Kelly #89: Senior Moments

I feel like this comic encapsulates my final semester in college. All of us seniors had our own very specific ambitions. Some were less obtainable than others (becoming president of the United States) while others were just sensible planning to avoid becoming our parents. Like Kelly, my goal was to work in book publishing. It turns out Kelly was right to worry about being unemployed after graduating from college because the recession decimated the publishing industry so I never did land a full-time book publishing job. Eventually, I did leave my rural hometown to live and work in a city but not as a “spinster librarian” like my friends joked (side note, it’s not nice to use spinster as an insult because a woman’s worth is not defined by whether or not she is single). Eventually, we all forged our own paths and 11 years later are mostly happy after graduation.

Kelly 88: Basketball?

This one makes me cringe a little bit. Women’s sports teams are very powerful and impressive and some of the most entertaining to watch. However, it seems my comic characters didn’t think that, preferring instead to support the Binghamton men’s basketball team, despite their numerous scandals.

Most of the issues with the men’s team, who had only recently been good enough to play in March Madness, came to light while I was studying abroad but it rocked our university, especially since we didn’t have a football team so basketball was our pillar sport. And even though basketball had previously been so popular, when I was in college I only attended a couple of games but that was more than enough.

NA Humor: Teakipedia

Wikipedia is much more accurate than in this comic but I believe at the time our college professors used stories like this to deter us from using it when doing research. As the creator, I think it’s very funny to picture the American colonists throwing whole teapots and cups into Boston Harbor in order to invent one of the most ubiquitous coffee chains in the world. In real life, I do not think my brother would blatantly rip off Wikipedia to write an essay but it’s something I can easily imagine his comic counterpart Seth doing. It also begs the question, what’s the most outlandish thing you’ve read on Wikipedia?

Kelly #87: Help Not Wanted

The lack of employers willing to talk to liberal art majors was a big feature of my first university job fair senior year. It’s hard for me to tell even now if that was because that’s just how things were always done or because of the fairly recent recession. Either way, as an English major, I felt incredibly left out when the schools of engineering, nursing, and business and even the human development department had representation at the job fair but the only table for Harpur College was for the economics majors. Some say the recession was the beginning of the end for liberal arts majors and I am not sure if that’s true nor whether I would have a different major if I was in college now post-recession. Perhaps students have the best chance at getting a job if they diversify and major in both something they love and something that can guarantee a job like STEM.