Thanks for that Dr. Benzley

Today I got an email from BYU's civil engineering department asking me to fill out an exit survey before I graduate and that it's required for graduation, blah blah blah. Before today, I was kind of looking forward to this email because it meant that the CE department had actually been keeping track of me and that I am indeed on track to graduate in two weeks. However, once I opened the exit survey and started filling out the questions, I was slightly less than contented. I'm sure that my department chair, Dr. Steven E. Benzley didn't mean to totally defame my character and make me look like a worthless waste of flesh, but that's pretty much how it turned out. Here are the first four questions from the survey. The rest of them are irrelevant to my point and mostly consist of me crapping on the incendiary evil that is the math department.

1. Where will you be working after graduation?
2. What is the salary range of job offers you have received so far?
3. Are you married?
4. Did you serve an LDS mission?

Those were literally the first four questions on the survey. Of all the failures I've had over the past 4 years, these are clearly the most poignant and agitating. When you submit mission papers and the Church says, "Hell no, you won't go!" you don't exactly feel like you're the king of the world. You could argue that this wasn't actually my fault, but you're certainly not going to convince my subconscious. As the Divine Comedy skit 'Zoobie and the Beast' put it, "The point of college is to get married!" At BYU, this is obnoxiously valid and rigorously followed by students and ecclesiastical leaders. Barring some tragic turn of events that would result in me getting married in the next two weeks, this isn't going to happen. My relationships with both fiancée #1 and fiancée #2 serve as the pinnacle of my inability to fulfill my BYU destiny. And finally, I've busted my A for the last 4 years to be able to earn a degree that was actually useful and would land me a good job after college. Little did I know that in 2010, a BS in Civil Engineering would be about as useful as a BA in English. My BS is genuinely BS at this point. Perhaps it's that I have no real experience to speak of, or maybe it's that my résumé just sucks, because I have applied for ~300 jobs and I have not heard back from a single one of them for an interview. Yeah, that's right, it's not my lack of professionalism or personal skills that are holding me back... at least not yet, it's actually just that people see my résumé and say, "No thanks."

So I thank you BYU Civil Engineering Department for pointing out my most significant failures from the last 4 years and then jamming them into my eye sockets. I would liken my feelings right now to a red-hot cast iron torsion sample thrusted squarely and firmly into the groin... or so. Now the best part is that I get to answer similar questions 2, 5, and 10 years from now as a follow-up. Hooray for reliving this wonderful event... and hooray beer!