Opinion on Raikes School/formerly JD Edwards Honors

tiredofnewbies
Sat, 13 Jun 2009 12:57:07 +0000

I work at a company that attempts to benefit from design studio projects and hires students as interns over the summer. We’ve also hired a few of their graduates. While these are nice kids, I fear for their future. These kids are fauned over as if they are Einsteins of business and computer science. Its like the emperor’s new clothes…no one is allowed to point out the kids are educated but INEXPERIENCED! Per my employer, none of us with college degrees, many of them from schools with much higher academic standards and reputations than UNL, were really ever educated because we didn’t attend this illustrious program. My employer gives them anything and everything they ask for. You would think this would be a positive to joining the program but this is the equivalent of giving a 16 year a brand new car of their dreams, a vacation to Cancun, and 500,000 just for turning 16. Will the child learn responsibility, learn to work for things, appreciate the things they work for and actually develop any kind of work ethic. These kids are smart, but they are not required to prove themselves. They are just handed every perk, every opportunity. They have a faster path to promotion and actually come into the organazation one level up from any other new hire. We have experienced technical people being forced to defer to students and new hires…anything to keep them happy. This results in less then optimal solutions for our business area, but that’s not as important as keeping these youngsters happy…they are the future of the company and we must, must keep them at all costs (in fact we keep very few permanently). Its better to have the young kids, whether they do good work or any work at all, then let these kids get out of our grasp. Its like management feels that these kids are some magic fountain of youth and if they worship these kids they themselves we will re-obtain youth and live forever. It’s completely irresponsible. These kids do not understand that over time they are actually going to have to work and will not like everything about their job. Over time they will not get everything they ask for and they are going to be so disappointed. Its very hard to go from being worshipped to just being another employee. This is going to send them on a spiral of dispair where they continue to look for the worship they once had similiar to an 8 year old trying to find meaning in Christmas once they find out about Santa. A person learns and grows through constructive criticism, being mentored, being educated by people more experienced than they are. None of this happens with these kids. In fact its reversed. So they are getting an education (although many seem socially inept…could this be the isolation associated with this program) and they are getting great opportunities, especially at my employer, but college is only the start of anyone’s education. A job is where you really learn and due to the way employers are implementing this program these kids are missing out on this formative, early, on the job training. If any of these kids succeed long term it will be in spite of, not because of this program. In fact, very few will ultimately survive at my employer. You have to have support from the people you work with to succeed. These kids aren’t given that support not only because of the way the program is implemented (the experienced have to defer to the inexperienced) but because the rest of us are now choosing not to support them strictly to avoid joining the cult! The rest of us feel that these kids have enough perks, enough worship, enough special clubs only they can belong to (all supported and paid for by upper management…when was the last time that interns at your company had a monthly lunch with the SrVP of your division. Better yet, when was the last time you ate lunch with your SrVP?) that we aren’t going to go out of our way to attempt to mentor these kids…besides they are regularly informed no one but them knows anything anyway. BTW, it doesn’t surprise me that professors would feel they aren’t getting any respect…its part of the program to continually tell these kids how much better they are than everyone else.