UBC and Employment
With the number of graduated students increasing, the rate of unemployment in B.C. is also increasing. It’s relevance is high to everyone, especially undergraduate students.
What Do Students Think?
Here, we did research in UBC about students’ responses to the unemployment problem and the positive actions UBC takes for students’ future career.
Data shows that B.C. lost 7,900 jobs in the month, according to Statistics Canada, with most of the losses — 6,200 positions — in full-time work. The unemployment rate increased five ticks over the month to 6.7%. Year-over- year, the picture isn’t quite as bleak; the province added 51,600 jobs in 2015 — but most of these were in part-time work.
Is UBC Even Doing Anything?
As for UBC’s positive measures, they offer Co-operative Education for students to enrich their working experience and refresh their social self-evaluation. Besides, almost all main faculties have co-operation programs for students to apply for. Data shows in recent years more and more students apply for and join the program, especially engineering students.
Survey of UBC Students
Out of a survey of 53 students, we had roughly half of our students work part time. Some other options included participating in volunteer work for no pay.
How many hours do you work a week?
As you can see from the graph above, we had a large variety of how many hours students worked while they attended school. This shows that although we’re all attending classes at UBC, many of us are working to save up or pay for an education.
What does this mean for me?
You might be looking for a job, or in university working towards a degree for a job. Whether or not you were aware of the unemployment crisis specifically in B.C., it is understandable that as a student and potential worker the employment crisis will affect you.
UBC is providing helpful measures in terms of gaining experience in school such as co-op, but are they really doing enough? Are the two hour long drop in lines at Arts Advising really assisting you in helping you find a job?
Maybe UBC needs to start providing more helpful resources to allow young adults to navigate a world of employment. What we can understand is during this employment crisis, our university is not doing enough to support the large amount of students facing employment struggles.
Questions
How do we find the news and report it?
Initially, we noticed the news about dropping unemployment rate in BC on several social media platforms, and we thought that it was closely related to our daily lives. Therefore, we chose it as our topic. First, we collected the information about UBC’s helpful employment measures such as co-op, and then we interviewed three students who had part-time jobs on campus and one employer who hired students. Next, we made a short video and posted it with related information on Medium.com. Additionally, we posted a poll on Facebook groups to gather more feedback from students.
What makes the story news?
It is significant to our daily lives. As undergraduate students, we are sometimes worried about our future employment. Through this news, we hope to inform people that every student has the same confusion regarding academics and employment, and UBC cares about our future career by providing co-operation and online consulting.
Secondly, in some way it is timing for our first year students. After knowing the suggestions and the feedback from other teachers and students, maybe we can have a more clear academic plan for next year.
Finally, it includes proximity elements. Talking about finding a job is what we must face in the future, or even in the coming summer holiday. Maybe it can provide some useful tips for you when you apply for a job.
What issue or questions arose during the process?
How to choose various interviewees was a big issue to begin with. We had limited time for our video, but we still want to show you an overview of this issue from student perspectives. A question like “what is a news” is not easy to answer ourselves as it is not a black and white answer. We had selected several topics for our presentation, and only this one worked out the way we wanted. In the meantime, we also face some small questions, like how some people do not want to be interviewed, how to balance our time, and how to divide the work.
What lessons do we learn?
We understand that the things that are attractive aren’t always news. What is important is how we make them news and the way we demonstrate them. Along with teamwork and communication ability, we learned lots of tips for future employment. Besides, we also see various work opportunities and the positive measures UBC takes for undergraduate students. For us as newer students to UBC, we are more confident of our future academic lives. It is an awesome experience to do the research and deeply learn about our university and its opportunities.
