The Pantheon of Internships
A brief examination of the religiosity of the job search at the University of Waterloo
In the pantheon of a capitalist society, nothing is worshipped more than capital. In A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Karl Marx stipulates that money ultimately alienates the essence of man’s life by obscuring it as he is dominated by his worship of money. It is certainly the case that capitally productive aspirations dominate our functioning as a society: businesses are generally inspired by the market gap they fill, or the market they can disrupt as is often the ambition in tech, rather than any kind of humanistic aspiration to build a more equitable world.
The drive to accrue capital is inherent to survival in a capitalist system and is a prominent driver of human behaviour on an individual level. Behavioural decisions are driven by economic scarcity, and evaluated on the basis of cost-saving or money-making potential. The cultural dominance of capitalism and its effect on the way in which we approach decisions, particularly ones with substantive temporal and financial costs, has permeated and perverted most cultural institutions, none more than institutions of higher learning.
Universities were founded as beacons of intellectual curiosity, exploration, and cultivation. However, over the past 50 years the ethos of higher education has mutated from one of pedagogical rigour and academic growth to one of workforce development. In a capitalist, cost-saving, money-making society this is an entirely rational development, seeing as the cost of higher education has doubled after inflation from 1989 to 2016. Hence universities have become de-facto degree mills for most — an economic investment whose success is measured not in intellectual growth, or learning, but in employability and pay upon graduation [1]. Even historically research-intensive universities have shifted to become focused on aligning with industry: 63% of Harvard’s class of 2020 graduated to high-paying jobs in consulting, finance, or tech, with only 7% doing further schooling or research. But unlike schools like Harvard that were founded as institutions focused solely on explorative intellectual theory, Waterloo’s predominant focus has been on aligning with industry from the outset of its inception just over 60 years ago.
In a relatively brief timeframe, Waterloo has ballooned in reputation and recognizance for its unique co-op program, which has, in part, lead to Waterloo being dubbed “the most innovative university in Canada” for 27 years straight, as well as a recruitment turnstile in the high-pressure Silicon Valley pipeline. Waterloo’s co-op program is its fundamental value-proposition — economically speaking — and in turn one of the inherent keystones of the culture that students experience.
In the pantheon of a capitalist society that worships money, wealth is next to godhood. The brightest are the most successful, with success being measured by financial compensation. In Waterloo’s microcosm dominated by insecure overachievers, this results in an obsession with co-op — to most, a proxy of success and ability.
In Worship, Faith, and Evangelism: Religion as an Ideological Lens for Engineering Worlds, a quasi-religion is defined as a series of faith-like practices. An alternative definition would be that a quasi-religion is composed of rituals, which are certainly practiced by students at Waterloo. From the outset of undergrad, students arrive on campus, begin their classes, and participate in workshops and resume critiques before barreling down in preparation of job applications, interviews, and the repeating cycle of such until they get a job. Then, those students go on co-op just to return to campus and repeat the same rituals all over again [2].
Durkheim provides an alternative definition of religion as any unified system of beliefs and practices relative to objects considered ‘sacred’. At Waterloo, the culture of “Cali or Busting” — or the aspiration to be recruited to Silicon Valley — can certainly be viewed as such. Those who are able to do so gain respect from their peers for their competency, as well as from broader society for their wealth. They become saints in the pantheon of co-op culture and the broader capitalist culture that facilitates it, often-worshipped by those newcomers pubescent in Waterloo’s high-pressure aspirational echo chamber.
Irrespective of religious definition, there seem to be four elements common to any form of religiosity: evangelism, worship, mythology, and doubt. At Waterloo, evangelism borders on indoctrination as students are converted to the dogma of co-op culture in their recruitment to the university, or as fresh first years navigating the throes of insecurity that come along with being in a new environment where your peers are now as smart, if not smarter than you, and where most do not have the same safety and security of their prior home. These nascent students are evangelized formally through the rhetoric communicated by the university or its students about the earning potentials of graduates who follow “successful” professional pathways, or informally by the mythologies spread amongst the Waterloo community. Mythology, like evangelism, is inherent to religious practice, and in Waterloo’s co-op culture these myths take forms twofold. As aforementioned, myths often express tales of talented students who are able to secure absurd levels of compensation over brief four month co-op stints or who get to work in workplaces with absurd “perks.” Sometimes, too, they are expressed in the form of grand narratives about entrepreneurial students that were able to metamorphosize side-projects kick-started to increase their employability into full-on companies. In either case, narratives of exceptional cases spread, becoming the competitive fixation in the minds of young, bright, insecure students, often in favour of things like happiness or community impact — or in Marx’s words, “the essence of life.”
The dominating aspect of any religion, as well as its lifeline, is worship. Worship refers to ritualized practice of homage to particular beliefs important to an ideological framework. At Waterloo high-paying big tech jobs with exclusive perks are worshipped. Homage to this worship takes many forms. Often, students (particularly insecure overachievers) are quick to tell others if they have received a desirable internship, a process further facilitated by social media like LinkedIn. Nowadays, it is common practice for students who have received “prestigious” jobs to post their thanks on LinkedIn, an oblique and humble way to approach communicating your competence and success to others. At Waterloo, such behaviours inform social structures and hierarchies as some students become viewed as “more successful” or “more competent” than others. In other words, the aspirational framework that defines the co-op ideology encourages students to engage in ritualized practices that pays homage to the co-op value system and pushes people to engage in behaviours that perpetuate conscious and unconscious hierarchies and social behaviours. Such interconnections define collective belief, and establish the student-worship of Bay Area jobs and the like as a self-sustaining religion.
The final attribute of any religion is doubt. In Waterloo’s co-op culture, it runs rampant but often goes disengaged as many students are unable to wrestle with it while weaving through the frenetic pace of Waterloo’s perpetual ping-pong between school and work. Doubt, as experienced by students, pertains to uncertainty about the miraged promises of Silicon Valley and big tech jobs. Although well-paying, students often question the fulfillment and happiness that comes from the jobs. Unlike formal religions, though, this is not necessarily problematic. There is no social excommunication from co-op’s pantheon. Outside fleeting passive judgement, the highest level of interest students take in the professional aspirations of their peers is simple indifference. This is an interesting observation given the high-pressure nature of Waterloo’s Silicon Valley pipeline, and the resultant aspirational echo chamber so fervently oriented southwest, namely because this reality is at odds with student-perception when they are evangelized and indoctrinated into co-ops dogma. Ultimately, the inefficiency of the system, from the perspective of personal wellbeing and fulfillment, is that it limits definitions of success. Rather than opening students up to new opportunities and pathways unimagined before, co-op’s religion often reduces them to a few: UX designer, developer, and product manager. Financially, students at Waterloo are a success — the average graduating salary for SYDE 2020 graduates exceeded $100,00 CAD. Yet, students are not necessarily happier: over 40% experienced extreme anxiety throughout their degree, with 6.6% experiencing suicidal ideation, relative to the American national average of 3.9%. Economically speaking, Waterloo’s religion around co-op is exceptionally efficient — from a holistic humanistic perspective, it is not so much so.
As it stands, co-op culture is a form of worship like most: one that eats you alive. But it was not intended to be, nor does it have to be. It has the potential to free students of preconceived notions of success, and to try new things outside of the scope they believed possible, or outside of the scope of the pathway-prescribed possibilities associated with their degree. Contrary to co-op’s lore, career and life trajectory are not linear — no two paths are the same.
Footnotes
[1] In researching his book Academically Adrift, Richard Arun found that 45% of students demonstrate no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing through their first two years of university. This proportion improves marginally by the end of the degree; roughly 36% of students do not improve at all throughout their course of studies.
[2] The religion of co-op could also be viewed as one with a large number of personal sects, as individuals often have personalized rituals that they use as heuristics or superstitions in preparing for the job application cycle.
