On the one hand, they are high-end professionals with a master’s degree; on the other hand, their future is covered by a glass ceiling that looks bright and outstretched, but is hard to reach.
Nine faces are indented into a grid lined up on the computer screen. Lu Keshu appears in a striped shirt and ponytail on the far right.
Everyone is well dressed, their white shirts clean and pressed, their hair waxed and slicked back, or pinned back with small hairpins. Everyone adjusted the distance to the camera in front of them, straightened their backs, and looked at the screen.
At 14:00, it’s official.
My name is Gao Yang. I have both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Beijing Forestry University, majoring in business management. The man in the upper left corner of the grid introduces himself. I’m Wu Runming, Master of Finance from the Central University of Finance and Economics, and have interned in both banking and securities companies.
I am a graduate student at Hunan University, and did my due diligence report during my internship at an investment bank. My undergraduate degree is in Guangdong, and my graduate degree is in England.
3 985, 2 211, 3 international students, Lu Keshue counted them in her heart.
My name is Lu Keshue, and I have a master’s degree in economics from Beijing Technology and Business University. When it was my turn, Lu Keshue said the name of the school quickly, then added in a whisper: I am a positive, upbeat person who loves to travel. Someone on the screen seemed to be pursing their lips, and she thought they were laughing at her, if only their internet speed had just gotten worse, she thought, so that no one could hear her embarrassment.
Group Face
Formal Session. The nine candidates were asked to discuss the revenue loss of a hotel restaurant. The guy from Central Finance started with a bullet point on the topic, which was like being a leader. The British student inserted in the gap between his words, I’ll take notes. The female student from Sichuan University immediately followed up with, “I’ll take the time then.
This was a leaderless group interview. At the end of October, Lu Keshu received a group interview notice, which was an operation coordinator position in China Resources Land Group that she had applied for a long time ago.
It was written in the online posting that if you want to stand out in the interview, you need to grab a role at the first time: the leader with a strong presence, the timekeeper with a simple but essential role, the recorder who can think quickly, and the code name of the others is “other members”.
Judging from the probability, it is the person with the role who can make the examiner, who is observing from the side, remember and pass this round of interview.
Rokusu originally wanted to be the timekeeper, which was both existential and simple. But she was unsuccessful.
She could start from the framework of service and management, but her external service was not adequate, such as grasping the restaurant’s menu, and her internal management was also negligent. The central finance guy, who grabbed the role of leader, threw out his opinion.
I think it’s the miscommunication between the leaders and the employees that causes the misinformation. The girl who majored in business management used a technical term. Lu Keshu nodded her head silently, she did not know this word and felt that the other person was better than her. In the entire fifteen-minute discussion, she only said, “Well, yes, I think so too.
It’s definitely not going to happen. After closing her computer and leaning on the back of her chair, Lu Keshu stared at the ceiling. October was almost over, and there was no substantial progress in the fall recruitment.
Beijing was a 985 or 211 school, so our Shuangfei had no chance. The “double non-permanent resident” that Lu Keshu was talking about was the abbreviation for “non-985, non-211” on the Internet.
In June 2016, the Ministry of Education announced the expiration of the regulatory documents of these two projects, and stressed that no 985 and 211 universities were allowed to set the threshold for recruitment. However, after more than a decade of implementation, the numbers 985 and 211 have come to represent China’s most important universities in people’s consciousness, and both the selection of institutions, civil service recruitment exams, and the pre-recruitment screening of resumes by companies are leaning toward these two labels.
Under the popular perception that graduates of elite universities are more likely to be quality talents, double non-masters students have become a silent and dim image group. What surfaced on the Internet is also the self-mockery of the small-town do-it-yourselfers’ scrappy alliance.
On the one hand, they are high-end talents with master’s degrees; on the other hand, the label of “double non-permanent” puts a glass ceiling on their future, which looks bright but is hard to reach.
Autumn Recruitment
You know what? While 985 and 211 graduates were anxious about the interview result, we were still following the HR, rushing to the next one after this one, just to make sure our resumes would not be left behind in some nook and cranny. When I talked about the cruelty of the job fair, I smiled with a smile on my face, looking helpless and pretending to be relaxed.
In 2020, the written test for the fall recruitment has been on the hot list several times because of its difficulty, including the three-level matrix, static energy formula of particles, indefinite integration, and demonstration of Laurent series, and graduates who took the Bank of China’s written test said they felt like they had participated in a low-profile version of The Strongest Brain. Tencent’s written exam made graduates describe themselves as mentally retarded, losing their hair at the first question. The objective questions are limited to 40 questions per hour, including data analysis, graphical analysis, and logical analysis, followed by 30 minutes of subjective questions, depending on the position and content, for example, the operations post requires answers to WeChat’s small program e-commerce has been opened, talk about small program e-commerce what differentiating features compared to Tmall, Jingdong Taobao?
When reading these news, Lu Keshue kept thinking that it was hard, but at least someone got the chance to be beaten up like this.
This fall hiring season, also known as the hardest fall hiring season by the media. Under the combined influence of the new coronary pneumonia epidemic and the economic downturn, both the demand of enterprises and the number of job applications have been affected. According to the 2020 University Student Employability Report, compared to the same period last year, the number of college graduates recruited by major enterprises decreased by 16.77%, from 14.86 million to 12.37 million, but the number of job applications increased by 69.82%, from 5.28 million to 8.96 million.
Throughout the fall recruiting season, she submitted a total of 141 resumes and participated in four live online presentations, six offline presentations, and three dual-selection events. And that group interview was the only feedback she received.
Because of the epidemic, she couldn’t go to many offline seminars, and the university was too strict. Lu Keshu regretted that she didn’t have the chance to attend more conferences. Every fall during the campus recruitment season, many companies would come to hold seminars. According to past experience, the conference was an opportunity for Shu Lu to face the HR of the company directly, without having to be screened by the internet.
Koshu Lu was prepared to follow the itinerary of enterprises and go to each school for the seminars. As a result, many offline seminars were broadcasted live online, which sounded more convenient and you could attend them anywhere with your cell phone. However, without the process of submitting resumes offline, it was not necessary for her to attend the seminars.
When Lu Keshu sat in front of her computer, she clicked on the live link and the question kept popping up in the lower left corner, “How many people are you hiring for the marketing position this year? How soon will I hear about the interview? In the past few years, there have been a number of companies that have inward-tweeting channels.
Some companies had inward pushing channels, and inward pushing gave people the feeling that they were looking for relationships openly. She asked one or two seniors in foreign companies, but they declined, saying that there was no guarantee for inward pushing.
They said that there was no guarantee for inward pushing, but some public websites also had information about inward pushing, but of course it was not unconditional. She had to complete the online application on the official website first, and then forward the tweets from the public number to her friends or WeChat groups with more than 300 people without any grouping according to the requirements, and finally get the code for in-tweets by taking screenshots.
Generally, Lu Keshu would forward such an article to her family or classmates, and when she encountered an internal tweet from a public number with fewer followers or readers, she would simply switch to WeChat to send it to her friends and take screenshots. She doesn’t want more people who are looking for a job to see this message, which means that she has added more competitors to herself.
She knew that the in-tweet codes provided by these public numbers had no effect, but were more like a kind of self-satisfaction that could make her imagine that her resume was quickly spread out in front of an HR person when the email was successfully sent with a swoosh.
If you want to get along better in Beijing after graduation, you have to confirm your direction right away, and there is no time for you to try different fields. There is no time for you to try different fields. It is better to do three internships in one direction! Only then will they have a chance to compete with others. The senior sister said with a serious expression on her face, staring at the new students.
At that time, Lu Keshu thought that Chen Li was too exaggerated. What’s more, would a master’s degree graduate be any worse than an undergraduate graduate?
A piece of paper
Chen Li is not an alarmist.
Chen Li graduated from Beijing Jiaotong University, a 211 university. Unfortunately, she lost the entrance exam and was transferred to Beijing University of Technology.
As an undergraduate, Chen Li had a class of 25 students, only five of whom chose to work, while the rest went on to graduate school. In the job market at that time, fewer people dared to use their undergraduate degrees to fight for a job. In 2015, students submitted an average of 25.71 resumes and got about 10.97 interviews, according to the Peking University Student Employment Report. In 2019, students will have to submit an average of 36 resumes to get about 13 interviews.
In June, Chen Li graduated from school and joined an urban commercial bank as a supervisory trainee. She said she had no choice but to work in a branch and couldn’t get into the Beijing branch because she didn’t have enough education. Her undergraduate classmate, who went to Renmin University of China for graduate studies, went to the head office of China Postal Savings Bank in Beijing. In the banking system, there are head office, local branches, and regional sub-branches, and these levels represent the distance between the workplace and the city center, and whether you will be running marketing or sitting in an office.
Chen Li doesn’t think she is inferior to her classmates, and here she gets a little angry and her voice gets loud. She compared her undergraduate grades, school performance, awards and certificates one by one, and found that she was in the upper echelon, except for her loss in graduate school.
Chen Li said that she knew very well that the moment she chose to accept the transfer, it meant more pressure when competing for jobs. At the beginning of graduate school, she went to an offline free resume editing event hosted by Public Finance Partners. The host took their resumes and looked through them one by one, picking up one to cover up the name and photo, which is the resume that HR likes.
The host picked out another one, folded a section, and withheld the school information, and pointed to the line in the internship column that read Bank, Business Manager Assistant Intern. Chen Li took a glance at it, but it was her own, and the other students squeezed forward to see it, so she felt ashamed to be carried out as a negative example.
When she returned to the dormitory, she asked her undergraduate classmates who worked in the Internet how much their salaries were, and compared them with the salaries of the previous year’s graduate students, who earned twice as much as the latter.
The first semester passed, and during the winter break, she applied for an internship at a firm with her school’s external supervisor, and went to the field to survey projects together; towards the end of her first year of research, she looked up internship recruitment information on public websites and microblogs every day, and kept an eye on funds and securities companies, investing in 30 to 40 of them. The undergraduate student who got her master’s degree at NPC soon received several internship interview notices. She sent her resume even if the internship information was outdated, and emphasized in the body of the email that she had a lot of time and did not want to be retained.
In the summer, she joined the investment banking department of a private equity firm, and during the fall recruiting period, the department head told her that there were no hiring plans this year, so she found another internship, interspersing her two jobs, going to a private equity firm on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and to a securities firm on Thursday and Friday. While others usually have two internships, I had double the amount of experience.
According to the experience given in the original resume revision activity, Chen Li’s later resume, in the internship experience written four paragraphs, awards and honors a bunch, is the most abundant in the class, one page, number five words, leaving only a small thumbnail size margins, full of.
However, from last fall to this April, she did not receive any satisfactory offers from funds, securities and SOEs. Compared with the interview offers received by her classmates who were employed directly after graduation, she said, “A master’s degree in DIA is just a piece of paper.
In the end, Chen Li chose to work as a management trainee in a city commercial bank. She doesn’t want her former classmates and teachers to know her current situation, and when asked where she is going, she fiddles with a topic, and every time she sends a message to her friends, she is careful to post it in groups.
Last Wednesday at noon, Chen Li received a call from Hr. that there was an extra quota for the Hukou and she needed to fill out the application. According to the previous practice, the hukou process was about a year, which she could accept. But when she went to fill out the application in the afternoon, she hesitated because the time line showed three years.
HR stared at Chen Li, pointed to the signature on the lower right hand side of the application, tapped it and said, “What’s there to hesitate about?
The account was very attractive, but she was not sure about three years. Her plan for herself is to go to the UK in a year and do a master’s degree at one of the five G5 super-elite universities in the UK, including Cambridge and Oxford. She figured she’d have to be an elite student or do a double master’s when she got back on the recruiting scene again, which was the safest route to take.
The Double Non-Silent
On Nov. 1, Shakespearean blogger Wu Meng posted a video about a double non-female job search, which received 51,000 likes and 22,000 retweets overnight. In the video, Wu Meng, wearing a mask and wearing her hair loose, walks and tells the camera about her job search experience, which is another day when she feels that education is important.
Zhang Window, who is studying at Guangxi University for Nationalities, was under the pressure of double non-conformity the day his college entrance exam ended. He had just stepped on a line, and could only choose a better school. His father, who is a doctor, and his mother, who is a businesswoman, are not satisfied with his education, so he has to study in a 985 or 211 school for promotion.
When I was in junior high school, my brother’s bachelor’s degree was from a 985 university in Wuhan. When I returned home during summer and winter vacations, I asked him what his school life was like. He didn’t even mention the name of the school. At that time, my brother was very quiet and generally did not comment on what was happening at home. When he got into our graduate school, he started to invite his family to Hubei, showing them around the school and always imparting his experience to Zhang as someone who had been there.
Later, when he went to Beijing to have dinner with his brother, who was a doctoral student at Renmin University of China, he pointed to the library and bragged that our library had the largest book collection in China and that this was a good school. In fact, the number one university in terms of book collection was Peking University.
His first choice for graduate school was South China University of Technology, majoring in law. As a result, he was transferred to Guangxi University for Nationalities by a narrow margin of one place.
Zhang remembers that when he called the admissions office to confirm the list of re-examinations, his mother said directly to him to go to World War II.
He clutched the phone and did not speak. World War II? A whole year of repetitive living, relying on muscle memory for exercises that I had done many times. I don’t feel so brave anymore.
Only two people in his undergraduate class went to graduate school, and Zhang was one of them, but he knew that no one would ask for his contact information to consult him. He was also reluctant to contact his undergraduate classmates. In the summer of his senior year, many students preparing for World War II rented a small private room near the school, and went to the library to study for more than ten hours every day, just as they had done in the dormitory. Giving up World War II, he sometimes felt like a deserter.
He seldom showed up at his high school classmates’ parties, from Guangxi to Tianjin, and finally back to Guangxi, nothing to say. When my brother came back from summer vacation and ate dinner with him, he ridiculed him in the middle of the meal and said, “You’ll stay in Guangxi afterwards. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do that.
The 985 and 211 symbols are always in front of my eyes. It is not only that they have a lot of people who have a lot of experience in the field, but also that they have a lot of people who have a lot of experience in the field,” he said. And double non-friends, together, are always chewing on a common confusion: I am a useless, post-wave, I do not deserve.
While being denied his identity by the outside world, Zhang uses the same criteria to judge his own school. He has looked up school rankings online, 152, which is even lower than undergraduate school rankings. He also wrote equations on paper to calculate the difference between the two, and instead of going against the grain, he came to a school that was even worse.
The school was on the same subway line as Guangxi University. In the past few years, we have seen a lot of people who have been in the process of getting into the business.
When selecting classes, he went to the school’s website to check the teachers’ background information, and also to differentiate among the teachers. He first looked to see if the doctoral degree was from a 985, and then to see if the master’s or bachelor’s degree was in the same field. When he saw that his mentor’s bachelor’s degree was from a 211 school, and his PhD was from Guangxi, he felt sorry for the teacher and lamented about his future.
There are two routes to the PhD, application review and examination, the former means complicated materials, the latter is test preparation, but in the end, there is no way around the acceptance of the mentor. As a dual non-native master’s student, Zhang was not sure that he could find a mentor willing to take him on, and the discussion among his classmates was always self-deprecating: which teacher would be willing to take a dual non-native master’s student?
Once, a retired professor from one of Beijing’s 985 schools came to the school to give a lecture on how to get a Ph. He said that a PhD would provide academic resources and graduation prospects, but I wouldn’t want students from your kind of school. After the old professor finished his speech without any delay, the 80 students below were silent.
Academic qualifications and abilities?
In September, the Douban Discussion Life Group was created, and now with over 6,000 people, this group is the corner where many dual non-masters students find encouragement. Whether it’s to express anxiety, spit out grievances, or communicate academically, there are always people at the bottom to cheer them on.
The introduction of the group says, “There are only a few 985 and 211 schools / Everyone is talking about life in 985 and 211 / DIA bachelor’s degree is busy going against 985 and 211 / DIA master’s degree seems to be one of the disappearing groups on the Internet / What are we doing, what should we do and where should we go?
When Sue Lu fails to brush up her email notifications, she comes to the group to brush up her posts, where she can feel that she is not alone in her failure.
Sometimes, she would find postings like her own: she didn’t receive any offer, there were not many interview notices, and the two she had been to were only double non-permanent, the rest were all from Central Finance and Shanghai Finance.
Recently, people are talking about the hot variety show “Heartwarming Offers”. Zhang Window and Lu Keshu coincidentally expressed their favorable impressions of intern Ding Hui, who was the most educated of the eight interns. He received his bachelor’s degree from Changshu Institute of Technology, a second-tier university, and his master’s degree from East China University of Political Science and Law, which is one of the five schools and four departments recognized by the legal system, but not 985 or 211.
In the interview, Shi Xinyue, a lawyer, commented directly: a resume like yours will be screened out in the preliminary selection, and has no chance of getting into the interview.
In the second phase of the program, there was a debate competition, in which eight people were divided into two groups. In the free-debate session, Ding Hui’s employee-agent side was slightly weaker, the group was silent and looked down on the material. The team won the debate.
Lu Keshu has been following this program, and Ding Hui showed her that education and ability are two different things, and she especially wanted to see Ding Hui beat the elites! However, the best debater eventually went to an overseas student in the same group. Like many people, Lu Keshue was not fair to Ding Hui and lost long ago because she could not surpass those qualifications no matter how hard she tried.
On November 3, Kshul Lu received another email inviting you to a preliminary interview.
This is the first real face-to-face interview she has received since the fall recruitment. The interview took place in Changsha, 1,483 km from Beijing. Hunan is her hometown. After the fall recruitment was hopeless, she listened to her mother and her boyfriend’s advice, “Come back and try, there are good companies here.
The train arrived at Changsha South. Lu Keshue took off her mask and took a deep breath, the moisture in the air crawled into her nasal cavity, and the dryness no longer stung.
The first time she spent the winter in Beijing last year, she woke up in the morning when the glass of water on the table dried up and a white dandruff appeared on her skin when she scratched her finger. But at that time, she still wanted to graduate and stay in Beijing for a while.
She went to her friend’s house where she worked, a two-story loft with a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, laying on the sofa with cats stomping on her, and in the distance, there were still high-rise buildings being built in her neighborhood.
Lu Keshu was born and raised in Xiangtan, Hunan Province, and majored in financial management at a third-tier university in Changsha. It was the most promising goal of her classmates at that time to stay in Changsha. Later, she passed the sixth level of English, studied in Beijing, got her master’s degree and now, she is back in Changsha.
The next day, she had an interview with a bank in the Beichen Delta. Standing in front of the mirror, the shirt made her look like someone who had been working all day as a school director, tired and serious. The thin girl, who always had a smile on her face, tilted her head in the mirror, a little satisfied this time.
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