Jobless Senior Discovers Selling Out Is Actually Hard

Soon-to-be unemployed senior Jessica Robertson is coming to grips with an uncomfortable fact: Being principled is hard, but getting a nice job at the cost of her soul is also pretty darn hard. “Why did no one tell me?” she groaned. 

Robertson isn’t a total saint, but she had always tried to do the right thing. You know, separating out plastic waste, saying, “Gosh that sucks” when reading about the internment of Uighurs in China, and reminding herself that investment banks are bad. Many of her friends are moving to New York to work for Goldfish Snacks or whatever, and she accepted their life choices but, deep down, felt they were taking the easy way out.

“But then someone said they had to get through like seven interviews and do math? Isn’t the whole point of selling out that it’s chill? I’m so confused. Why would anyone do this?” Robertson asked. Poor silly Robertson thought she could always pivot to selling out later in her Penn career, but as she approaches graduation, she sees that she may have run out of time. “Apparently these soul suckers recruit kids halfway through sophomore year.”

With a cushy, morally dubious job out of reach, Robertson is left wondering what to do with her half-formed, unpursued principles. “I guess grad school and Twitter it is.” It’s no easy thing toeing the line between sainthood and selling out, so we at Under the Button wish Jessica well in her efforts to be both useful to the world and not poor.