Against the Tide

            I’m not sure if it is just this university, city, entire area, or perhaps even region, but it is difficult to get past the feeling that you are always swimming against the tide.  Good ideas always seem stifled; hard work gets glossed over; and if something productive does manage to eek its way through the pipeline, an overbearing bureaucracy will quickly stamp it out.  In a nutshell, this place destroys your motivation to do anything more than collect a paycheck, and even that is a difficult process. 

            Today the cold hard reality finally set in: no matter how much groundwork I lay for this Career Development Center, they are going to find some way to ignore it and completely muck it up.  People with no experience will be hired based on connections, or another patchwork of part-time employees will be cobbled together further ignoring the untenable nature of such a situation.  I should have known this already, and part of me probably did, but naively thought I could change the realities of an inefficiency seemingly embedded in the local culture.  At this point, it seems the only reason I am continuing this work at all for the next 3 weeks is to add it to my resume.  Sad, since I really wanted to see it succeed, but true.   It is times like this that I relish the opportunity to go back to America and work with people who, by and large, actually work hard in a meritocratic system.