Like so many graduates these days, I left university last year with a sense of grim foreboding. The world was in the throes of an economic crisis that seemed to worsen by the day; riots were spreading across the nation’s streets; and News of the World journalists were listening to everything we said, and then misreporting it. In 2009, when this whole ‘here-comes-the-apocalypse’ rationale came into being, I had remained quietly confident that things would come good for people my age. I thought that we would just ride this little crisis out for a couple of years, accrue a bit more student debt, and ultimately enter the outside world as it started to become a lighter-place again.
How wrong I was. When I left university, Europe was collapsing like a flan in a cupboard, and its graduates were filing out into an enormous proverbial scrap-heap of wasted man and brain-power. Dutifully I followed suit, slipping in to this androgynous, amorphous mass of humanities students, desperately seeking an unpaid internship in literally anything. I even applied for one at a waste-disposal company. If it was good enough for Uncle Bulgaria, I thought, it’s good enough for me. Unfortunately, I wasn’t good enough for them.
So, I returned back to the scrap-heap (proverbial, I had been turned away from the literal one), dusted myself off, and started again. I decided now that I would be a banker. Spreadsheets are cool, I thought, and at least the gutter-press are Public Enemy Number 1 these days; compared to those guys, bankers are pretty-much Mother Theresa. So, I put in some applications, and I successfully convinced all around me that every morning I got out of bed with the sole intent of analysing derivatives. Eventually I attended some interviews, and ultimately I even convinced one bank to have me as an intern. Unpaid, obviously, but working.
It was at this stage, however, that something changed. I had heard about the enormous increase in demand for so-called Super-Tutors in London, and signed up to Bright Young Things Tuition, who offered a rather different route out of the ‘heap. As a tutor, I was suddenly able to do something with my good-for-nothing History of Art degree. Finally, my work involved something that I was passionate about. It also tore me away from my desk, and away from the persistent glare of a computer screen in a darkened room. My office was no longer some soulless tower block filled with pin-striped worker-bees, now it was some of the most remarkable houses in London. And soon after, I was shipped out to manor-houses across the country, living and teaching in what appeared to be the set of Downton Abbey. For those who want to stretch their tutoring even further, there is the opportunity to work abroad. Fellow tutors I have met have worked with families in Moscow, Lagos, Monaco, China and America, living an all-expenses lifestyle and salaried at the same rate as a newly qualified Magic Circle lawyer. With roles currently available in Florence, Moscow and Greece, I am considering following suit.
I doubt that I will be a tutor forever, but before I commit myself to enslavement at the hands of Mighty Powerpoint, I am sharing my passion for my subject in outstanding surroundings. I’ll at least hold out till the guys at the scrap-heap (literal) realise the mistake they’ve made, and come crawling back…
Christopher Rumford
