What the NBA Draft and Duke Basketball says about my employment prospects.

Another NBA draft came and went, and, once again, I was not selected. Apparently NBA scouts weren’t impressed with my workout (I don’t work out), or my intangibles (I don’t know how to play). But I suppose that’s not too surprising, because most four-year seniors don’t get drafted anymore.

And at the draft’s conclusion, more of my peers unwillingly joined the ranks of the unemployed. These guys aren’t unlike me and you (and by you, I mean me again): they were highly touted coming into college, showed occasional flashes of brilliance, but settled into relative mediocrity for four years. They are still highly skilled, but they simply can’t match the level of their peers, who were more talented, worked just as hard or harder, and ended up being paid professionals.

Like I said before: this blog is about how every event is somehow inextricably tied with my existence. So I got to thinking: who is my counterpart? That is, what college basketball player represents my experience in college? After a few minutes, the answer became painfully clear:

This guy.

That’s right, long-suffering and much-derided Duke point guard Greg Paulus. During his four years, Paulus was one of the most viciously mocked players in recent college basketball history, and unlike J.J Redick or Joakim Noah, there was good reason: He led perenially underperforming teams to early exits in the NCAA tournament, and he was, unfortunately, somewhat of a bitch. There’s just something about his face that evoked creative bullying genes in opposing fan bases. Instead of the second coming of school legend Bobby Hurley, Paulus was a major flop. By senior year, in the embarrassment of all embarrassments, he was benched in favor of an unproven freshman.

The worst part, though, was that Paulus was offered scholarships out of high school to play quarterback at a number of college football powerhouses (Miami and Notre Dame, among others). You think he might want a mulligan on that one? That blank stare he gave as Duke gave up leads to lesser teams probably translated to something like, “What am I doing on a basketball court? I should a celebrity in Miami.”

So here is my horribly depressing parallel: I loved the humanities coming into college. In high school, I was part of my school’s literary magazine. English was my favorite subject, debate was my favorite extracurricular, and history was a great personal interest. So I did what any other lover of the humanities would do: I became pre-med. I slogged through years of chemistry, biology, and (gulp) organic chemistry, only to finally conclude what I knew all along: I like the humanities better.

Just like Paulus, I inexplicably stuck with a subject in which I had no future. Paulus, for one, did the reasonable thing: he went back to school. Last month, he joined Syracuse’s football program, and is presumably trying to rekindle what could be a more successful football career. I wish I was that focused. Instead, I’m going to DC and testing my luck as an unproven candidate in a shitty job market — this would be like Paulus going to the Arena Football League and throwing footballs around for team scouts.

So my college career and my subsequent employment prospects can be best described as: “Similar to Greg Paulus’s.” Definitely not something I’d want to put in my resume. But definitely not terribly disheartening, either.

Just don’t ask me what my college version of this moment was.