“It’s great commencement is outside the unemployment office. Really saves time on my commute,” said graduating student Onion Ployable.
Photo by Erica Rosslee and Jordan Whitlow
After another uneventful year at the University of California San Diego, the class of 2024 is set to graduate this June. University officials have expressed their pleasure with the tranquility of the past four years, which have been notable for “miraculously nothing bad happening at all,” according to Chancellor Khosla. “I really look forward to watching whatever’s going to happen to the Class of 2024. I look back on the past four years and marvel at the peaceful quiet of the first year, the exciting Return to Learn of their second year, the mastery of patience necessary to hold back on the strike retaliation in the third year, and the excitement of finally getting to peacefully unleash armed police on campus this year. These students have seriously had it easy. The real world is going to hit them like a rubber bullet.”
Many students on campus have adopted a similar attitude towards their futures. In the 2024 Undergraduate Experience Survey, 97% of graduating students responded that they “highly agree” that their near future will entail “being forced into the inky black maw of capitalism until [their] worth to the one percent dries up.” An equal number responded that they “strongly agree” to the question “Do you accept your fate?”
With the job market looking increasingly rocky for UCSD graduates, many students have been forced to get creative with finding ways to get on their feet. Computer science student Sil Icone has been working on AI research and development for Amazon, but according to him, “I literally spend my day looking at video feed of Sixth Market and tallying up totals. I’m a glorified cashier. But at least I haven’t been laid off yet — I told HR that I’d be willing to take a pay cut down to 12 cents per transaction if they can remove my name from the next two layoff lists.” Meanwhile, Literature/Writing major Diverci Tihyre has a job lined up at Tesla. “Yeah, I know they just hired me because I’m a woman and I majored in humanities, but a job in their ‘employee stress relief’ department opened up, and it was literally the only thing I could get paid for,” Tihyre said. “The job’s cool, I get paid $15 an hour to walk around and let the engineers throw rocks at me. The big boss says it helps boost their ego and get the creative
juices running.”
The graduates face a tough road ahead, but the university affirms that it “remains committed to finishing the year on a positive note” despite the recent announcement that universitywide commencement celebrations are to be canceled. “I know you were all very excited to hear Al Gore speak, but we will have to steal him from you again. Unfortunately, the surgery for the chancellor’s ego, which was critically bruised after he walked past a sign calling him ‘violent and incompetent,’ is too expensive. We just don’t have enough money to fly Gore out on the UC’s private jet. He keeps insisting that he’s going to fly commercial, but we know he’s just being humble. We’d never subject him to flying with the rabble,” said Interim Vice Chancellor Maureen Harrigan.
In lieu of a commencement ceremony, the Class of 2024 will be emailed an MP3 file of a newly developed TritonGPT clone of Al Gore’s voice giving a live-generated speech and reading their names. In preparation for its inaugural speech, TritonGPT was trained on a corpus of Chancellor Khosla’s emails to all academics, staff, and students. 2024 graduates remain unfazed, with one saying, “It won’t be the first graduation I listened to in the background.”
