News just in: a terrifying new epidemic is spreading through Cambridge and other universities across the country. The situation is progressing at such alarming speed that latest reports suggest that the threat is in fact close to being upgraded to pandemic status.

It seems that many intelligent Cambridge students have been infected by the dreaded ‘ergophilis digestivum’ virus, commonly known as ‘Get-A-Job’ disease. The disease seems to infect those in their final year of study in particular; something about the gaping void of an unplanned future seems to make these students, for some unknown reason, especially susceptible to the virus. This horrifying parasite compels its human hosts to accept jobs at firms that their parents haven’t heard of or in sectors that are a bit ‘iffy’, leaving them hideously disfigured by alleviated student loans and friends from outside the Oxbridge bubble.

We spoke to three Cambridge students who reflect the majority of views across campus. Many of their friends have been stricken by the illness, going to work at sewage companies and lesser-known accountancy firms.

‘I’d rather live in a bin and scavenge from abandoned Gardie’s boxes than work in a high-up management position at McDonald’s’, said one interviewee. ‘At least that way I could live with some dignity.’

‘I want a job where I can use my Master’s degree in Classics,’ said another, ‘and I’m not willing to compromise simply because I can get all the benefits of a high-profile company at a lesser-known firm, even if it does have more potential for long term growth and promotion prospects.’

100 percent of our interviewees complain of general feeling of hopelessness about the future, and rumours of a graduate position at Aldi with a £40,000 starting salary have only fuelled complaints that there are no good jobs any more. Current advice is for students to put off graduation at all costs, and instead to discover a never-before-manifest love for Management Studies. Ill-advised postgraduate programmes and trips to Africa to ‘find oneself’ also exhibit similar levels of efficacy

And those who accept places in professions that are beneath them often find themselves paying for their decision in other ways too. One recent graduate, who wishes to remain unnamed, has said that she feels alienated since accepting a competitively-paid position at a lowly energy company. ‘When my friends talk about how they aren’t earning any money, I feel really left out. A lot of the time, I think it would be better to be massively in debt and chase a big-name company than to earn a living at a decent if less prestigious firm’.

Lizzie Brown went on to say, ‘It seems if you don’t work at a Goldman Sachs or a McKinsey type firm, then you really are missing out on…something. I feel really ashamed to be earning an honest living at a solid company that provides many with valuable services and resources.’

Despite its devastating effects, some are saying that the contagious spread of ergophilis digestivum may be a good thing, forcing those who refuse to work to enter the jobs market, which has famously been doing great the past few years.
‘My kids are lazy and do nothing all day except watch Take Me Out- a good dose of ergophilis would be just what they need,’ said mum-of-two Barbara, as she attempted to spatula her daughter off the sofa. ‘I just don’t understand: they’ve never had to work for anything their entire lives so why would they expect to not have to work for things now?’

However, recent polls suggest that one of the main reasons young people go to university was ‘to make myself attractive to prospective employers’, closely followed by ‘to get away from my annoying younger brother’, and ‘to feel dead brainy’. Combined with the expanding cost of higher education, it seems that seeing university as a path to more highly-skilled jobs is the key to why young graduates have been holding out for some kind of return on their investment: usually in the form of a job that they couldn’t have got had they left school after completing Pokémon Sapphire.

Nevertheless, the financial crisis, the rising levels of tuition debts and the subsequent need to pay them off can only account for so much.

‘Too many whingers, that’s the problem. Not the ‘economy’, whatever hocus-pocus that is,’ said one high-level government official who graduated in a jobs boom and rolled into a law firm with a Third. ‘If you won’t get a minimum-wage job cleaning up coffee-flavour baby-sick in Nero’s just because you feel that, as a graduate who’s spent a great deal on their education, you should be working in a graduate job, then you are a job snob - no two ways about it.’