The agonising search for the coveted industrial attachment

In the beginning, attachment was a word and the word was an addiction to Patco, the whitish mint sweet that explodes in sugary splendor the moment it touches your tongue. In secondary school, you went to a boarding facility that was, really, a mini monastery. There you had to face and then overcome home-sickness, bullying and cold showers while fighting the surging, uncontrollable hormones, and get accustomed to daily plates of succotash (read Githeri) laced with kerosene.

University then becomes The Freedom Hub. Here, you are free to do everything and anything you want, because you are away from your parents. But after those four years of discovery, comes the next stage – attachment. This mandatory part of coursework is always at the back of any student’s mind. But in real sense, campus life is a series of attachments.

You get attached to Grace, that maddeningly beautiful being you meet at Fresher’s Night. She made your knees go weak and despite your brain’s constant warning not to be attached, you became as attached as a climbing plant. However, she later pruned you and threw you to the pits of Bro Zone.

That experience earned you a distinction in the Character Development certificate course, but it didn’t stop you from further attachments with Mary, Joyce and Agnes.

Until third year came, and the university administration began throwing around the words Industrial Attachment. The return of that word – attachment – gave you PTSD and you momentarily had flashbacks of your previous…well…attachments.

This wasn’t welcome news. I mean, you had just completed your third year, a stage of study when your parents cut back on financial support since you are now presumed to be a fully grown, bearded human. You had just written the end of semester exams when the bombshell dropped and boy, did sighs of exasperation escape your breath!

And what poor timing. Talk of industrial attachment when your answer sheets could suffocate examiners with their abundance of hot air? Based on the nonsense you scribbled, and because you had no space to use your mwakenya thanks to the hawk eyed invigilator, you knew that the markers would certainly need air conditioners.

Then came the last day of school. Your faculty’s Dean of Studies in liaison with the lecturers held a session to prepare you for the coming months. The soft spoken, grey haired Professor spoke at length about how you should behave in the corporate world, and cautions you against embarrassing him and the school.

You soak up his words of wisdom. He assures all students that there are enough attachment slots and nobody will be left out. This revelation injects a new confidence in you, and you start daydreaming about doing your internship at a blue chip fintech company, and later having companies fight over you, trying to offer you lucrative contracts to work in their companies.

To add sauce to this crunchy update, the Attachment Coordinator goes on and on about how the companies have great reputations, and how the managers there have a secret liking for students from your faculty, who are perceived to be over baked. The session ends with a call for students to apply to any company they like, and a repeat of the promise that everyone will certainly be absorbed.

That evening, as you interact with your friends from Education and Hospitality faculties, you realise that they are all just as excited as you are. Being a rabble rouser, you jeer at Kangethe, who looks like a Freedom fighter, and you wonder loudly how he is going to manage life as a Teacher on Practice, not of history but mathematics. You scoff at Ivy, the beauty who is into Culinary Arts yet Lord, won’t her amoeba-shaped Chapatis horrify customers when she gets to be chef on duty for a day?

As you head home after putting the semester to bed, you start making a plan on how you will search for a place to do your attachment (that word again!). You arrive in the village and it is planting season, so you first offer your reliable human resources and join villagers in the farm.

Later in the evening you start thinking of sowing seeds of an application to renowned companies, then it hits you like a ton of bricks that you don’t even know how to begin writing a formal email, and worse, you have no Curriculum Vitae. The last time you wrote a CV was back in high school, during literature class.

You realise with great sadness that you will have to part with Sh1,500 so that some CV maker can help you draft a fitting resume. Armed with the one-page document that is as scantily detailed as a thief’s eulogy, and relying on Uncle Google, you scour through job websites in search of attachment opportunities.

You find a couple of attractive openings, but the sucker punch that knocks you out cold is where they list the preferred candidates’ skills. You had no skill, nada, zilch to none. You realise it is easier for a politician not to steal public funds than for you to get an attachment position without ‘experience’. It is now three weeks to the end of the school recess, and you are yet to begin your internship. What to do?

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