Question: I'm writing to solicit your opinion. Is there "demeaning work"or is all work somehow meaningful in its own right as a counsellor at a Canada Student Employment Centre recently tried to tell me? Is working at a mind-numbing, dead-end job much better than having no job at all?

Allow me to elaborate. I'm a recent university graduate who, during the past two summers, has held challenging co-op positions...While attending school, I worked at the head office of a large Canadian company and managed a small non-profit corporation in my spare time. I have solid computer skills and I speak French fluently. I've been accepted into a prestigious post-graduate program at the University of Western Ontario in the fall and, were it not for my experiences this summer, I'd have to say that I'm pretty satisfied with the way my career path has been unfolding thus far.

But this summer has been a total disaster. I'm out of school and no longer qualify for a university co-op program...and forced to rely upon more traditional means of finding summer employment. Let me be the first to tell you, the pickings are slim. That is, if you refuse to work for minimum wage.

Enter the Canada Student Employment Centre staff who assure me that there's nothing wrong with slaving away for $7.00 an hour when you've just finished investing over $40,000 in a university education. Well, I for one refuse to demean myself that way. Does that mean I have an attitude problem? Is there no such thing as demeaning work?

Answer: Although they're related, you're asking two different questions: Do I think minimum wage work is demeaning? And, do you have an attitude problem if you refuse to do it?

My opinion is merely one voice, so I decided to conduct an informal survey: I discussed your circumstances with nearly a dozen people. One young man said, somewhat bitterly: "Welcome to the real world." A couple of people agreed with the Student Employment Centre counsellors that work of any kind is valuable in that it provides income and indicates ambition and drive.

Everyone else felt (and I'm in this camp) that work offering low, or even no pay can be worthwhile if it adds to your skill set and furthers your long term career goals.

Rather than an attitude problem, I suspect you have a faulty and rather limited perspective on individual careers and work in the open marketplace and how the two interdepend. And you're wise to examine this early in your career as it could well come back to haunt you if you don't.

Whether or not work is demeaning is a subjective judgement. Most of us, at some point in our working lives find ourselves doing dead-end, mind numbing work, often for minimum wage.

At times, the marketplace is tight and work of this kind is all that's available. At other times, such jobs are a means to an end. I'm reminded of a man with a PHD in philosophy who had an early morning paper route for five years. And this didn't demean him at all because it left him free for the rest of the day to study and write about issues of true importance to him.

Building a rewarding and satisfying career demands a high degree of objectivity.

A career evolves slowly over time, as you accumulate education, training, skills and actual work experience. And your ultimate career success will depend on your ability to plan and to manage yourself and these various components thoughtfully and creatively in a changing workscape.

Training, education, skill development are some of the factors within your control. But the "experience" component, the work itself, is controlled by employers. And in this regard, you need to sharpen your perspective.

As an economist once explained, jobs and work in a market economy exist because someone, somewhere will pay to have something done.

You, your skills, education and training are a "commodity" that employers buy based on their needs, not yours. No employer will hire you and pay you a healthy wage simply because you spent $40,000 on your education, for example. That employer has to have a need for you, work that needs to be done, work that you, with your skills and abilities, can do.

You've just experienced your first taste of the often harsh supply and demand equation that dictates what work is available. And it won't be your last.

This summer, low-skilled, low-level summer jobs were available, especially once summer had actually arrived. The "good" summer jobs (many of which also pay minimum wage, by the way) tend to go to young people who apply in January or February and have their summer work lined up by early spring.

Could it be that you ran into your own lack of planning this summer?