When I did an internship at a big corporation after graduating from university, I was deeply offended that the work advertised as an MSc-level support role in the strategy department meant feeding the printer with paper and bringing my supervisors coffee. There was hardly anything else to do.

I obviously protested within two weeks but my supervisors got angry with me for not wanting to do the work a summer high school intern could have done. Or as I said, "a chimpanzee".

At one point I started bringing business books to work to have something to read while waiting for the next 5-minute task. That really angered them more than anything.

Experiences such as this really left me questioning the world. What is the purpose of higher education if most jobs, in practice, don't require much of it. My equally educated co-workers couldn't do Excel sheets, didn't know how to program Excel formulas, but knew everything about the latest tie fashion.

It was a revelation.