

Cauldrons and bottles on a wooden desk
Photograph by David Brabiner / Alamy

Dear Headmaster McGonagall:

I am a recent Hogwarts graduate, and, although my time with you was a literal fantasy, I unfortunately did not learn a lot of basic skills, like math or spelling, at your skool.

You may say, “Why do you need arithmetic? You’re a wizard. You can do magic!” To which I reply, sure, for some wizard careers that’s great, but other wizards work in middle management and just want a normal nine-to-five gig. When I graduated, I thought that all I would need was my wand and a couple of choice incantations, but these days, without at least a little algebra, you’re not even qualified to work in Bertie Bott’s retail department.

It’s hard out here for a poorly rounded wizard. Recently, I went on magical LinkedIn and saw almost none of my Hogwarts class of 2007 represented at top-tier wizarding companies. It’s not difficult to speculate why—without the assistance of Hermione Granger, half of my fellow-Gryffindors couldn’t even conjugating most verbs, and I am not sure that the instruction we received from Hagrid the giant is technically certifiable. Additionally, I cannot sit still for more than four hours a day without embarking on spontaneous adventures, and my vocabulary is poop.

Thanks to the Hogwarts curriculum, I can withstand mind control and even limited torture, but I cannot write a compelling cover letter without humiliating grammatical error’s. Why is literature not a course at your skool? I can enchant my quill to write my thoughts, but I never learned how to make my thoughts enchanting. I heard that Durmstrang students have a skool newspaper. You know what Hogwarts has? A three-headed dog lurking in the castle, with permission to kill whoever it finds. Indeedly, my life was constantly endangered while at Hogwarts, which was an academic distracshun.

I have also noticed that some employers have dismissive attitudes toward Hogwarts graduates. For instance, I spoke to a recruiter from Gringotts who told me that they don’t accept candidates from party skools. Are we a party skool? I had friends die here, but not from drinking. (It’s because they were murdered.)

You may or may not be aware, but the economy has changed, and the need for my skills defying Lord Voldemort has lessened. You know what would have been a better use of class time? The study of foreign languages. Geography. Brexit. Also, does it seem like graduating students from Slytherin House skew racist? Can we please get them some liberal-arts exposure?

Perhaps most disturbing of all, our most gifted alumna, Hermione Granger, is as well read as she is only because she spent all of her time braking into an illegal library. I believe designating any part of a library as “forbidden” sends the wrong type of message to students, especially in a skool where skipping classes and even fighting your professors is kind of chill. Obviously, the culture surrounding education needs to change.

Realistically, here is what I am qualified to be:

  • A troll hunter
  • An auror
  • An eccentric teacher at Hogwarts

As you can imagine, this does not make me an appealing prospect for interview season.

My wife and I have a son, and soon we will need to consider where to send our brave boy. I hope that, by the time he comes of skool age, Hogwarts will have evolved into the type of academic institution capable of preparing him for the highly technical competitive war zone that is the modern wizarding job market. In the meantime, is there an alumni network I can send my resumay to?

Seamus Finnigan
Class of 2007