Why Uloop Works for Millennials
Millennials have become the Martha Stewart of the times: no one likes us. We don’t even like us, or what we’re purported be. As a late millennial, I’m no stranger to criticism about my generation and its values. For years now, I’ve seen news stories lampooning millennials for ruining everything from the housing market to the NFL. We’re lazy, we’re job hoppers, we want trophies just for showing up, and we can’t put down our phones. But have we examined the reason for these criticisms? Why are we job hopping? Why do we crave recognition? The answers to these questions are the exact qualities that make Uloop.com such a great place to work.
1. We See the Value of Our Work
According to The Millennial Myth, millennials would give up a large portion of their salary to feel appreciated at work. Perhaps the only viable part of Marxism is its assertion that understanding how an individual’s work connects to the finished product benefits both the product and the individual. At Uloop.com, we have weekly challenges that earn us points, which can be used to redeem rewards and put us higher on the weekly leader board. We don’t want a trophy for showing up, but we would like the opportunity to earn one based on the quality of our work. Because our articles are marketed on social media, we can see how we contribute to the Uloop community based on how popular our articles become. We see the value of not only our work, but the work of our peers.
2. We Pick Our Own Hours
One of the perks to being a college student is picking class times. If you’re an early bird, go ahead and knock everything out early in the day. Night owl? Take some later classes. However your brain works, you can usually mold your schedule around it. Uloop follows a similar model, which is fitting, since Uloop is a community of articles written for students by students. We are judged based on our product – our writing – not how long it took to create it. It will be published regardless of whether we spent twenty minutes on it or twenty hours. This makes it easier to like what we do because it doesn’t monopolize our private and social lives. And what would we have to write about if we didn’t have lives beyond academics and work?
3. We Get Criticized
At Uloop, we work directly with editors to make our articles the best they can be. This means receiving criticism and making changes. We get weekly notes from our campus editors that address the week’s highlights and lowlights. While it’s never fun to hear what we’re doing wrong, it makes it much more rewarding when we finally get it right and see our work published. Uloop does not reward us for working, but for working valuably. This ties back into allowing us to pick our own hours. We work for as long as it takes to produce quality stories, whether it takes one draft or fifteen.
4. We Find Ways To Market What We Love
You will never see me write an article about sports. They’re just not my thing. And that’s okay! At Uloop, we have over ten different categories we can write about. From sports to fashion to politics, there’s something for every area of interest because we’re allowed to focus our efforts on things we enjoy and things we find important. In an age where it’s rare to find employment in our major, Uloop is a breath of fresh air.