This week, a 26-year-old college graduate was viscerally rejected by a seasoned marketing professional in Cleveland, Ohio. The graduate had simply sent a Linkedin request, hoping to network with people in Cleveland before moving there. The response she received was representative of the brick wall many millennials face trying to land jobs after graduating.

“You are quite young and green on how business connections work with senior professionals. Apparently you have heard that I produce a Job Bank, and decided it would be stunningly helpful for your career prospects if I shared my 960+ LinkedIn connections with you - a total stranger who has nothing to offer me," Kelly Blazek wrote. "Your invite to connect is inappropriate, beneficial only to you, and tacky."

From senior year of high school throughout college, millennials are told to network. Linkedin is a networking social media site that aims to do just that. To reach out to a job bank marketing specialist was a step in the right direction to stand out among the thousands of millennials competing for dozens of jobs in their fields.

Blazek came off as arrogant and resentful of a younger generation that she believes is reducing professionalism in her field.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. The generational gap is apparent in the language alone. Calling a millennial “young” and “green” is telling a spade that it is a spade.

Millennials are aware of their lack of experience. Every job application asks for experience, and people have struggled to build a resume worthy of a career job for years. Yet, people like Blazek aren’t willing to give millennials a chance at earning experience.

Thus, millennials are left to grasp at straws and reach out any way they can. Saddled with an average of $30,000 in student loan debt, sending a request on Linkedin is hardly a drastic, unprofessional action.

Instead, it shows that the graduate researched the area and found out who the power players were. She went above and beyond browsing job sites and lumping her college resume in with those thousands of others. She went straight to the source and simply asked to network.

Later in her rejection letter, Blazek made a point to call the millennial entitled. On a post about students lobbying for more funding for higher education, an AL.com commenter said millennials are looking for handouts. Perhaps some are, but the majority are not.

Factoring in inflation, $30,000 in 1970 would be $180,000 today.

To the baby boomers that graduated in the 70s, it must be staggering to imagine graduating with six figures of debt attached to your ankles.

Trying to make a salary decent enough to live on and pay back those student loans makes a Linkedin request seem like small potatoes, doesn’t it?

Where some people would cry entitlement, millennials would call it desperation.

Source: Pew Research Center

In 2012, 36 percent of millennials had to either stay at home or move back home. There’s no more glaring statistic representing desperation.

The solution to millennials finding sustainable employment may not be easy, but making it even harder with arrogant retorts to simple requests is unnecessary.

Opening up opportunities for millennials to shadow older, wiser professionals and expanding paid internships may be a better start. Encouraging students to get involved when they're still in college is optimal as well.

In her apology, Blazek said that millennials "are the future."

She’s wrong. Millennials are the present, and they’re desperately willing to work for a chance to succeed. That is beneficial to any company, Ms. Blazek.