<p>“Well, you can still join the airforce after college. That ship has not yet sailed.”</p>
<p>Or… that airplane has not yet departed.</p>
<p>But ha! They closed the cabin door early, leaving you standing there, out of breath and sweating. And the gate agent smirking as she watches you miss your flight.</p>
<p>Honestly I prefer a more involved interviewing process, because it shows the management is hands-on and cares about its people. It doesn’t actually waste that much of their time because as Emaheevul already mentioned, by the time you get to that level the number of candidates has been whittled down significantly. That said, the multiple month time frame for entry-level is obnoxious. For management I can understand, since the resource and responsibility investment is much greater.</p>
<p>ThisMortalSoil, mind if I ask which fields and which school?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So that means the other half were acceptances? (I hope…)</p>
<p>I just got back from a job fair at a local state university here in CA. I’d say there were about 30 to 40 employers. I think our table got a representative response. </p>
<p>Between my colleague and myself, over four hours, I’d say we spoke to around 60 students total. About 10 of those were looking for internships. We don’t really have internships, but we do hire fairly regularly. Thaty’s why, although I was hoarse from talking to the students I talked to, and it was about all I could handle in one day, I was a little surprised there weren’t more of them.</p>
<p>While the lengthy interview process was obnoxious, especially for an entry-level position, it was an extremely positive experience for me. How often do entry levels get that kind of exposure to upper management in their company? It was great to walk in on my first day already on a first name basis with most of management, especially since it’s such a large company, and I got tons of fantastic career advice and even interview pointers… the CIO had looked up who all else I would be interviewing with that day and was giving me tips on how to impress them and how to improve my interview technique. As an aspie that was a godsend!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Sadly it was only two responses hahah. One was the rejection and the other, well, they said they were interested but ultimately the internship didn’t sound like it’d really benefit me. The woman on the phone even said “I’ll be honest, when I was in college this wouldn’t be the kind of internship I would have wanted.” Red flag!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>How weird… Could it be that this internship is the brain child of someone high up in the company and no one else thinks it’s a good idea, but this person has the juice to get it done?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>What is meant by “get involved?” (Got a kid who has a skill and will probably be moving to Silicon Valley…)</p>
<p>Emaheevul07</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You need to realize that they aren’t just hiring you for an entry level position in a case like this. Sure, that is where they will start, but the want to evaluate your potential to move up in the company. You should be thrilled to death you interviewed with these management positions because that tells you that yes, it’s entry now, but there is advancement potential. Had you only interviewed with one person, that is a pretty good indicator of a dead end job. If you think the process was obnoxious now, you may have been giving off those vibes during the interview. Turn that attitude around and look at it from the company’s side-they saw something in your resume that intrigued them and wanted to see what other’s thought as well.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Your internship is what you make of it, and half the value’s in having a name to put on your resume anyway. Hell, my first internship was just proofreading documents/pitchbooks endlessly and printing/prepping them for clients and prospects. It wasn’t paid. BUT not only did having some experience open further doors, I got to sit in on some pretty high level meetings just for asking. Any experience is valuable.</p>
<p>take the internship. It goes on the resume.</p>
<p>I was thrilled to be there during the interview process, and obviously I can’t have given off too bad a vibe because they did hire me even though they filled the position I’d applied for with somebody else and hired me for something more advanced. Like I said, I thought the interview process was an extremely positive experience even if it was crazy that it lasted that long. I was just agreeing with the poster above me that it was a really strange way of doing things… I’m not sure why you read into that that I had a bad attitude, SteveMA, seems like you zeroed in on two words of the post and ignored all the rest and the context. :P</p>
<p>We have two factors in this country that are hurting both recent college grads and all job seekers in general. The first is that jobs have and will continue to be outsourced outside of the US job market and the second is that productivity gains have diminished the need for workers in almost all areas.</p>
<p>These factors make up a “Structural Unemployment” problem that no one seems to want to talk about politically. None of the solutions posed by either political party in this country address this problem. I am not optimistic that this problem will be solved in our lifetimes, if ever. </p>
<p>People need to look at the fact that American corporations are making record profits while not needing to hire more employees to do it. If they are already making record profits and getting by with less people every year, what hope do new grads have unless they have studied engineering or CS or one of the few remaining fields that still will need people to fill some slots?</p>
<p>We have a tendency to be overly optimistic and think that better times are ahead for college grads, but in fact, every year from now on will be worse because of the outsourcing and productivity gains. There just isn’t any reason for job creation, while at the same time the labor pool just keeps growing and growing.</p>
<p>Perhaps we should get you a rainbarrel to wear with suspenders and a sign that reads, “The End is Nie.” ;)</p>
<p>We have unlimited creativity, and the outsourcing is beginning to rebalance. Pay is rising in Asia, as the middle class grows, and there is less marginal return in ancillary outsourcing. Also, there is a return now avaible to other economies to outsource here.</p>
<p>When I graduated high school, Japan was going to take over the world, and now it is, allegedly China.</p>
<p>I think past performance is the best predictor of future performance, and if the government will get out of the way, we will take off, economically, as always.</p>
<p>
It is not good for people with a science aptitude. There is a huge surplus of science grads and companies abuse them terribly. At the BS/MS level many science grads work as technicians if they are lucky. These jobs use to pay $30-45k ten years ago with benefits and only required a HS diploma or AAS at most. Now they require a BS and experience and pay $25-35k and are through a temp agency without any benefits or even sick leave. </p>
<p>Many PhD scientists are just plain unemployed or chasing post-doc after post-doc earning $35k without benefits, job security, and working $70+ hours in a lab.</p>
<p>Unemployment among chemists is 19% flat out and only 30-40% have full time jobs and half of that 30-40% work dead end crap jobs at the university for as little as $10 an hour.</p>
<p>In chemistry/biology nowadays being underemployed not in the field is not much worse than being employed in the field.</p>
<p>I had a look at indeed.com for my area for unskilled jobs (daughter is looking). I was surprised that there was a decent amount of demand for unskilled labor in our area. The unemployment rate in our town is 4.7%. It’s 6.1% in the surrounding cities. I need to send her a few pointers to these. She’s looking on her own but maybe a few more pointers would help. The jobs are in the areas of receptionist, counter worker, manual labor, customer service representative, stocking, retail sales, and billing.</p>
<p>Poetgirl, your post is just like what all of the political parties say, especially the Republicans. The problems with Structural Unemployment are here to stay. Just like the Republicans and Democrats, your post offers insults to intelligence and no solutions. The only reason that wages are rising in Asia is that they are falling in the US. I’m more concerned about my kids in the US than about Chinese wages.</p>
<p>^^ I agree. Structural unemployment is here to stay - especially for manufacturing jobs. It isn’t just because all manufacturing is moving to China - it is also because of automation. The manufacturing that is still in the US also is highly automated. And in the future, structural unemployment will affect white collar jobs. There was a recent article in WSJ about Citigroup hiring Watson (the Jeopardy playing computer) for doing tasks for the bank to make the consumer’s life better - Watson would find ways to find out what consumers think by doing data analyses and data mining. So bank jobs are now in jeopardy. When we have advanced robots, other jobs will be in jeopardy. Even if you don’t take science fiction seriously, or at least the claims that science fiction writers make about robots taking over the world - you can see the arc of where this automation and computerization and robots will take us…the future is here now.</p>
<p>The reason Chinese wages are increasing is because of market forces, and it has nothing to do with falling US wages. Don’t knock someone else’s ignorance before addressing your own.</p>
<p>Structural unemployment is a reality which everyone acknowledges, it’s the degree that’s in dispute. Don’t forget, there’s been “structural unemployment” for over three centuries now and we always seem to cope just fine. This time does feel orders of magnitude larger, but we will see. Either way, if a tsunami’s coming the right response is to get to higher ground, not throw a tantrum and whine about how unfair it is.</p>
<p>We have companies in New Hampshire looking for machine techs for manufacturing. They don’t need someone with a Bachelors degree - they want someone with an Associates degree or Certificate Program completion that can operate computerized equipment. They don’t need that many people to operate the equipment but the people they need have to be trained. It is nice to see manufacturing in the US but yes, not so many people are needed.</p>
<p>One potential thing that might affect manufacturing costs is natural gas. We have a lot of it and it is very cheap. There’s a current news article about a guy in MA that does Compressed Natural Gas conversions on gasoline-powered-cars. The energy equivalent cost is $0.60/gallon. He’s selling these as fast as he can make them. Japan is facing power shortages this summer as they shut down their nuclear reactors. They have diesel-based generators as backup but crude prices are very, very high right now. I could see GE or another US company delivering a bunch of NG reactors and shipping LNG there. Or Japan moving production to a country where electricity and energy in general isn’t a problem.</p>