I’ll just tell my kids’ war stories for what they are worth. The moral is, I guess, that a little bit of luck is all you need to get some traction, and whenever that luck shows up, even if late, it turns out to be the right time.
Kid #1 (prestige university, English major) got to one week before graduation with no definitive job. She was not depressed. Her ambition at the time was to be a writer, and from lots of talking with other writers she understood that meant a lot of hustling and a lot of menial day jobs. She had lined up a cheap apartment in a hip neighborhood in the city where her college was, and she and her housemate/best friend were going to share it. She was completely confident in her ability to get some retail service job – she had experience of that under her belt – enough to pay the rent and buy food. She understood that we were not going to subsidize her (and the same was true with the friend and her family – her parents barely had enough to live on themselves).
This was not, by the way, a slacker who had avoided facing the future. She was (and is) an inveterate planner. Her modular resume (a different resume for every employer) and cover letters, as well as her history of career-focused internships in college (working for magazines and other publications, as a writer and editor), were being used by her college’s career center as models of what a kid like her should do. It just hadn’t worked yet. This was 2009, and the job market was generally terrible, so maybe there was less shame in not walking out of graduation into a career job with a 401(k).
Out of the blue, she got an offer from Teach For America to do one of her top choices for a day job – teach English in New York City. She had gone through the interview process eight months before and had effectively been waitlisted, which as far as she was concerned meant rejection. A couple of hours of agonizing and talking to her friend convinced her she should take it, and she did. A week later, she had moved across the country and was in training. In the course of the next few years, her interest in writing diminished, and her interest in education policy blossomed. And so a career was born. (At least so far . . . ) She has had a series of good jobs with quality employers and increasing compensation, as well as excellent benefits.
Kid #2 (prestige university, sociology major) had planned to go directly into a PhD program in sociology, but when the dust cleared after visiting he didn’t think enough of either of the programs that had accepted him to commit to them. By then, he had to focus on finishing his senior thesis, so by the time he actually started looking for a job it was very late and he was very distracted by end-of-college stuff. He definitely had more than a little situational depression, and he was nowhere near the systematic job-seeker his sister had been. Tears were shed, more than once. He really wanted to stay where he was (there was a girlfriend involved) rather than move home, and in theory where he was had a more vibrant job market. He had a part-time job that didn’t pay enough to live on and that would not continue into the fall, and an offer of another part-time job in a theater – his other passion – that also wouldn’t pay enough to live on, but could be combined with a regular-hours day job.
We agreed to cover his rent through the end of July (one month beyond what had already been paid for), but if he didn’t have a job by then he had to move home and look there. The last week of July came, and there was no job. We arranged to rent a U-Haul for him to move his stuff home. July 31 was a Saturday. U-Haul started calling us around noon – why hadn’t we (he) picked up the van? We were already calling him. No answer, no call back. He was hiding from us. You can imagine how angry we were!
It turned out that Friday afternoon at 4:45 he got a call (which went to voice mail) from the only employer with an unrejected application outstanding, asking him to call back by 5:00, or first thing Monday morning. He called back just after 5:00, and no one was there. He didn’t want to leave his city before Monday morning, in case they offered him a job. And that’s what happened – he called back at 9:00 Monday morning, and he started work there Tuesday morning. Over the weekend, he had talked to the landlord, who had agreed to let him hold over for up to a week for per-diem rent. (He knew they didn’t have the apartment rented, and were planning to renovate it before renting it out again.) On Monday, he worked things out with U-Haul to get the van the next weekend to move his stuff to a place he could store it for a few weeks.
The job wound up being a bad one, but the kind of bad job one can learn a lot from, about the world and about oneself. He was good at it, he mostly enjoyed it, and it gave him a lot of self-respect. It paid terribly, but along with the part-time theater job (which he took) he earned more than enough to support himself. He wound up getting a terminal masters degree with partial funding at his old university, and then getting an actual professional job in his field with his buffed-up skills, at a pay level that easily amortized his masters debt. I’m still not certain he has an actual long-term career path (he’s working on it), but he has a spouse, a house they own, and a dog, and we aren’t paying for any of it.