<p>I'm just curious about job prospects for college graduates this Spring. My D is finishing up this May (and off to Law School) and S is a sophomore. According to them, almost no one in the graduating classes of their respective schools has good employment lined up. </p>
<p>I'd like to do a bit of informal polling here. I've checked to see if CC has already had a similar thread but have not found one. So, here is the question: "Has your graduating kid or someone close to them gotten a good job offer, or not?" Any general information about their school and major would be helpful, too.</p>
<p>S is graduating in May and only one friend has a really good job (ie a career position) lined up. Two more are off to med/law school. The rest are searching. It certainly helps to have a degree that is more marketable right now. But the real key is to be very agressive and network. And alas, these are two skills S does not have or care to employ. He is learning the hard way about that “early bird” thing.</p>
<p>My daughter is a junior, engineering major, and she got “lay offed” from her summer internship. With the downturn in the economy, the company decided not to hire any interns this years. I guess this is better than laying off actual employees.</p>
<p>English major, elite non-Ivy university, no one in the (artsy, bohemian) set of friends has a real job lined up. Some going to grad school or fellowships, a couple to work for their parents, most cobbling together subsistence gigs while trying to get traction through unpaid work. The upside (limited as it is) is that none of these kids ever thought it would be easy to get a job; this isn’t so different from what they imagined would happen when times were good, except they thought a few of them might get real jobs somewhere, and they thought that the economics types would be laughing at them instead of competing with them for retail sales hours.</p>
<p>My sons both found great summer jobs in the Computer/networking field that will serve as internships. I have a friend who’s son just graduated in theater and it is not good. He is applying to retail stores now just to find anything.</p>
<p>The field of study makes a big difference. I am glad my sons are only sophomores this year. Brutal year to graduate.</p>
<p>One daughter is graduating from West Point next month. Her entire class has a job starting this summer.
My other daughter is graduating from the U of I. Neither she nor any of her friends has a job yet - summer or full-time. :(</p>
<p>The military has become an attractive option for some graduates. S is at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. He says that five or six guys he knows in the program have decided to enlist. Others, despairing of the job market and late making any decision, are going to grad school in the U.K., because the app. deadlines at their schools tend to be later than ours.</p>
<p>G’town has an annual job fair for agencies and departments of the federal gov’t. Last year a few dozen kids attended. S went this year, and the room was filled with people and many were waiting in the hall to get in. Don’t know how many got jobs, but this is a good indicator of shifting employment patterns and attitudes about what qualifies as a good job post college. It used to be that investment banking was the hot ticket for a graduate. Now it’s government work–low but steady pay and good benefits–if you can get it. </p>
<p>Anyone have stories about teaching or medical fields?</p>
<p>Here is an article about teaching positions from the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Georgia has been one of the big employment centers for new teachers for the last few years. Lots of grads from the Midwest where enrollment was shrinking had been finding jobs here. Now, not even the locals can find teaching positions. The principal at my child’s elementary school gets at least a dozen unsolicited resumes a day!</p>
<p>I also want to add that I was with several college seniors graduating this spring in education this past weekend and most of them can’t even secure sub jobs. GA is allowing class size to increase next year in most grades to decrease the need for teachers.</p>
<p>Our local school system is laying off teachers.</p>
<p>Like momoftwins, S1 has a job lined up. He will commission as an Ensign in the U.S. Navy in few weeks. He will commission on Friday,graduate on Sat. and start to work on Monday.</p>
<p>Mixed results here: For daughter, nothing yet, a few interviews, no jobs. For her friends, one got a low paying stipend as a research assistant (she is planning med school or grad school in clinical psychology, this will be OK for next year), one got a good job through an internship last summer at a consulting firm, one who is an engineering grad got an engineering job, but not in the field of engineering that she majored in and a long geographic way from most of her friends, another who is artsy has a gig for the summer and a restaurant job to pay the bills. These students except for the artsy one who went to an art school are Duke/Dartmouth grads.</p>
<p>Boyfriend, fall 2008 graduate, English degree, has had no luck. Lots and lots of applications, a couple interviews, no job offers. This has included everything from major-related career jobs to temporary and short-term, sometimes part-time, opportunities. The competition is fierce.</p>
<p>I’ll be graduating this May, also with an English degree, and I’m just now starting the job search. I’m a little more optimistic about my chances of getting a decent job – I have very interesting and relevant experience – but I’m still a little nervous.</p>
<p>Of my senior friends, I know one that has a job offer that she doesn’t really want but will take anyways. The others are still interviewing…but they all say that they go in and interview but afterwards the interviewer will say that they don’t actually have any job openings, they’re just interviewing just in case. I know of one that’s going to grad school. They’re a variety of majors - health care administration, psychology, biology…</p>
<p>I’ve noticed that the majority of people with something setup for sure set it up earlier (first semester, early winter) and that some of the people that put it off until Feb/March are having a harder time finding jobs.</p>
<p>I have found something similar to what hj is saying-- many friends will go through 2-3 rounds of interviewing and find out the job has been eliminated at some point along the way. But, most of my friends have had something come up.</p>
<p>OP: This year is really tough. Just came back from CPW at MIT and the career office indicated a drop of 30% in the interviews from last year. They did mention that their graduates are doing much better than their peers.</p>
<p>A little fable to perk people up: When my wife graduated from college (Psychology and American Studies double major), she not only didn’t have a job, she didn’t even have a job lead. On the day after her graduation, her father told her he was leaving her mother. She got on a plane and flew to California (where she had never been before) to join a boyfriend with whom she had never spent more than a few days at a time. After a couple of weeks of listless depression, she started to look for a meaningful job, without success. In the meantime, she took “maintenance” jobs – first a part-time admitting clerk in the local ER, then a sales job with a wholesale jeweller who paid her under the table. After five months and many fruitless leads, she got a VISTA internship with a small nonprofit housing developer in a gritty industrial town. She had 0 prior interest in low-income housing, but she wanted to work on something important, and that seemed important, if really small-scale (there were four people in the office, counting her).</p>
<p>Flash forward two years. She was a valued, permanent employee of the growing agency, running two development projects on her own. She wasn’t being paid a whole lot, but she wasn’t spending it, either, and she had saved enough for a year of graduate school. She had a regular racketball game with the city manager, played second violin in a pickup string quartet, and was on the board of directors of the local battered women’s shelter. </p>
<p>She had a real career underway. It didn’t proceed in a straight line – what she does today has nothing to do with low-income housing, and a lot more to do with her original interest in Psychology. She picked up a law degree on the way, and has spent most of her career in fields where that degree is the wrong one. She is successful and respected. She has changed jobs about every 3 or 4 years, and has never been unemployed for a day (other than her first semester of law school).</p>
<p>It can take a while to get traction, but talent wins out.</p>
<p>My nephew graduated in January from a mid-reputation public flagship’s business school with an undergraduate degree in marketing. He had two job offers lined up before he graduated, neither of them particularly lucrative, and one seemed to be dead-end. The one he accepted claims to have something better for him in the future, but right now he has to be at work by 5 am (some days much earlier), and then spends 12-14 hours every day driving around the state servicing clients.</p>
<p>Son will be graduating this spring from a highly rated Mechanical Engineering program. He and all of his classmates have at least one offer - job or grad school. Not all are excited about their offers. A surprising number are government jobs.</p>
<p>A well-known college guide has as a statistic the number of graduating seniors who found jobs after some number of months. The Naval Academy always reports 100%.</p>
