<p>So i'm graduating this semester and I've been jobhunting. Its super discouraging!</p>
<p>I'm not sure if the economy has downgraded since last year so if its just me. </p>
<p>Last year I applied to many many companies and I was sending out TONS of resumes / cover letters. This shows that companies were accepting them. However, this year I'm having trouble even getting companies to take my resumes!</p>
<p>Most (80%) don't bother returning my email of of the ones that do respond 75% say they're not hiring and to get my in touch in a few months. </p>
<p>This means that for every 50 emails i send, i only send out 2-3 resumes if i'm lucky. </p>
<p>I was also a discouraged new graduate when I graduated in 2003. It was in the middle of a jobless recovery and nobody wanted to hire a new engineer. </p>
<p>You may want to consider graduate school if you don’t find a good job right out of college. It’d give you something to do while waiting for the economy to turn around and allow you to earn more income after you graduate. It’s expensive though and right now you’re probably not thinking about more school.</p>
<p>Getting your first job out of college is the hardest one to get. Since you are young, a lot of companies see you as a flight risk (for good reason) since they don’t know if you will stay at their company or industry very long. Companies don’t like the cost of training new hires and new graduates and see them as more cost than benefit. They’d like some other company to train you instead. </p>
<p>Long term, you’ll find ample opportunity in engineering and be pleased with your choice of major. The day will come that you send out your resume and companies call back begging for you to work for them. Someday, you’ll post your resume on Monster and have so many messages on your cell phone by the end of the day that you can’t return them all. Someday, you’ll land a great job that pays you well and provides a nice stable income. </p>
<p>But I understand today, when you come home to no responses to your resumes and no messages on your machine, that it is very frustrating.</p>
<p>All I can say is don’t give up. Keep sending your resume out. Keep trying for the great job. Keep looking for job as an engineer. It will come someday.</p>
<p>What? Career centers aren’t useless at all. I don’t know, maybe career centers at bad schools aren’t any good but career centers at decent schools will know who is hiring and can help set you up with an interview. At the very least you have to go try; I got one job offer this year (I’m graduating this semester, it was for a permanent job) via a career center interview.</p>
<p>My experience with my career center was very bad. They had some employees there that didn’t have any desire to help the students and were rather rude. They required that you upload your resume through a Monster system and it was extremely complicated to get it to work, and they refused to help with it. Then, I discovered that I couldn’t try to interview at most companies because my major was Mechanical Engineering Technology and most companies only interviewed Mechanical Engineers. Of course, I didn’t know this until after I paid my money (they charged for on campus interviews). In short, they were just about useless.</p>
<p>+1 for bigtrees post (#3). DH and I got out of grad school in 1986 from U. Texas, the same month that oil prices tanked. My first job offer was rescinded when the economy died. We sent out 273 resumes all over the country (yes, I still remember the exact number) - “We are a newly married couple looking for work as structural engineers in the _____ area.” That was a lot of envelope licking! We got back only a handful of responses, most saying, “Sorry, we don’t have anything.” Five months later, we got one call from a firm in Maine, though - they flew us both up and offered us jobs. In the 90s, we were each laid off several times, but every time we landed a job very quickly and gained new, valuable experience. In 1999 we started our own firm. As bigtrees said, now our phone is ringing off the hook, even in this economy, mainly because DH is an outstanding engineer and people person. Our main “problem” is deciding which jobs to turn down.</p>
<p>So hang in there! Just keep knocking on doors and networking. The way we found the Maine firm was from a copy of the “structural engineers” section in the Portland yellow pages that a classmate gave us - we just included all those addresses on our mailing list. So you never know where a good prospect might come from.</p>
<p>Yes, it’s a roller coaster sometimes, but I wouldn’t go back and change a thing.</p>
<p>bigtrees I agree. My school’s career office is horrible. I read some schools have waiting lists for companies, not us. Lol, we make fun of people who go to the career fair, its ridiculous.</p>
<p>engineering career services is like the lifesaver at my school…life without it would be scary</p>
<p>I’ve seen people with low gpa’s, they got jobs but it just took some time…some didn’t like them but stuck it out and got much better jobs later,…go above and beyond in your resume CL, make your stuff centered on the company, put in the extra effort you know… especially with a low GPA, you should be applying to a lot of companies to increase chances</p>
<p>One of the first things you should do before decided on a college is contact the career services center and see how many students they place in internship/co-ops and in full-time positions. I don’t know how you would find that first job if it’s not through them - companies generally aren’t too accommodating towards people with less than 3-5 years of experience.</p>
<p>It had a great engineering college. The career services department wasn’t run by the engineering department unfortuantely.</p>
<p>At the time that I went to school, you had to pay $35 per year to participate in on campus interviews. Yes, it upset me a lot and I didn’t like it one bit.</p>
<p>The thing to remember - state colleges are operated by government employees. Typically government work is employment for life whether you do a great job or a crummy job, and MSU was the same deal. The people that ran career services didn’t care and there wasn’t anything the university could do about it.</p>
<p>I’m going to go ahead and say that any school that charges current students for on campus interviews is not a good school. Academically they might be good but overall, no. I go to a state school as well and our career services people might not be world beaters but they’re good and informed/informative, and I’d never dream of having to pay to take part in an on campus interview. I’m glad MSU doesn’t do that anymore apparently.</p>
<p>Don’t be surprised about the e-mail thing. I would be more surprised that a company would actually respond to e-mails than not. If you are only relying on sending out random e-mails I would not expect a very high success rate.</p>
<p>As mentioned, I would try your school’s career services center. While I did not use mine to find my job, it did help many people I know. Purdue had some online thing that allowed you to see which companies were recruiting and you could submit your resume. From there, if the employer was interested, you could schedule an on-campus interview. I obviously cannot speak for your school but I would assume that it has something similar.</p>