<p>From today’s NYT: Summer Jobs Go Organic “Erin Axelrod, who graduated from Barnard College last week with an urban studies degree, will not be fighting over the bathroom with her five roommates on the Upper West Side this summer. Instead she will be living in a tent, using an outdoor composting toilet and harvesting vegetables on an organic farm near Petaluma, Calif.” <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/dining/24interns.html?hp[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/dining/24interns.html?hp</a></p>
<p>“Good luck to your son developing his career in show business, Northstarmom. I know it’s easy enough listening to a tale like mine saying, well why didn’t you do such and such, or most kids would have done so and so.”</p>
<p>Fortunately, S is concentrating in the tech side of theater, where there are far more jobs. But if he can’t find work in his field of choice, he does have job skills and job experience to get jobs in other fields .</p>
<p>I agree that college is about getting an education. At the same time, though, growing up means learning to become responsible for ourselves including eventually getting employment to support oneself.</p>
<p>I can’t imagine viewing fears about the rigor of college as being a reason to not talk to my kids about employment. How else could they be expected to learn how to become financially responsible for themselves?</p>
<p>S already is talking to the career center, professors in the field and people in the field to find out what he can do now to have the best chances of being able to work after graduation in the field that he loves. If he can’t find work in the field that he loves, he knows he’ll have to accept whatever work he can find so he can take care of himself including paying off student loans.</p>
<p>He also knows he’d be welcome to live at home after graduation – and pay rent (which he did with his gap year with Americorps). S, however, says he doesn’t want to live at home after graduation, and I suspect from his applications to out of state summer internships, S would prefer to not live at home even this summer.</p>
<p>" Recruiters from different areas of the US may show up at a college’s job fair but if their location isn’t among the most desirable places to live, kids will often pass them up. Some kids think they need to be closer to home when it comes to finding a job as well."</p>
<p>Beggers can’t be choosers. I find myself amazed at how picky kids – including mine – are about jobs. They don’t seem to understand that it’s a seller’s market, and they may have to take an uninteresting job outside of their major, and they may have to move to a place where they’d prefer not to live. </p>
<p>I’m also fighting this battle with S, who’s far too picky about summer jobs than I think he should be. For instance, he didn’t apply for positions with summer camps that he would have had a good chance of getting. He said they wouldn’t give him the job skills he needs to get hired eventually in his major, and the work didn’t sound that interesting.</p>
<p>When I was in college, I worked up to 60 hours a week over the summer including working full-time as a clerk in a dirty, noisy factory. I didn’t like the job, but I was glad to have employment that would help me with my school expenses. It wasn’t until I had an internship after senior year that I finally got interesting employment that matched my career interests. </p>
<p>"As for things like Teach for America, there are some interesting threads on this forum that indicate the program may not be such an uplifting experience. "</p>
<p>True: But it’s a position that provides essential job experience and also enough money for people to support themselves. That’s the bottom line, and that’s why Teach for Americorps and Americorps have gotten so very competitive particularly this year.</p>
<p>“It just seems that this particular class has a rougher time of it due to the terrible economy and competition from people who are older, wiser and more experienced.
Very difficult job market, ESPECIALLY for college grads with degrees in anything other than engineering or nursing.”</p>
<p>Very true. More reason for the students who are currently in college to get on the ball when it comes to job hunting. I imagine that finding a job will l be very competitive for a very long time, and those who are passive, picky or unmotivated are risking being permanently left in the dust and trampled by the students coming behind them who will be very aggressive.</p>
<p>“When I was in college, I worked up to 60 hours a week over the summer including working full-time as a clerk in a dirty, noisy factory. I didn’t like the job, but I was glad to have employment that would help me with my school expenses.”</p>
<p>I picked up garbage at Jones Beach all summer long during my college years. And I wasn’t majoring in waste management…</p>
<p>I am a big believer of liberal arts education, but at the same time it is important my daughters will major in something they could get a job upon graduation. My D1 had a vision of going into dance. I had her do some research on how much dancers could make, if they were lucky. Minor is fine, major - no.</p>
<p>When you have work expereince it is easier to get another job, even if it’s a minimum wage job. When D1 started college, I insisted on her getting an on campus job or I would cut off her monthly allowance. She has worked in the same office for 2 years. She has experienced office politic and some minor conflict with her boss, but end of this year they recommended her for student employee of the year.</p>
<p>I think in today’s economy one needs to tap into all resources - family, friends, colleagues… This is the time to be flexible. Just because you are an English, history or philosophy major, it doesn’t mean you can’t go into business related job. After all a liberal arts education is suppose to teach you critical thinking.</p>
<p>When I graduated in the 80s we were in a recession. As a math/econ major I was turned down at every commercial bankin training program (didn’t even know what ibanking was). I didn’t have a job when I graduated, but within a month I found a job as a actuarial trainee. I did not enjoy the work or study. As soon as the market turned around, by accident, I got a job at an ibank as an analyst. I was hired because of my actuarial training and heavy math background (I was doing pricing for insurance products, which in some ways was more complicated than security pricing). The first job doesn’t have to be “it” job. If it’s not the right fit, it could still lead you to your next job.</p>
<p>Good luck to all the new graduates. We will be facing junior internship next year, which potentially could lead to a permanent position. Our D1 is going is going to be abroad this fall semester. She will need to be extral vigilant to stay in touch with her career placement for on campus recruitment.</p>
<p>What kind of work experience did your kids get during school? A college placement office is one resource, but that’s all it is – one of many that a job seeker should be using. It’s not a particularly good one – the last place you want to be when looking for a job is in the same place with a whole bunch of other people with equivalent qualifications are also looking. For example, a degree from a prestigious college can be a lot more valuable when sent off to an employer who is more likely to be seeing applicants from the local state U – that person might be impressed, but the recruiters who arrive on a campus certainly won’t be. </p>
<p>Things were the other way around for my son last year when he graduated – he was stressing, I kept telling him not to worry, that as soon as was out of school and available he’d get a job quickly. I was right – he barely had time to unpack his stuff at home before he was on a plane to his new job. (It really helps to be willing to relocate).</p>
<p>The best way to get a job, of course, is via networking – and the first place for a new graduate to start is to call the people she’s worked for in the past. (Even if they aren’t hiring, that’s the first step of networking).</p>
<p>For all whose graduating students are looking for jobs: The state department is hiring. They’ll even take people who aren’t fluent in a language. I heard this directly from a diplomat who’s recruiting on college campuses.</p>
<p>Not only is the State Department hiring (Foreign Service is as competitive as ever however), but overall the government is hiring at a brisk pace as economic stimulus and program funds make their way thru funding channels.</p>
<p>toodledoo</p>
<p>It seems like from your last two comments that you’re feeling some kind of regret for sending your D off to college. Seriously? Even if she doesn’t find a job right away or for a while, know that her BA degree put her at an advantage or at least an equal footing with many other job hunters. Don’t worry about majors either- the BA/BS degree simply lets the employers know that the applicant is competent enough to write, read, and think critically.</p>
<p>Your D’s attitude also seems to be playing a role in her reluctance in finding a job quickly and effectively. Is she reading the news? These days, she needs to be flexible in order to get a job in a field that she’d like to work in. Even the kind of job that she gets. Whatever pays the bills. Too many students IMHO go straight for big cities like NYC or DC hoping to find a job in a city they wanted to live in. It is true that it’s help to be THERE but make sure she isn’t going in blindly, be aware of the employment market. It’ll take time for her to actually get her dream job.</p>
<p>College is never a waste unless the student spent 4 years doing nothing by partying and pulling C averages.</p>
<p>“regret for sending your D off to college” - no, this was the plan all along. she studied hard, made great grades, and graduated in four years from a highly regarded private LAC. So i’m proud of her. I do regret that the money available for her education was spent solely to study things that were of great personal interest without regard to how it might help her support herself.
“BA degree put her at an advantage or at least an equal footing with many other job hunters” - don’t think so. our economy is increasingly technologic and quantitative. would have liked to see something that relates to this, incorporated into her degree
“BA/BS degree simply lets the employers know that the applicant is competent enough to write, read, and think critically” - bravo, bravo. may come as a surprise, but you can learn to do all that quite well in spite of being an engineer, accountant, scientist, etc.</p>
<p>my earlier comment was that, in discussion with other parents during commencement, I found myself not alone in feeling there should have been more from this LAC that would prepare our kids to find work. My opinion, a stretch but I’m entitled to this whether anyone else agrees or not, is that liberal arts colleges are an anachronism. There have always been college degrees that did not relate to employment, but the world we knew is changing right before our very eyes.</p>
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<p>The government might be hiring, but it is still very difficult. I have applied to every single GS5 and 7 opening in my field of interest since last summer, and have gotten nowhere. I just bought the book on federal resumes that was recommended here (forgot by who), so maybe that will help me “play the game” better. I do acknowledge that I have picked a particularly difficult field to enter without military experience, but… it is what it is. I’m with AmeriCorps now, and then I guess I will try and work my way through some internships, possibly to graduate school, and then into my hopeful career (all the while, continuing to apply to all entry level jobs that I can find in the field).</p>
<p>Also, the stimulus money is a one time deal. AmeriCorps (at least around me) won’t increase the number of people they hire because the money increase they just got is only temporary. Furthermore, the program that I am working with will be replacing (when their year runs out) 3-5 people over the next few months, and there are currently over 50 applicants in the system for those places. And this is just for a job that pays you below the poverty level (eligible for food stamps!)</p>
<p>CIA is hiring too… if you speak Russian/Japanese/Urdu/Pashto/Farsi/Arabic/Serbo-Croatian.</p>
<p>And just for kicks, I checked the civil service jobs that the State Department has opened… a new graduate would be eligible for 5 of the 81 advertised positions. Two of which are secretaries.</p>
<p>Probably not in soccerguy’s field, but where my S works they had people with Masters degrees applying for GS4 positions.
(GS-4 qualifying requirements: 2 academic years above high school, or Associates degree)</p>
<p>
Sounds like you have confused college with trade school.</p>
<p>LAC’s are for students who are smart enough to figure out how to get jobs without attending school for that purpose. As I noted above, the kids who will be employed coming out are the ones who have picked up work experience along the way and are networking, using their contacts from previous employment and internships.</p>
<p>Let’s face it – anyone looking for a job right now is facing a huge challenge. That said, it’s still possible for a recent graduate to get a job.</p>
<p>Career placement office in colleges manage to help a small percentage of students. I graduated from an Ivy during the 1980s recession, and, unless you were an economics major with a high GPA, you didn’t get a job through career services. Most of us graduated without a job. Most of us worked our butts off over the summer to find work, and most of us found stop gap jobs – for instance, I took one as an assistant restaurant manager – that had nothing to do with our aspirations and educations. The lack of jobs for graduating seniors cannot be blamed on career services.</p>
<p>As others have said, connections and networking is everything. Most LACs have alumni networks that can be used to get leads. If your D’s placement office has an alumni contact directory online, she should go through it to find all alumni in your home area and nationally in her chosen field. Have her send out letters – hundreds of them, if necessary – introducing herself as a recent graduate looking for employment. She should include a r</p>
<p>Calmom, I disagree that the placement office is a suboptimal place for a graduating kid to find a job. Although you are competing with everyone else who is looking, you are also speaking to employers who “know the drill” when hiring LAC grads. For the most part, they are not looking for vocation-specific skills (except for the Big 4 accounting firms who are looking for kids who need the hours required to get licensed.) Although some may have very narrow criteria (GPA’s above a certain cut-off, fluency in a language other than English or French, etc.) they understand that they’re hiring 22 year old kids who don’t have a lot of practical experience.</p>
<p>Agree that work experience during college summers is absolutely important for launching a successful post grad job search. Too late for graduating seniors but good advise for everyone else.</p>
<p>OP- Your D needs to get off her duff asap. Monster, Vault, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs.com, WashingtonPost.com, Craigslist, Linkedin.com all offer searchable job postings (try “entry level” or “new grad” as search parameters). Idealist.com is an excellent source of entry level jobs in the non-profit sector. And you will need to help her understand the numbers game- she could apply for 50 jobs before she gets a single acknowledgement; 100 before she gets a phone interview. But the yield after that stage goes up very dramatically- the internet is actually a very efficient vehicle for companies looking to hire.</p>
<p>She should plan to spend 8 hours a day on the job search (I’m serious. It is a full time job). She should send a few drafts of her resume and cover letter to the job counselors at her college (yes, they work summers) to get their edits and input. She needs to remove most of her geographic criteria unless they are a matter of life and death (needs a certain climate for an underlying medical condition; needs to be able to drive a parent to chemo). She needs to let go of any expectations of her first year’s compensation, which means she needs to purchase an inexpensive health insurance plan ASAP. Today.</p>
<p>The 20 somethings I know(without master’s degrees or RN’s) who are now in fulltime, career oriented jobs fall into two categories-- those who snagged something with a major corporation the Fall of their senior year through campus recruiting, started working the summer after graduation and are now going through the companies training program, or just advancing; and those who reluctantly started a non-paying or low paying internship type job after graduation which soon turned into a paid career track type of job. Whether it’s in media planning, grants writing, PR, event production, sports marketing, ad sales, statistical analyst, program management at a foundation, fundraising, etc.-- I think all these kids started out doing an 8-12 week “trial run” which turned into a real job by Fall. Or they registered at a temp agency and did a couple of random, not glamorous temp stints until their boss asked if they’d like to stay on fulltime.</p>
<p>So she needs to get moving. Taking a data entry job for minimum wage (which may not include health insurance it it’s described as temp work) is a good deal if it’s in a field or company she’s interested in. But if she doesn’t have any work experience… she’s got to start now.</p>
<p>It’s too bad she lost the last year… but no time like the present to get started.</p>
<p>I just came back from my husband’s college reunion, which coincided with the school’s commencement. I talked to graduating students from this school, and parents of graduating students from other colleges. No one had a job. One parent’s kid graduated last year with a degree in computer science and still was unemployed, and said many of her son’s friends from last year are still looking. I also heard about many kids (both in college and high school) who can’t find any summer work – including kids who had jobs they secured earlier in the year (including jobs they had had last summer), but were cut when they got home. There were stories of kids who couldn’t even find an unpaid internship, because these have been taken by graduating seniors. Even restaurant work is hard to find, as experienced workers are taking those jobs.</p>
<p>This doesn’t directly apply to the OP, but I felt compelled to share this information. It’s tough out there. This weekend was stark evidence to me that this is a dire economy. </p>
<p>I graduated in the 1980s without a job, as did many of my friends. But our debt load wasn’t as high.</p>
<p>Yeah the economy stinks but todays grads have a skewed perspective on what working is all about.</p>
<p>A local big box retail chain is looking for assistant managers. A neighbors kid is a new, unemployed grad with no real work experience. So I mention to the kid that big box chain is hiring. He tells me, “I graduated with a BA in sociology, cum laude from Prestigious U, why would I go into Retail?” and I was able to tell him, “Well since the store manager has a Master’s in Linguistics (and was Phi Beta Kappa) from that same U sounds like the two of you would really hit it off”.</p>
<p>No dice. Kid would rather be unemployed than do anything besides make a zillion dollars at a hedge fund or advise President Obama on Social Networking communication strategies. (his dream job.)</p>
<p>Kid, get off your butt. I graduated during the recession 30 years ago; my first job was in retail management, it was horrible and I hated it. But a “real job” leads to another real job eventually- sitting at home twittering your friends about how awful it is to be unemployed leads to more unemployment.</p>
<p>Economy is bad. There are still jobs and there are still companies and organizations and schools and hospitals and foundations that are hiring. Sure, nobody wants to take their shiny new degree and start working as an employment counselor at a homeless shelter for $9/an hour with no benefits (they’d much rather work at Brookings developing strategies which assist the homeless- actual homeless people not so much) but it used to be called “working your way up” which now sounds so retro.</p>
<p>I never thought of it before this thread, but many parents who have kids desperate for work now graduated during the last big recession. I think the difference between us and them is that they benefited from our eventual prosperity, which was much greater (in general) than that of OUR parents. It really is tough to readjust expectations. Somehow we must impress upon our children, through our own examples, that such employment measures are probably temporary.</p>
<p>I’m worried that my daughter, who has planned to go to grad school for several years now, will meet with the same competition in the fall when she applies. Many students are delaying entry into the workforce by going to grad school.</p>
<p>Yes, there are many kids applying to grad schools while they hope the economy will improve & there will be more “desirable” jobs available.</p>
<p>I have worked retail but neither of my kids ever has. Honestly, due to my kids’ health issues, I don’t think either of my kids could handle the physical rigor of standing on their feet for an entire 8 hour shirt, so it’s good they’re realistic about what they can & can’t do. They do have a useful skill set and aren’t looking to make lots of money but standing for extended periods of time is not in their skill set, so that rules out most of food service and retail for them.</p>
<p>So far, S has had several EE internship offers both after sophomore year & this year, after junior year. We hope they will lead to employment offers after he graduates in 2010. Don’t know whether D will get the intersnhip she will interview for this week & whether it will have any pay or be totally volunteer (tho it is in the field she’s interested in). She & S will also be webmasters this summer.</p>
<p>Thanks to all for some really great feedback out of this, except for calmom’s condescension: “Sounds like you have confused college with trade school.” I’m pretty sure most of us here know the difference. On the other hand sounds like you might consider job-related education (nursing, computer tech, meteorology, vet science, etc etc) to be “trade school” fodder. If so, you’ll surely not agree with my position that a lot of LAC curriculum would fit very neatly into a community college’s adult education program. Pursue that on your own anytime AFTER you can pay your own rent.</p>