<p>I'm majoring business admin with a concentration in corporate financial management (Accounting and Finance) but I still have a major fear of ending up in a dead end job. I even have experience as a property manager but I don't actually get paid for it for more than the gas it takes to get there (sorta like an internship but not really since its just a couple who owns a few properties).
Am I in danger of working minimum wage?
How do I avoid getting stuck in the underemployment cycle?</p>
<p>I tried to post this in “internships” but for some reason it ended up here</p>
<p>does not your college have a career center where you can talk with counselors? Have you gotten to know some profs so that you can get their advice on career directions, on fields that might match your interests and strengths? The biggest red flag concerning career prospects at this point would be a strong reluctance or outright refusal to take advantage of the expert resources that are right at hand. This gets at people skills, and without them the outlook in any field is going to be limited.</p>
<p>Nothing wrong with spending some time working minimum wage. There are a lot of people that claim they suffer from underemployment but really they are at a just employment level. If you want to be in the best position possible you need to work and work hard. Whatever you do, academic, civic, employment, will need to be done to the best of your ability. There should be no job beneath you.</p>
<p>If you’re able to create value, you will be rewarded. So if you’re going to do something, do it well. A lot of kids get in the mindset of ‘well, they aren’t paying me so I can slack off’ which is erroneous. </p>
<p>@mikemac Yeah I’ve gone to counselors. All they say is “follow your dreams” or “follow your heart” or “you can do it buddy” and then they tell you to go to online job forums.
My dream at this point? Not flipping burgers. I’m not going to be unrealistic. I go to SJSU. I don’t expect IB or some high prestige job. Hell, even a government job would be an amazing stretch for me. I’d take anything really with upward mobility and above 30,000 in pay.</p>
<p>@Pinnum The counselors say those sort of things where they don’t REALLY help you. It’s the equivalent of saying “you can do it buddy”. It doesn’t steer you anywhere.
The problem is if you get experience in a certain job with no actual skills it can black list you from skilled labor. That’s why I’m a property manager even if I don’t get paid much. It’s way more attractive to an employer than flipping burgers and I can spin it into usable skills.</p>
<p>Oh, and I have a 3.66 GPA so far if that helps.</p>
<p>@DickCheney You seem to have all the answers. I guess you know better than me and all the people I know that paid their dues before moving into competitive professions. </p>
<p>A few examples of people I personally know:</p>
<p>-The kid that worked at starbucks after not knowing what to do with his communications degree. So he learned to code so he could help a friend that was trying to develop some web based programs. Helping his friend for free while serving drinks. He is now working at Google making more than his father who is an engineer. </p>
<p>-The kid that dropped out of engineering school due to having a kid and took a job in a lab providing cleaning services and now works with the engineering team and is happily supporting his family.</p>
<p>-The kid who worked in the kitchen at a restaurant for two years and made a lot of great connections to other young college aged kids. His work ethic got him connected with one of the other worker’s dad that is an executive at a regional firm that was excited to hire him.</p>
<p>-The kid that started waiting tables at a chain restaurant and had an energetic personality that resulted in corporate hiring her to perform trainings to franchisees in the region–tripling what she made waiting tables.</p>
<p>What does a ‘dead end’ job say about a person? They will do what is needed to succeed. </p>
<p>well, hate to say it, but at many large public U’s the counselors are not very helpful. Sounds like your experience. There are still your profs to talk with. And you need to do some digging on your own to find out what successful kids are doing. Joining some of the business clubs on campus and seeing what other kids ahead of you are doing to try to line up better job prospects is a good idea. Internships are going to be a key for standing out when you graduate. You can see if their are alumni lists of grads that are willing to talk to current students about their career area and how to enter it. Take a look at some of the books in the career center or on Amazon. </p>
<p>@mikemac @pinnum won’t my experience as a property manager be almost as if not more useful than an Internship? I have about 4 years under my belt.
Your examples are anecdotal pinnum.I have my doubts that every Starbucks employee now works at Google or is out of the “minimum-wage” trap.</p>
<p>They are anecdotal. But so is the ‘underemployment cycle’ as you call it. </p>
<p>Are you asking what you should do once you graduate or are you asking what you should do to not be stuck in minimum wage for years to come? There is a difference and I answered the latter. </p>
<p>If you want to get into finance than you need to be applying to finance summer positions at firms in your freshmen, sophomore, and junior years. </p>
<p>But there are plenty of alternatives. Lots of great jobs for people with the right personality who are willing to work hard and pound the pavement. Insurance sales reps can do very well as can wealth management professionals. Any of these professions you can move into without college. </p>
<p>Find out what you want to do and contact those firms.</p>
<p>It sounds like, to me, you just don’t know what opportunities are out there and the best way to figure it out is to get out there and do a lot of jobs that you might not enjoy. You need exposure and the pay rate has little to do with that.</p>
<p>Jeez, I should have gone into health care. Since any internship is difficult to get nowadays versus just volunteering at a hospital with little to no hassle.</p>
<p>Wait, since you’re an accounting concentration is there any reason why you can’t look for accounting internships? If you go to your university career center you can get some any indication of the firms that recruit at your college, and of course you can always go beyond that to applying directly to companies that you’re interested in. An internship is one of the best ways to get into public accounting because 1) you get paid a pretty decent amount and 2) you get to see different aspects of the job to see what appeals to you or even just to see whether or not you like it.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to knock jobs working at Starbucks or waiting tables; all work can be meaningful and can open doors for you in terms of the skills that you learn and the things that you can learn about yourself. But it’s always a good idea to keep an eye out for internships that relate directly to your interests and skills because that’s a direct path to a career and even if it isn’t for you it’s a good way to find out if you’re on the right track for what you want to become.</p>
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<p>The hospitals near the university I went to had over a year long waitlist for volunteers. Stop complaining about how hard things are, and go do something about it.</p>
<p>You already know what you need to do to give yourself the best chance at getting a job. Keep looking for internships or low-level jobs that you would qualify for in the area that you’d like to work in eventually. Apply to anything that you think would be more helpful than your property manager job or is more related to what you would like to do. Get experience and connections in the field that you would like to work in. Learn skills that are valuable in your field (it might be becoming proficient in programs that are commonly used or picking up another skill like programming or graphic design or whatever would make you a more competitive applicant than your peers). You may need to work your way up from the bottom, but you have to work for it. No one can give you a step by step guide about how to make sure you never have to work a minimum wage job.</p>
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Sure, if your intended career is in property management.</p>
<p>College kids don’t have a lot of experience with big purchases, let along hiring decisions, so let me pitch it to you this way. You decide to get a tutor for a class and call up a few people with listings for your subject. One says he hasn’t ever actually tutored before, but he’s a good student and has solid experience working in the cafeteria. The next one you call says she has tutored kids from your exact class for 2 years. Which one will you hire?</p>
<p>It isn’t always possible to get an internship in the exact field(s) you are thinking about for a career, but the closer you can approximate them the better.
vs
If you can’t spin it into an internship, which is often low-paying or even non-paying, how is the magic going to happen that lets you spin it into a fulltime job?</p>
<p>@mikemac I can barely make time work for college. I can’t put a ton of effort into job searching until I graduate. All the while my property management experience grows. Personally I think a 6 year vet (who’d only be 25/26) is more attractive than some kid with 1 internship who is wet behind the ears.
As a property manager I can mention useful skills such as the ability to provide customer service (working with tenants)
Conflict resolution (working with tenants)
Trustworthy with money (delivering rent)
Management experience (overseeing property employees)
HR skills (interviewing potential tenant candidates)
Finance Skills (Offer to calculate the costs for add-ons and renovations and see how they will affect potential rental income)
Obviously I won’t mention those things so crudely on the resume but I feel it gives me a lot of creativity.
Hell, I could even set up book keeping for the land lords and spin it into accounting experience.
Try to do that with a McJob.
Hell, most internships are fetching coffee or filing documents. </p>
<p>PS: I don’t have a career goal anymore. Getting a job that pays 30,000 and has room for advancement is all I expect at this point. I’m pretty burnt out and crushed about my career goals. I plan to live at home so I probably would live on only 6000 of it. The rest would go into Index Funds.</p>
<p>The amount of terrible I’m reading from you is astounding, DickCheney.</p>
<p>First of all, you can spin ANYTHING into legitimate experience. Although it is best to have direct experience, the reality is that you aren’t going to be fully prepared for any job you take, even if you have had plenty of internships. Depending on the industry, you are going to have a learning curve of 3-6 months before you start adding real value, and any hiring manager worth his salary is going to know that.</p>
<p>Now, for you… okay, so your career services folks are borderline useless. That is just one less resource out of thousands at your disposal. Writing on a message board about how woeful your situation is doesn’t help, so stop doing that.</p>
<p>The first thing you need to do is to stop brushing aside every suggestion given to you. </p>
<p>Next, you say that you have a hard time balancing everything in college, to the point that you can’t apply for jobs. That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Waiting until you are out to even begin looking is a terrible idea. In college you have a difficult schedule - classes that meet at random times, atypical working hours, groups that require far more of your time than is sane. But the reality is that you actually have a lot of free time that you can’t identify. What does your weekly schedule look like? How much time are you in class? Doing homework (be honest… messing around online doesn’t count)? Eating? Traveling from place to place? Figure out everything that you do in a given week. There are 168 hours a week. </p>
<p>You say you just want a job, but that isn’t good enough. Nobody is going to hire you just to pay you. You need to figure out what you have done and where your strengths lie. Jobs are not mysterious things that pop out of the sky, and job searching isn’t something that you just decide to do one day. It is exhausting. It takes plenty of time, but it takes an immense amount of effort. … put it this way… going through the full process of studying up on a company (and the position you are applying to), reviewing and tweaking your resume, writing a cover letter and then completing an application might take you two to three hours, but you are spending that two to three hours working your mind in ways that it isn’t used to working (nobody’s mind is used to thinking that way). It will feel like five or six hours. If it is easier than that, either the job you are applying to is particularly kind to its applicants or you are doing it wrong.</p>
<p>When you apply, chances are that most of your applications won’t even be reviewed, and you will never know. Your application gets sent to an abyss of HR purgatory, never to escape. That’s OK… realistically, you’ll hear back from 5-10% of the companies you apply to. Don’t be discouraged by that. </p>
<p>Use SJSU’s career search tools. <a href=“https://sjsu-csm.symplicity.com/students/”>https://sjsu-csm.symplicity.com/students/</a> - you have access to this site… when you apply to jobs here, you’re more likely to get a response, since the employers are specifically targeting your school for hires.</p>
<p>Here are a few things NOT to do:
- Write off low wage jobs as a waste of your time. It’s better to have a paid job than not to have one.
- Wait to look for a FT job until you graduate. You are shooting yourself in the foot. If you don’t have time, MAKE time.
- Come up with a generic cover letter and fill in the blanks. Instead, write a brand new cover letter every time you apply.
- Talk about how you can’t find a job. You haven’t looked, so of COURSE you can’t find a job.
- Say that you just want a job. If you want to get a job, you have to have a basic idea of where you want to apply. By basic idea, that could mean a bunch of general industries you want to explore… industries you would be able to spend a third of your life and half of your waking hours working in. </p>
<p>I guess I’m not really sure why you posted in the first place since you find issues with every suggestion. Well, I guess you know what you want and how to get it. I hope it all works out for you.</p>