<p>My question is for all of us with college grads this year: What is happening on the job market? Is it as bleak out there as the press makes us think?</p>
<p>If another thread is started on this and is alive and well, point me to it...</p>
<p>I am resurrecting this to see if anyone has input, given that some time has passed.</p>
<p>I’ll report first: My son graduated this past year, but is working and doing fine (movie industry - visual effects artist).</p>
<p>Did it take him long to find his first job, digmedia?</p>
<p>My daughter is in Teach For America. She is the only one of her circle of friends – mainly humanities majors, some social science – who is working full time with pay and benefits, although one will be starting a very entry-level job with a nonprofit next week. A number of people have fellowships of one sort or another; her former roommate is teaching English in France.</p>
<p>Many of these kids did not expect to have an easy time finding their place even before the collapse. Some are working three jobs at a time – maybe 20-25 hours of retail to pay the rent, 30-40 hours of unpaid internship in their field, and freelancing for some pay.</p>
<p>My S is an Ensign in the U.S. Navy, went to work two days after graduation.
His best friend and college roommate is also a Naval Officer. </p>
<p>Their other roommate graduated with a Accounting degree has been working at FexEd loading trucks.He does have a job lined up for tax season and hopes it will become permanent. He is living at home with his parents.</p>
<p>Another friend grad. w/ Business degree, still no job, contemplating joining the military.</p>
<p>A neighbor’s S grad. with a Meterorology degree. He remains unemployed and living with parents.</p>
<p>A few of S’s female friends were successful in finding jobs pretty quickly after grad.
They were all Communications majors. One got a job in sales with CBS Sports.</p>
<p>A friend whose D majored in Nursing started her job in August.</p>
<p>My son is having interviews. </p>
<p>No offers yet … but he won’t graduate until May. Not sure how things will really play out, but there <em>are</em> companies hiring into their management training programs and there <em>are</em> companies looking for new grads.</p>
<p>S1 graduated in May. Is currently enrolled in a PhD program. I suggested he work awhile before pursuing PhD, but w/this economy, he did right thing by continuing his education. That was his plan all along, I was just slow to accept that as right plan right now.</p>
<p>I thought this CNN article would be appropriate to post here.</p>
<p>Of the nine recent grads interviewed, all of them are working, at least part time.</p>
<p>[Class</a> of '09: They got jobs! - Amanda Benzaquin - Employed (1) - CNNMoney.com](<a href=“http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/news/0912/gallery.class_of_2009_jobs/index.html]Class”>Class of '09: They got jobs! - Amanda Benzaquin - Employed (1) - CNNMoney.com)</p>
<p>My son graduates in May and has accepted a job offer in a fun city far from the northeast. He reports that a lot of Penn seniors are having a lot of trouble landing jobs- even Wharton kids. He said the 3.8 and 3.9 Wharton kids are getting the few i-banking jobs that are left in NYC, and the 3.3-3.5 kids are scrambling. My son found his job elsewhere than through the Penn OCR. He had been planning on law school, but with the market so bad for lawyers right now, he decided it was not a good investment.</p>
<p>I’m quite concerned that my son, a college senior, will never find a job. He lacks motivation and hasn’t even put a resume together.</p>
<p>By contrast, my two nephews who graduated last year both have jobs. One in DC doing some financial work, and another in NYC doing some lab research work. Both kids have great plans in their future: lawyer and doctor, but they want to work a bit before more school.</p>
<p>My niece, who graduates in May, already has a job at a big accounting / management consulting firm in DC. They hired her last October, after she had interned for them last summer.</p>
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<p>Man, that’s tough. It’s not only humanities. Our group has an unpaid intern (Mech Eng) working full time while he searches. Hopefully he’ll find something if they get started on these supposed “green jobs.”</p>
<p>He graduated several months ago. Unfortuneately, all we can offer him right now are recommendations.</p>
<p>Of course, twenty years from now these kids will be telling some young whippersnapper about this being the best time of their lives. It always seems better in the rear-view.</p>
<p>My son graduated with econ degree in '09 He did the usual consulting internships for the last three summers but realized that wasn’t for him and what he really wanted to do is teach HS. He’s now back home substituting 5 days a week at his old high school. He will start math classes next week at cc to fulfill missing endorsement credits and then this fall enroll in teaching program w/masters. He has been supplementing his sub income with lots of soccer refereeing both youth and adult leagues. He makes enough to pay for his additional education and car/personal expenses. So we keep feeding and housing him and helping with insurance…its all going to work out!</p>
<p>The job market seems pretty decent for Computer Science grads.</p>
<p>^That’s great. I have a good friend whose son was a 2001 Computer Science grad from Northwestern. He had a fabulous job lined up. He was let go six weeks after he started (and the company didn’t survive, either, although it took a little longer to go down the tubes). He looked for over a year without success, then decided to go to grad school in math. It turned out his math wasn’t good enough for a PhD program, so first he had to pay for a remedial MS at MIT. He’s finally going to receive his PhD in applied math this spring. He’s looking for a job . . . in finance. (Hard luck kid, that.)</p>
<p>We have Dec '08 (anthropology) and May '09 (microbiology & immunology) grads. Both were employed within 3 weeks of graduation and are self supporting. Hooray! My niece will be a May '10 (biochemistry) grad and has a job offer on the table.</p>
<p>My '09 son started his job in July. All of his good friends from Colgate also have jobs. It is a very tough market, but there are jobs out there. There was a thread on CC last fall about this (although it veered off in another direction), with some excellent advice to grads (see posts #24 and #38 from blossom and meredesfilles) on how to approach the job search.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/794669-unemployed-underemployed-recent-top-20-college-grads-why.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/794669-unemployed-underemployed-recent-top-20-college-grads-why.html</a></p>
<p>ellemenope -</p>
<p>Every time I see your name, I think of the two letters of the alphabet: Ella and Mellon. When my son was singing the alphabet, he would always sing “A B C D E F G, H I J K Ella Mellon P, …”</p>
<p>Actually, the answer to the question you asked is way too complicated to lay out here, but the short answer is that he is working for himself. Much of movie industry stuff is done on a project-by-project basis. He was able to immediately get work as a contract programmer for a company, but his first movie contract was about 6 months after he graduated. Everything in that industry is by reference, so getting a foot in is the hardest, but if your work is good, then the contracts keep coming. His “luck” was that the people on his “team” in college went out to Hollywood and most got jobs right away. Two work for Dreamworks (one in production design and one in the production office), one for Digital Domain (visual effects house that did the vfx for films like Titanic, Star Trek, Benjamin Button, and on and on), and two other are freelancing.</p>