<p>You don’t know what my views are. I often argue a point that I don’t necessarily agree with.</p>
<p>We homeschooled both kids - they never went to school. I know the arguments of those against schools and those for schools and the strengths and weaknesses of those arguments. I’ve seen the stuff that you’ve put up time after time after time on homeschool mailing lists - as a point of discussion among believers, it’s popular. As a point of debate against someone who knows how to debate - it’s a loser to the public at large.</p>
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<p>I’m more used to going for weeks and months.</p>
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<p>You may not get anywhere. I will have an immense amount of fun.</p>
<p>Perhaps you could find another forum to hawk your wares.</p>
<p>I’m not sure how my dad’s business is an example of “tragic.” The family makes poor decisions about how to prioritize their income, but the business has been alive and kicking for ten years and makes six figures-- and he is the only employee, besides my 18 year old sister who does a little graphic design work.</p>
<p>But when it comes to hiring Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook go to MIT, Harvard and Stanford. By your analogy they should go to community college or hunt high school drop outs.</p>
<p>You are unable to understand that everything is about probability.</p>
<p>A high school drop out can be successful but the probability of that happening is very low.
While a graduate of HMSPY can be successful and the probability is very high. </p>
<p>Son took care of the application for the local defense firm. He sent them a resume several weeks ago and they directed him to fill out a fairly long application form with a lot of detailed information yesterday by email. This is a security clearance job so I assume that they will sponsor him through the process if he passes an interview and gets an offer.</p>
<p>He submitted two resumes this morning, one for a posting from his career center and one from an online job site. He received a phone call for the job from his career center and they are going to arrange a phone interview.</p>
<p>He submitted one resume yesterday for another job posting from the career center and is trying to track down the name of the recruiter that was on campus on Wednesday (he was
working at the time).</p>
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<p>We’re using a little database that I set up to track everything related to job hunting. It keeps track of contacts, emails, job postings, interview comments, dates of application, dates of contact, a queue of jobs candidates to do applications on, on campus recruiting and unsolicited contacts that he rejected. When you’re applying to a lot of jobs and you have multiple interviews scheduled, it can get confusing as to who or which company you’re dealing with. The database provides instant information related to the job search.</p>
<p>I mean to do a write-up on using this tool for job-hunting. The software that I use is free but it only runs on Mac OS X. There is software to do this on Windows too but it’s a fair chunk of change.</p>
<p>He did a few more applications and he’s received a bunch of phone calls from recruiters. There is one recruiter that he’s working on for two positions where the recruiter has exclusive agreements with the hiring companies and the recruiter’s partner is an alum at son’s school. The recruiter said that companies are currently getting inundated with resumes for their job postings and that this is why the process is slow. I’m not sure that I buy that.</p>
<p>At any rate, there are still about five or six companies in play and he’s just waiting - which is just as well as he’s pretty busy with projects.</p>
<p>On another front, daughter has been looking for jobs - mainly retail and she told me that there seem to be a lot of openings in this area which surprised me. Our local economy is actually doing quite well and I see the big and medium malls are packed on weekends and quite busy during the week too. Unemployment is 5.3% in our area and it seems that people are in a mood to spend, at least at the malls and shopping centers. Smaller stores in-town don’t seem to be faring as well.</p>
<p>He had another interview early this afternoon with a company that isn’t well-known but I’m sure that everyone using these forums is an end-user customer of. There are a ton of sub-specialties in Computer Science and he has a few like most students. This job is looking for one of his specialties. I’m waiting for him to get done with work to see how it went.</p>
<p>On another note, a friend’s son (in an Ivy engineering program) was unable to get an internship for the summer. He, like my son, started looking late in the cycle. He’s going to do an unpaid internship in China (parents paying for airfare). It sounds like a pretty interesting opportunity and it’s one way to go when the economy is crappy in your home country but booming somewhere else.</p>
<p>I have British friends who have been nagging me to look at some opportunities they found in England. I’ve never traveled at all and I didn’t think their job market was much better, so I didn’t give it much consideration.</p>
<p>On a whim today I started looking to see if there are any CC programs that would only require the 2 yrs I already have + maybe only a semester or two of additional requirements, but I am not sure what if anything would make me more marketable. I was considering a paralegal certificate, since I’d like to do that and it’d complement my BA in poli sci well enough, but I haven’t seen many opportunities for paralegals anyway so I am not sure if it’d be worth it. I have a math LD so that limits a lot of my options, but I was considering whether I’d be capable of doing any of the business related associates degrees, but I doubt that would help at all if my bachelors was in poli sci. I don’t know. It’s just looking like the most I am going to be able to make is 15-18k and I need 27k minimum (before taxes) to be able to meet basic living expenses and my student loan payments. I’d been getting interviews for positions which would meet or exceed that but they all pretty much laugh me out of the office when they see my work experience, even though I thought it was pretty good for a new grad and I don’t know why they call me in the first place if I stand no chance of getting the job. But I suppose I can’t afford anymore student loans anyway, so additional education is all but out of the question. I’m not sure what to do at this point but just keep trying and hope something comes up before my loans go into repayment.</p>
<p>I had a look at sales associates jobs locally and things are actually not bad. My daughter has expressed an interest in a position at a company that seems to be hiring aggressively in this region. Minimum wage is $7.25 in this state but my guess is that you can move up fairly quickly as there’s probably a lot of turnover. In a sense, it’s similar to a job at MacDonalds (btw, I think that all work has value). The position also provide training for another position too and it is in doing something that she told me that she wanted to do when she was much younger. These jobs are for high-school grads that may or may not be going to college. Our daughter has taken courses in accounting, management, marketing and communications, some of which is probably relevant. She has also taken calculus, chemistry and a few computer science courses so she should have more than enough math skills for the job. This company is also hiring managers - she has no experience so she’s not qualified there but it could be something for the future. She can also work a few days while she is in school. The jobs that I’ve looked at generally want good math skills. By good math skills, I think that they mean the ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide, make change and determine whether a transaction is reasonable.</p>
<p>So some of those 15-18k jobs that you’re looking at may have some potential down the road if you can wait for promotions. I would guess that first-level managers get in the 30s. I do think that business courses would help but my guess is that showing up on time, doing what’s required and then a little more and helping out others could move you up the ladder.</p>
<p>If you have a job, you can use the America Opportunity Tax Credit to pay for almost all of your community college expenses if they are under $2,000. That may allow you to take one or two courses per year. In some states, you could take a lot of courses for that amount.</p>
<p>Son had another phone interview this afternoon. They want him in for a second-round interview so that means suit + tie.</p>
<p>I was interested in sales and marketing type positions but once I started applying for them I started getting dozens of calls a day and they were all scams which sent you out door to door pushing coupon books on commission (and not compensating for travel expenses) and stringing you along for months before they pay, and they made the “opportunities for advancement” so ridiculously out of reach that it would be impossible to reach them without buying your own inventory. It’s apparently pretty much the same company with 50 different names, and I have found maybe one or two job postings so far that actually look legit. I need to find a more reliable job search strategy for those kinds of positions. The job boards, including my university’s private job board which is supposedly “vetted,” is RIDDLED with “entry level marketing” scams.</p>
<p>And as for those 15-18 a year jobs, I am being told at interview I am not qualified. I am not giving up, but things are looking dismal and that was why I was thinking about seeing if I could do anything with those CC credits to maybe open a wider variety of opportunities up. These jobs are secretary positions, which I would be more than happy and able to do, but they don’t want me. I am either under or over qualified. And if I have to take a job that is going to require working for years before I can make a living wage, I accept that I’ve got to pay my dues but I have no place to live after the first six months or so, so that’s pretty alarming.</p>
<p>I have all the math skills you mentioned, and I passed college statistics with a B-. Not great, but I am more than capable of the basics. The question was if I could handle higher level math classes, and I really don’t know the answer-- four years ago when I was taking my math requirement definitely not, but now I don’t know. I’ve worked in sales before and had to track and report all of my sales and all the sales for the day/week/month/etc and prepare bank deposits, and that was easy. Selling was not so easy and I didn’t enjoy it so much. I was good at coming up with sales strategies and tracking the sales but not so much actual selling. I do better in customer service type positions.</p>
<p>I guess it’s way too early in the job hunt to get discouraged, especially since I started so late, but I am not having the particular problems I was expecting. I was expecting not to be able to find opportunities at all, or for them to not pay enough, or for them to be too competitive for me to get called back at all, but I was not anticipating being told repeatedly that I am under-qualified to be a secretary. It seems like almost every opportunity I can find is geared toward candidates with bachelors degrees who have 7-10 years of experience, even for positions at the bottom rung of the ladder. I can’t figure out what the new grads with internship, summer job, and volunteer experience are supposed to be applying for, no one has complained about my major, just my experience. I founded and ran an organization and do public speaking engagements but I apparently have no skills!</p>
<p>I never dreamed I’d have a job by now, it’s not that, but I don’t know what to do with the feedback I am getting. Everybody wants me to have worked that exact job before for years at a time, a similar job that utilizes the same skills is not enough, and and anything unpaid or part-time doesn’t count. And now the kinds of retail operations where I worked before won’t take me full time because they have part-time high school students who dont need benefits to fill their shifts. I don’t know what I was supposed to have done differently!</p>
<p>I was working in a corporate environment back in the mid-1980s and we
had a lot of managers and each manager had a secretary. The
upper-level executives had one or two administrative assistants which
were paid very well. The job required a long day, running errands,
sometimes traveling with a manager to meetings, etc.</p>
<p>Today there are hardly any secretaries around. We have one
administrative assistant for every fifty or sixty employees now as
everyone does their own email and other administrative tasks.</p>
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<p>I can’t imagine that you’d need any more math than you already have
for an associates in a business area.</p>
<p>I think that selling is tough for most people - if you’re trying to
sell someone a product (as opposed to people coming to you to buy
something) you’ve got to be able to accept a lot of rejection. These
days, many are getting that experience looking for a job.</p>
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<p>Well, my son has a near perfect GPA and multiple interships and jobs
and is having far more difficulty than I expected, even though, as you
said, there are lots of job openings out there. In his case, the
openings are quite specific and you need the right internships that
mesh precisely with what the company is looking for. In the old days,
companies hired you and trained you - you just had to have the
appropriate major (or sometimes any major), maybe come from the right
school and have a decent GPA and maybe an internship or two.</p>
<p>Here’s an example of a job that my daughter is looking at:</p>
<p>Minimum wage in MA is $9 I think so it should pay around $18K.
This company is also looking for managers and other positions so
it appears that there should be some growth potential. I’d be quite
happy if my daughter got this kind of job after her freshman year -
she could work there part-time during the school year. Perhaps she
could get a promotion after working for two years and it would be
a nice launch into an accounting job.</p>
<p>I think that you would be quite overqualified for this job and, as
you’ve said, it probably wouldn’t pay the bills but could you work out
some kind of living arrangement? Either with parents or friends where
you split costs? That’s what I did when I left college for the working
world and it was very, very common back in the late 1970s. So were
carpools.</p>
<p>I’m glad that you’re not giving up. Youth is a time of optimism, even
when things are very hard.</p>
<p>Yeah, I have my moments of discouragement but I am still going, and I am still applying for at least a handful of jobs a day. I have a meeting at my university next week to discuss a project I was working on while I was there, I was hoping they would hire me at graduation to run the program since otherwise it pretty much dies with me and the department was very interested in it, but I don’t know what will come of that if anything. That was really what I was putting most of my attention into while I was in school, along with my internship, because I was led to believe they intended to implement this program and I knew they would need to hire someone to run it after I left, and I built the program from the ground up.</p>
<p>After another year my boyfriend will be on the job hunt, and once he gets something if we were able to split costs I’d be okay on the living arrangement front, but from six months out until he can find a job I am going to have to be able to pay for something myself or else find strangers who would put up with living with an aspie, and even with decreased rent and utilities I don’t know if I’d be able to make enough-- my loan payments alone are $600 a month and we don’t have public transport here so I need to fuel and insure a car. So we shall see. I don’t come from the kind of family that helps each other out, so I will have to find some way to make it work. Maybe if I could work two jobs, a day and an evening, maybe I could make enough. Once bf is out of school I could afford to make less money and work my way up.</p>
<p>As parents we like the fact that in our DS’s area(comp gaming) job offers are determined in large part by project related testing. Yes it is time consuming but it is far more objective than merely considering an applicant prepped resume. Fortunately his undergrad program was a great preparation for this process. He beat out applicants with grad degrees in his first job. In his second he got a great step up offer across the continent.</p>
<p>^Son who is graduating with CS/Math degree just had 2nd phone interview with Google. It was a real-time problem solving experience. I forget the method or program used but it involved working with a group online & they could see his work. A realistic scenario; each phone call was 45 minutes. </p>
<p>A decent resume is one thing, but proving you can do the work is better. He now has a 3rd, in-person interview scheduled! :)</p>
<p>Mommusic - We have a friend who is a Google employee (in a completely non-computer related area). She is not a recent college graduate and was not looking to change jobs. Google found her resume on LinkedIn and contacted her. Even though they were the ones who initiated the contact, she still had FOURTEEN interviews before they offered her the job - seven were phone interviews and they flew her half-way across the country for seven more in-person interviews! Guess they wanted to make absolutely sure they had the right person!</p>
<p>We have a similar process though we try to do it in two days. It’s a
pretty rough two days but it’s usually talking to 10 to 12 people.
For those with a research background, we usually invite them to give
a presentation on their research to a conference room full of people.</p>
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<p>Sounds like things are going well for your son.</p>
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<p>I haven’t heard of this approach - an impromptu work session. We don’t
do give out puzzles where I work. In general, an engineer can just
talk to the candidate to get a feeling for them. If you have enough
engineers doing the interviews, then you’re going to pick up any
issues.</p>
<p>One other thing that employers look for is open source work. In open
source work, all of your work is public. I was offered a job for my
open source work a few years ago but I already had a great job.</p>
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<p>Computer Science programs usually have a mixture of practice and
theory. At the graduate level, research becomes much more important.
I’ve had discussions on the mix of theory, practice and research with
professors. Where I work, theory and research are more important. We
take quite a bit of time to train employees in our environment and
practice as it is incredibly complex and you wouldn’t learn it outside
the company anyways.</p>
<p>My son’s school is more theory-oriented and I’ve steered him towards
theory and research - partly because he has expressed a lot of interest
in math (and computer science math). The problem with this approach is
that it doesn’t work very well in the job market until you have your
Masters or Phd.</p>
<p>His school offers certificate programs in a variety of CS practice
areas. Let’s take the example of an Oracle Certification. It teaches
SQL, PL/SQL, DBA and other skills. These skills are in high demand in
our area right now and they would land you a job pretty easily. The
database courses in the undergraduate CS program are a mixture of
theory and practice and cover SQL DML and DDL and some aspects of how
to do database design. The graduate courses cover how to build a
database engine. This means that the student would learn how databases
work from a low-level perspective instead of learning how to use
database software. This sort of course would be useful for the student
intending to work at IBM on DB2, Oracle, Microsoft working on SQL
Server, or someone looking to work on Vertica (recently bought out by
Hewlett-Packard).</p>
<p>At the moment, web skills are hot, hot, hot. The number of web jobs
that I see far outnumbers every other category in my area. Our son
only has minimal web skills - he’s overweight in the theory and
research categories. This might have been a tactical error - it
certainly has hurt his job search but it certainly would make the path
to a Phd easier.</p>
<p>At any rate, there’s a recruiter from the defense firm chasing him for
an interview. He is waiting from another recruiter to get back to him
on when they want to interview so that he can send his available time
slots to the second interviewer. They’re located in the same area so
ideally they’d both be on the same day.</p>
<p>The beat goes on.</p>
<p>Congrats to those with jobs in hand, and jobs almost in hand.</p>
<p>Maybe if you didn’t treat it like a game you had to play and were instead passionate about learning, you might not be so jaded. Too bad you “played like a fool.”</p>
<p>Anybody want to give suggestions to my son, who STINKS at getting past the job recruiter? At least he still has a good job-related PT job since early fall. They like his resume, but he does not have a lot of confidance, which is what recruiters want. They ask, “what kinda job do you want?” His answer, “Anything.” And they don’t follow up. They send him job listings, meet him, and then tell him “The employer didn’t choose your resume.” </p>
<p>I know they just want a “quick sale” (aka commission) and they are not job counsultants/advisors who are hired by the advisee, but how do you win their favor?</p>