Unemployed or underemployed recent top 20 college grads-why?

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<p>This is spot on advice. I would add that waiting until you graduate to prove that you can handle a job, any job, is a bad idea. Kids should be working PT and during the summers by at least their Jr year. Doesn’t need to be anything career related - even waiting tables at the local steakhouse for 10 hours a week proves that you are reliable and capable of dealing with the ‘real world.’ I would choose a newly graduated job applicant with even a little bit of work experience and decent grades over someone with a 4.0 but never worked a day in college. This was advice given to me back when I was in college and I followed it and was offered jobs by 4 of the 6 major accounting firms in the immediate area when I graduated. Every one of them told me that it was because I had worked during college.</p>

<p>My son will be required to work during college and during the summers. There’s no reason not to do this, although I will admit with the current economy, even PT jobs are hard to come by.</p>

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<p>Agree with this. I know many attorneys. Most of them hate their jobs. The ones that make the most money are either trial lawyers who strike it big with a large settlement(s) or those who are very, very specialized. My advice to anyone thinking about law school is to do a lot of research on the various areas of specialization and go to school with that in mind. And make sure it’s something you love because you will be putting in major hours once you get that job. The average attorney does contract law, real estate closing, wills, etc. The money is not that good and many end up hating it.</p>

<p>“This is spot on advice. I would add that waiting until you graduate to prove that you can handle a job, any job, is a bad idea. Kids should be working PT and during the summers by at least their Jr year. Doesn’t need to be anything career related - even waiting tables at the local steakhouse for 10 hours a week proves that you are reliable and capable of dealing with the ‘real world.’ I would choose a newly graduated job applicant with even a little bit of work experience and decent grades over someone with a 4.0 but never worked a day in college.”</p>

<p>Agreed. Work ethic (outside of academics) can be developed beginning in MS, certainly by the junior year HS. Eschew the superfluous ECs and ensure the kids know how to earn money. A kid that has bagged groceries, bussed tables, slung burgers, washed cars, mowed lawns, harvested crops, modded electronics and sold on Ebay, tutored courses, etc. knows what they need to do when when times are tough. 70 years ago DS great-grandfather would have willingly swept streets to keep food on the table. No doubt.</p>

<p>A counterpoint on a tangential aspect: there are many roads to a building a strong work ethic and holding a job is only one of them.
My D never worked per se until her research job in first year of college. But by junior and senior years of high school, she was doing ballet 18-20 hours a week in addition to taking a normal run of AP classes, etc. Summers were spent in ballet camps, no work then either. She developed a tremendous amount of focus, discipline, and time management skills. So much so that transition to a pretty competitive college was nearly effortless for her as she was dancing 14-16 hours a week less than she had been accustomed, saving not only time but physical energy.</p>

<p>Every job she had in college, every internship, and now in the second year of her first job post-college, she has been praised for her her work ethic. </p>

<p>Having paid jobs is a nice option. But I don’t think it should be viewed as virtual requirement. Now, if the alternative is hanging out at mall and giggling or grunting over video games for hours on end, I would agree.</p>

<p>I graduated in 82 from architecture school. The biggest architecture firm in NYC laid off 300 workers that spring. Luckily I’d won a grant to study Spanish Colonial Revivial architecture which provided a cushion while job hunting. I eventually found a job in a related field planning. Theylaid me off after a few months and then hired me back half time. I then got a parttime job running a professor’s library at Caltech. It was actually one of the most enjoyable jobs I’ve ever had and gave me a great health insurance plan which I was able to keep the rest of the time I was in California so it worked out well. I had a real architecture job within a year, so I did okay in the end.</p>

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<p>If you’re a hiring manager looking at a stack of resumes, you have the name of the school, GPA and previous job history to look at. So there is some benefit to optimizing so that you can make the first cut.</p>

<p>^^^^I agree it is helpful to have at least some employment so you hae something to put in that section of the resume/application. Also, you may run across those hiring managers who think the only pursuit of any value is a paid pursuit. But most people get at least something to put in there by the time they graduate college, so I don’t think it is critical in high school, although working a job is almost always a valuable experience.</p>

<p>Which reminds me of a funny story. I was always working doing something on and off through high school. Like most kids I knew, the only work I had in middle school was mowing lawns, feeding neighbors pets and a paper route.</p>

<p>I was around 12 or maybe 13 and I was getting my “Scholarship” merit badge in Boy Scouts. The merit badge counselor looked at my list of activities and saw I had some volunteer stuff, and he said “That’s all well and good, but most people are going to look at what you do and ask if you are good enough that someone is willing to pay you.” Good grief! I was 12 years old and this guy was lecturing me about my carreer path and salary history. So you can take this to extremes.</p>

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<p>Not to mention you can pick up the phone and call a previous employer for a reference. I suppose that you could do that with a EC but it’s not likely.</p>

<p>At my place of employment (13,000 employees) the personnel office takes previous experience very seriously. We had a young man apply for a job that required 1 yr experience. His resume showed he had ‘interned’ PT at a company as part of his grad. degree requirement. Since he wasn’t paid for the internship, they refused to count it as part of his work experience and we were only able to offer him a much lower salary at a lower job grade. Had he had any other paid employment - even outside of the career field he was applying for - we would have been able to hire him at a higher grade and salary. Sounds silly, I agree, but that’s the way a lot of big companies operate. This particular young man had never held any job in HS or college - only the unpaid intern during grad school. We did hire him, his work ethic was horrible even though he was obviously smart, went to a good college and had a grad degree. Clearly had a huge sense of entitlement - you could see it in every thing he did. When he left, we made sure that we hired someone with a strong work history.</p>

<p>I don’t think HS work experience makes a huge difference, other than it acclimates someone to the realities of working but it does make a huge difference in college. As a new graduate, you need every competitive advantage you can get and having worked during college is definitely one of them.</p>

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BC, that’s fine for after college. I would expect someone to pick up work experience during the college years. I was addressing the notion of the necessity of acquiring work experience in the high school or even middle school years.</p>

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<p>You, therefore, are a superior parent to anyone else who had any constraints such as having to stay in a certain area due to a job or elderly relatives or that little pesky thing known as money. Well done! It’s a good thing your daughter turned out to be as smart as she was. Can you imagine if you invested all that effort in her education and she turned out “only” an average person of average intelligence?</p>

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<p>My first paid job was at 11 doing lawn work. Then I got a job with a company at 14 and worked in several jobs outside my eventual profession until 19. I would say that there are benefits to having jobs in high-school. It certainly makes it easier to get your first job while you are in college and it may focus you a little more on looking at careers. You get to deal with a different variety of adults and have to deal with tax and personnel issues.</p>

<p>^ When I was a teen (back in the late 70s) nearly all of my peers held PT jobs. Parents didn’t just hand out money - even for things like clothes. If you wanted a car, you had to pay for it yourself (my 1st car loan was $40 a month!). Interestingly, that doesn’t seem to be the case these days. I suspect my son’s generation is much more pampered than we ever were. Not sure it is a good thing.</p>

<p>A few of my son’s friends have held jobs during HS but not many. Those that do have jobs are the most driven, self-disciplined kids in his group (but not necessarily the top students). As I watch these kids, it’s very easy to predict that they will be very successful, no matter where they go to college because they have drive to work and earn money that other kids do not. BTW - my son is NOT in that group. He works a few hours a week at husband’s business doing the cleaning but that’s just because it’s easy for him to do. He’s never expressed an interest in getting a job.</p>

<p>I don’t think it’s necessary to work in HS but it certainly doesn’t hurt and you do pick up some very valuable experience.</p>

<p>One thing I have found very disturbing in dealing with today’s youth, as a manager, is there is an expectation that they will be given things (like promotions, money, the best assignments, etc) without having paid their dues. A neighbor once called my husband and asked if he might have a summer job for her daughter (she was in HS). When he explained he only hired people with a lot of accounting experience and suggested she might want to try waitressing or working at the mall, the mother got offended and said that was not the kind of work wanted her daughter to do. I think that parents like that set their kids up for potential failure. As an earlier post stated, you take what you can get when you first start out and be thankful for it. Eventually, you will earn the right to be choosy.</p>

<p>adding to the “get a job” theme - I wrote this in another thread a while back, but my son, who just graduated from college, worked during his junior and senior years of school as a bartender, then a bar manager.</p>

<p>When he was interviewing for jobs last year, much of the time spent in the interviews was about his experiences as a manager at this bar. The interviewers asked questions about his management style, how he made decisions about hiring and firing, what he looked for in employees, even how he managed inventory. I strongly believe that if he hadn’t had that job experience, he’d be another 09 grad without a job!</p>

<p>I worried while he was in college that the hours he spent at the bar were going to mess up his gpa, and preclude him from getting a job - in reality, it’s what set him apart from the mass of other kids looking for employment! He said that they barely glossed over what his major and grades were (economics, 3.6), they were not that important!</p>