<p>Out of curiosity, did any of the above posters graduate from a school operating on the Coop plan: Northeastern, Drexel, Cincinnati or any school where they took advantage of a coop option?</p>
<p>(I do not mean doing short term internships.)</p>
<p>Quote:
“Absolutely. Volunteer, take a couple community college classes, work on a project. All of that is looked upon much better than if you worked a job picking trash for 6 months.”</p>
<p>Completely disagree! Quite realistically, while waiting to land your preferred full-time job in your field, you could and should have a job (picking up trash, working fast food, retail, etc.) WHILE volunteering, taking a community college class, or working on a project. First of all, many people do not have the option to not work, financially, so this advice is not a realistic option, and secondly, speaking of work ethic as noted by other posters, having any kind of job WHILE doing activities to enhance your resume is ideal. </p>
<p>Trust me, many, many, many people with whom you are competing for jobs are doing BOTH or THREE of these things, so if you are only volunteering or only taking classes, you are at a disadvantage.</p>
<p>During my internship year I had a full-time internship, part-time grad school classes, and a part-time waitressing job. It was hectic, crazy, tiring and I learned a LOT. It also helped me eventually land my dream job. Worth it!</p>
<p>^^I am not saying you should ONLY do one thing. You could take a class AND volunteer lol. </p>
<p>IMO, it is okay to have those types of jobs while you are in school. However, once you get out, 6+ months of volunteering & other activities > 6+ months of being paid to pick up trash and volunteering. </p>
<p>As long as you LOOK like you’ve kept busy doing interesting/productive things on your resume, I’d leave off the “menial” jobs. The resume section is called “relevant experience” - you don’t have nor want to include everything. For good or for bad, if you’ve graduated with a 4+ year degree and were stuck in a low skill/wage job for months after graduating, it often reflects poorly upon you. Which sucks, because I agree, it shouldn’t at all.</p>
<p>Graduated May 2012 with a degree in International Relations from BU. Interning in Seoul to keep myself busy while applying for jobs in the US. So hard to get a job nowadays… Most of my friends already got job offers; I feel left out! But I like the aforementioned posts about volunteering and taking classes while waiting to get a job offer. Will consider that in the future.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This.</p>
<p>By the way, kevster1001, how’s that working out for you? It’s hard enough applying for DC jobs from NY.</p>
<p>Hey, to each their own, but my “menial job” was listed on my resume and always, always got positive attention from interviewers. Hands down I’ve talked about that in interviews more than my earliest internship experience. </p>
<p>Plus, while working I made money & created connections in the unlikeliest of places. All while volunteering and taking classes.</p>
<p>Also, obviously you don’t put your non-skilled jobs in the “Relevant Experience” section – there should be a place, albeit near the bottom, for non-career related jobs.</p>
<p>Epimetheus:</p>
<p>I am still applying for jobs located in Boston while I’m in Korea. Thus far, I have gotten one e-mail saying that the company is reviewing my application and want to know whether I am permanently moving to Boston (I am a CA resident), which is still uncertain in my agenda. I am also applying through my school’s CareerLink website, which is much better than applying through sites such as Monster or Indeed.</p>
<p>I think having just a BA by itself now was like having just a high school diploma in the 1950s and 1960s. In other words, yes, sure, it’s great to have a BA, but a MA will make you stand out completely (because, well, face it what real “valuable” work experience are you going to have at 21 when you’ve spent 95% of your life thus far in academia?). I read somewhere that less than 10% of the American population have a degree higher than a BA. Therefore, having a MA already places you in the more-educated group of American society. </p>
<p>Now, the catch is, if you’ve been saddled with a lot of debt from your BA years, going for a MA when you haven’t found a job right after your BA is quite a hard initiative. And there’s also two additional issues relating to pursuing a post-BA degree:
- Not all MA programs are created equal.
- Probably about half of all non-JD, non-MBA, and non-MD programs are geared towards people who are interested in pursuing a PhD.
2a) Is a PhD worth it? Could you pull it off, both academically and financially? Sure, most PhD programs are paid for but you will still have to pay for those miscellaneous things and times this amount by 5-7 years…
2b) If you want to drop your PhD program after 2-3 years and just get a MA, sure, that’s fine. However, we all know that a MA will too soon be irrelevant too… the pace of globalization, mass access to education, and the expanding global middle class are really putting a strain on ease of life here in America. </p>
<p>What are your thoughts on post-BA degrees? Are they feasible?</p>
<p>Oasis, I can’t give any hard evidence, but I believe that a master’s degree isn’t as valuable as you might think. My college allows students to submatriculate, so they can start taking graduate classes before they finish undergrad. As a result, a decent number of my friends graduated with MAs in addition to their BA/**; some did it in four years total, and others took an extra semester or two to finish up. As far as job seeking, it was no easier for them than it was for anyone else.</p>
<p>One friend in particular stands out… he is extremely intelligent and has plenty of experience (well as much as one can have before having a full time job); he graduated with a ** after eight semesters, and he finished his master’s degree a semester later. There were very few jobs out there that were looking for applicants with his degrees, so he started looking at jobs that were only looking for bachelor’s graduates. He got no less than five rejections because he was overqualified; read: the company thought they couldn’t afford him.</p>
<p>He wound up finding a job, but it took six months and a lot of headache to do it.</p>
<p>My point is that master’s degrees are good - they add credentials, and once you find a good job, you are at a real advantage moving forward - but that you may find that it is initially harder to get your foot in the door just because employers are hesitant to hire people with credentials and no real world experience to back them up.</p>
<p>chrisw, that is very correct. I guess what I meant was that a MA will help fill that void of real work experience-- not everyone can get an internship all 3 or 4 of those summers during their BA years. </p>
<p>This is also a very contentious issue because it’s not like interns get to do anything important… I was an intern at a major defense firm but I honestly did not do jack sh**. Good money but as far as “real experience” went, I did not learn much that would benefit my career goals.</p>
<p>The worst part is that people graduating wait much too late to even start considering employment options. Your senior year should be fully devoted to finding a job – the process should not start in the 3 weeks leading up to graduation. By the summer between your junior and senior year, you should have a plan of action for the type of job you are targeting, the timeline that the recruitment, and how you plan on impressing and eventually achieving the goal of being offered that position. A game plan is very important. It begins about two years prior to you actually graduating.</p>
<p>I had more offers than you can count on one hand and turned down other opportunities. By the end of the Fall semester, I had accepted and enjoyed my Spring semester with job in hand. Most of the people I know who can’t find employment never took the recruiting process seriously.</p>
<p>“Most of the people I know who can’t find employment never took the recruiting process seriously.”</p>
<p>^ha, I hope you’re not trying to indicate that all those unemployed graduates are unemployed because they didn’t take the job hunt seriously. Plenty of people I know, took it very seriously and came up empty. </p>
<p>If ALL of those unemployed graduates took the job hunt as seriously as you, the college graduate unemployment rate would still be exactly the same. There are only enough job offers to go around and an astoundingly large applicant pool.</p>
<p>I can only speak from my experience, so take it as you wish. In my experience, even those grads that think they are trying so hard to find employment are not putting forward as good of a representation of themselves as they could to be hired. Whether it be a lack of networking, poor resume development, lack of applications submitted, or the “I am too good for this” attitude for some opportunities, most of the individuals I know searching for jobs could do more.</p>
<p>For example, it amazes me the number of people I know that go through TFA as a two-year gap to “figure out what to do” only to find themselves in the last few months of teaching and zero plans for the future. </p>
<p>In short, it is rare that I come across an undergrad or recent graduate and am blown away by the efforts they are making on the job front. </p>
<p>Most need to start with resume reviews and find professionals who will tear apart everything that grad has put on a piece of paper. I see resumes from top students and I am amazed at how terribly underrepresented their experiences reflect on paper. </p>
<p>When someone held an equity research position as an intern and the two bullets for the position are to the tune of:
- Assisted in the research of equities in the oil and gas industry
- Monitored the performance and provided outlook of ABC, XYZ, and JKL.</p>
<p>This above is not what trying your hardest looks like…and I see it much more often than I see the opposite.</p>
<p>“I can only speak from my experience, so take it as you wish. In my experience, even those grads that think they are trying so hard to find employment are not putting forward as good of a representation of themselves as they could to be hired. Whether it be a lack of networking, poor resume development, lack of applications submitted, or the “I am too good for this” attitude for some opportunities, most of the individuals I know searching for jobs could do more.”</p>
<p>27 years old, five years in the corporate world. The above paragraph is pure brilliance and 100% correct. I was clueless about job-searching until a year ago and stuck in an awful job, and now I’m making more money than ever, working a decently interesting job, traveling to cool places on the company dime, and much more confident about finding future success than ever before. I got my current good-job primarily because I became much more effective on job-searching, utilizing recruiters and my network. </p>
<p>-“Whether it be a lack of networking” (You should be connected to hundreds of recruiters on LinkedIn. Contact them at least once a month and see what opportunities they have. Seriously. If you’re job searching, you should be connected to at least 100 recruiters on LinkedIn. No excuses. If you’re struggling with a job search, and not connected to at least 100 recruiters on LinkedIn (by adding them via ‘friend requests’), I have no interest in helping you. Call them / email them, etc. They’re all desperate for great candidates. … Even if your resume sucks now, get connected, you still might get hired. They’ll gladly take “Updated Resumes” a couple weeks from now.)</p>
<p>-“poor resume development” (your resume most likely is bad. trust me. the high majority of resumes out there is bad. Ask one successful person to edit your resume, make their changes … then ask another successful person to do it, make changes, repeat … ask recruiters to help with your resume, they see hundreds of resumes a month, and a good recruiter will know how to help you improve your resume … and consider hiring a well-reviewed ‘professional resume adviser’, someone like Job Jenny (google her, and get her eBook)) </p>
<p>-“lack of applications submitted” (a low-percentage play, yet I’ve still definitely gotten interviews from mere submissions. still, apply to at least 20 jobs a day while you’re job-searching, and probably many more)</p>
<p>“or the “I am too good for this” attitude for some opportunities” (if you were ‘too good for this’, other companies would be banging at your door, desperate to hire you. in all likelihood, you are not ‘too good for this’)</p>
<p>Hahaha. While most of you guys were partying and getting lousy degrees, nerds like us were working our butts off in absolute isolation to be in the comfortable spot we are in now.</p>
<p>Got me a science degree. You go to college or university to learn a TRADE or a SKILL that people will pay you money to perform. NOT to learn an idea like 75% of degrees. If you want to learn an idea, you should’ve spend $5 on a library card and not waste thousands on tuition.</p>
<p>Actually, you go to trade school to learn a trade. Undergraduate education is and has (historically) been about learning a wide variety of different topics; professional school is about learning a profession. </p>
<p>Consider this: as an entry-level employee at a business (outside of engineering, law, medicine… i.e. private industry), you need to be trained regardless of your educational background; often, employers will look for applicants from liberal arts backgrounds because they were trained to think critically before acting, and while it may require a greater short term investment, those kinds of people can pay very large dividends to companies in the long run.</p>
<p>I did party a lot and I did get a “lousy” degree (by your definition). The result is just that I enjoyed myself for four years… I’d say I’m in a comfortable spot now, and I’ve got a lot of fond memories to look at as well!</p>
<p>Ditto chrisw. I also have a “lousy” degree and have a pretty good job. And I actually enjoyed college and had some of the best 4 years of my life.</p>
<p>Yes, trade schools teach trades, but I am talking about the trades that are so advanced, they can only be taught in a university. Medicine, engineering, chemistry, biology, law, research, accounting, etc.</p>
<p>Those who go to college for the experience or to learn a wide array of cultured topics could have done it cheaper at the library and at a nightclub.</p>
<p>College is supposed to produce professionals and those who can provide an invaluable service. If college degrees prove that you are a “hard worker”, then what makes it different than the hard worker who climbed to assistant manager and made over six figures in the cumulative span of 4 years with just a HS diploma vs. a kid who spend six figures in the cumulative span of a college career and spent the whole time flipping burgers? The only way to beat that is with a college degree of great worth! </p>
<p>Society teaches you that college will guarantee you a better life and a better job, so many people go to college because society “told” them to, so they get these random degrees (no offense) just to be apart of the scene, yet when they graduate, they wonder why they can’t get a job.</p>
<p>If I am an employer, I am not going to hire you just because you have a college degree. I’m going to hire you because you have a set of skills that can contribute to the company that cannot be replicated by my current staff. A business of few highly skilled workers is going to produce less payroll expenses than a business of many mediocre workers.</p>
<p>parents excuse me if this comes across as insulting, but i honestly believe this…
I think part of the problem is that many newer grads who are having a hard time finding work… Have never worked. This
What i see most often with people who are having a hard time getting a job. Or they’re being too picky and think they are entitled to 50k and don’t want to worm their way up. This obviously isn’t everyone… But I’ve Seen. it quite a bit.</p>
<p>Out of curiosity, those of you who are not employed yet… Did you have jobs prior to now?</p>
<p>I see do many threads where people go off to summer programs or who do this or that without ever working a real job and who still get spending money from their parents.</p>
<p>Where I’m from, you want a car… You buy it. You need insurance for said car… You pay for it. You need gas? Same thing applies. Everyone in my home town works. My entire family started at 14. Nobody has had any Trouble finding a job. My one relative just turned 14 two weeks ago and has already started filling out applications. If a 14 year old can find a job do can you.</p>
<p>If I’m interviewing someone for a job with a 4.0 and no with experience and someone with a 3.0 who has been working for 6 years chances are I’m going with the experienced person assuming they interview well.</p>
<p>Take that menial job at walmart and get some with experience. Even if it doesn’t pay well. While you’re working there keep sending out resumes with Walmart on them as job experience. Nobody wants to see someone sitting around for a year when they could be working and learning things that come with any kind Job.</p>
<p>There are jobs out there. We hire hundreds of people each year. </p>
<p>Join linkedin .make connections. Ask friends if they’re hiring. Some places give referral bonuses and love hiring referrals</p>
<p>Sent from my DROID BIONIC using CC</p>
<p>I graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and I’m currently working for an aerospace company as a composite technician. It’s not what I really want to do because it’s mostly manual labor and I’m working with 90% of people who don’t even have a high school degree but at least it’s a start. Hopefully I can move up to an engineering position within the company soon.</p>