Recent college grad. Having a hell of a time finding a job.

It's all about networking. The jobs that you're applying for online are all being filled by people who are known to the company. Go to conferences and industry events and meet some people.

I was in your shoes for a while myself. I went to school with the goal of working in real estate development. After graduation, I worked a good summer job and then ended up painting houses and mowing lawns to make my student loan payments. After a couple of months of underemployment, I showed up at a social event hosted by my school's real estate program. Within a week, I had two interviews lined up. I ended up with a good job shortly thereafter.

In addition to networking, be sure to make your unemployment productive. The fact that you're not working doesn't mean that you have to sit on the couch all day (not that you are, but it's easy to fall into that routine). I don't know what area of science you're in, but a wide variety of non-profits and public agencies would love to have a volunteer or an unpaid intern. This type of work provides great networking opportunities and gives you something to put on your resume.

Obama has been re-elected. You'll be fine OP. You are the guys that voted him in, right?

Obama will take care of you.

Winchells Donuts wrote:

You guys should join the US Navy SEALS and kill Islamo Fascists for Israel.

Join now to get medals because Obama is pulling out in 2014. The huge advantage of the conventional branch's special SWAT force commandos is that the likihood of being injured in training is low. The conventional military will never haze you w/o leaving you with the option to call it off. i.e. NO physical torture is allowed and NO mental torture is allowed. Thus while you train for SWAT operations if you get injured it will not be because the US Gov't intentionally inflicted the injury or wound upon you.

OP, I was in a similar boat for a while.

I graduated with a degree in the social sciences, cumulative GPA under 3.0. I had no internships.

I went through a little period of homelessness this summer (but I was able to couch surf with understanding friends, so it wasn't horrible). I won't say there weren't times when I felt despair.

However, I just kept whacking away at it. I sent out hundreds of resumes, called dozens of places, cast a wider and wider net, and lowered my expectations again and again. Finally I got a job selling running shoes at a sporting goods store. The money was awful, but SOME money coming in is better than NO money coming in.

I kept applying for stuff I thought I wouldn't hate. I kept going to as many interviews as possible (working nights/weekends at the sporting goods store so I'd be free during the day for interviews). I got told more times than I can remember that I didn't have the experience/technical knowledge. I raged at myself for not getting an engineering degree or something in the hard sciences.

Finally, after about 5 months of concentrating searching, a really good gig just fell into my lap. They were desperate to fill a vacancy, I had two really good interviews where, being entirely honest, I just got lucky with having on-the-fly answers to their tricky little questions. I was hired into a job where the money is solid, the benefits are great, and the opportunities for growth are very good.

I'm not sure if I'll go to grad school for my PHD, (my ambitions are more in academia than making a lot of money) but whether I stay in this field for 5 years and pay off my undergraduate debt or stay in this field for 30 years and retire, it's work that I don't mind with people I like, and that's more than a lot of people can say.

A lot of people will tell you college is a waste of time unless you're a 4.0 double-engineering major with 14 internships, but I have to disagree. Yes, technically, I could have purchased all of my textbooks and read them by myself without paying hefty tuition. On the other hand, even though I didn't work as hard as I should have during my undergraduate years, I say that it was definitely worth it. The experience of college was really vital to my growth as a human being, even though I don't have a vast array of hard technical knowledge at my disposal.

Anyway, college is worth it/nuh uh isn't really the subject at hand. I'll just say that as a recent grad who was far from a model hire, but has found good, gainful employment, keep on keepin' on. Grind out the applications. Trawl the employment sites like monster. Look up labs where you might like to work and call 'em up. See if any local colleges or universities need a guy to answer phones in the admissions department or something- oftentimes at higher ed places, even if the pay isn't great, they'll let you take a class or two for free. It'll keep you in "school mode" and make up for the fact that a lot of administrative positions at a college aren't very intellectually challenging.

Another thing to consider is calling up a few temp agencies if you're in a large city. I was striking out bigtime even applying to 25 hr/wk jobs answering phones. I set my resume to a reputable temp agency (and be careful, because there are a lot of bad ones in big cities, too) and within a month or so, I was getting called to work those 25-30hr/wk jobs for ~1.5 times my area's minimum wage. Would I want to do that forever? No, but if you could do that for six months while you keep searching for a job you really want, you'd at least have some money coming in. I know for me, the psychological effect of knowing "I've got work, I'm making a little bit of money, I can do this temporarily til I find something better" was HUGE.

I love running, but I HATED selling running shoes, especially since our clientele was mostly wealthy, rude, and stupid. But I knew at the end of the week, I would clear enough money to keep the search alive.

Keep your chin up, OP. If you keep grinding away, eventually, something will fall into your lap. It might take 1000 rejections before that happens. People in your situation close to you might say "wow, I can't believe you just stumbled bass-ackwards into that job, I can't find anything" even though they send out one resume a week instead of 50.

And remember- you don't have to work at whatever you find for 30 years. If you want to work for 2-3 years, maybe knock out some grad-school pre-reqs at night, then take the GREs and skedaddle, no one is going to hunt you down.

I have a hard time filling jobs. We have technical support jobs that pay about $40k/year to start. Good health care. Small retirement plan. Takes 6 months to fill openings. This is in the midwest. Continually interviewing younger (under 30) peeps who can't dress right, say the right things, call back in time, or even care enough to submit the appropriate resume. They also think the pay sucks.

I am mostly hiring workers who are 50+ -- last hire was a 58 year old ex-teacher. She's fantastic.

There ARE jobs out there.

My brother graduated with a Bio degree two years ago. He had a pretty solid internship for a year. Graduated and had some trouble finding employment. He was going on interviews for jobs making less than 35k a year with guys that had Masters and PhDs in the field. After only being able to land one temp job, he found a position and two hours away. He has been there since and had trouble finding work closer by.

As for applying for jobs outside your drivable area, most places are going to ignore applications from recent grads with even a little experience when they can just quickly bring in someone locally. I temped for a while in an HR department that hires a lot of science majors. I filed and trashed the applications of new hires as part of my job and almost always threw the out of state apps. Like it has been said before, it is all networking, which is BS. My company offered recruiting bonuses for employees if they brought in a new hire. The HR recruiter also got a cut. Some of the applications of the hired people I read were crazy under-qualified for positions that needed prior knowledge and lab experience. I was working with a lot of sons/daughters/grandchildren/nephews/nieces of my co-workers. And of course many were awful and lazy at their job.

I don't think a lot of the people who have survived this economic mess have a grasp of how bad it is and quickly label the unemployed/underemployed as lazy. Outside my building people used to dress in suits and hand out applications to my former co-workers. It has been about three years since I graduated and of my college friends that didn't pursue grad school to this point, about 90% who are making above 45k a year landed their job through a relative. If you aren't super connected it is a tough battle to find a decent job as a new grad.

Raging Bull wrote:

I have a hard time filling jobs. We have technical support jobs that pay about $40k/year to start. Good health care. Small retirement plan. Takes 6 months to fill openings. This is in the midwest. Continually interviewing younger (under 30) peeps who can't dress right, say the right things, call back in time, or even care enough to submit the appropriate resume. They also think the pay sucks.

I am mostly hiring workers who are 50+ -- last hire was a 58 year old ex-teacher. She's fantastic.

There ARE jobs out there.

You sound like a horrible hiring manager. What in the world does "saying theright things" even mean?

Raging Bull wrote:

I have a hard time filling jobs. We have technical support jobs that pay about $40k/year to start. Good health care. Small retirement plan. Takes 6 months to fill openings. This is in the midwest. Continually interviewing younger (under 30) peeps who can't dress right, say the right things, call back in time, or even care enough to submit the appropriate resume. They also think the pay sucks.

I am mostly hiring workers who are 50+ -- last hire was a 58 year old ex-teacher. She's fantastic.

There ARE jobs out there.

Wow. I do all of those things and I'm still coming up empty. I would LOVE to be making 40K. I would dress professionally in an interview (if I ever got that far), I always call back or respond to an email within 24 hours. I tailor my cover letter and resume to the job -- I literally spend hours on it before submitting it to each individual job.

I'm desperate, and I'm really starting to feel as though something is wrong with me or my education. I mean, like you say, people have jobs. Most of my friends have full-time jobs. What's different with me? Where did I screw up so that I can't get a job? Frustrating. Doing my best and not giving up though, so hopefully something will come through soon.

Up the hill, down the hill wrote:

Like it has been said before, it is all networking, which is BS.

It's not BS. It makes eminent sense to hire a known individual rather than picking from a list of relative unknowns.

Think about it this way: if you were going to start your own firm, who would you hire? You've worked in your field for a while and you know a bunch of people. Are you going to advertise positions online and hire a bunch of unknowns? No. You're going to offer jobs to people you've worked with or at least had coffee with.

Networking is only considered to be BS by people who don't like doing it.

My son flunked out of college after the 2nd quarter of his 3rd year toward a BS Software Engineering degree. He soon landed a job as a software engineer in San Francisco. So, at least in his case, choosing a high-demand career and looking for a job in a high-demand city was more important than getting the degree. And forget the GPA having anything to do with it too. You need to pick a career where there is growing demand for your talents, and then move to where the jobs are. (BTW, his high school XC team took 4th at State(CA)his senior year!)

Raging Bull wrote:

I have a hard time filling jobs. We have technical support jobs that pay about $40k/year to start. Good health care. Small retirement plan. Takes 6 months to fill openings. This is in the midwest. Continually interviewing younger (under 30) peeps who can't dress right, say the right things, call back in time, or even care enough to submit the appropriate resume. They also think the pay sucks.

I am mostly hiring workers who are 50+ -- last hire was a 58 year old ex-teacher. She's fantastic.

There ARE jobs out there.

People say this, but as a highly qualified and well-put together college grad, never once came across a job like this. Tech support for $40k starting with good benefits, and employers not having absurd prereqs like 10yrs field experience? 1993 called, they want their job posting back. You're probably expecting some Harvard grad in an Armani suit to walk through the door to answer your phones.

I have bachelor's degrees in biology and chemistry, ran xc and track in college, graduated with a 3.6 GPA, have had multiple previous jobs in my field (from summer jobs), and great references (every employer I've had has loved me). I was multiple time state champion in high school, scored a 31 on my ACT and 5s on the two AP tests I took (Calculus and Physics), and tutored graduate students in an upper division physiology class in college. I read textbooks for fun, have had jobs working 60+ hrs/week, and held a management position this past summer (the work was temporary, so when work ended, so did my job). I am clean cut, work hard on my resume and cover letters, speak professionally, etc. So far it hasn't mattered as I've gotten no call backs, let alone in person interviews, so what's happening is they're tossing my resume upon finding I have little experience, am out of state, and am not of any relation to anyone at the company. All my contacts are from my college town, which isn't where I want to be, and given the number of people with degrees in college towns, I'd have trouble getting a job within my field that pays even $10/hr (I worked for $8.50/hr this past spring).

I feel pretty frustrated and downright pissed off because I am a high power person with a ton of knowledge and drive, and I'm very well natured and self-reliant. Even without job-specific training, I feel I'm a great candidate as I learn quickly and don't need any supervision once I understand what I'm supposed to be doing. None of this matters. None of it matters. Even within my own program at my university I lost out on two jobs due to some other schmuck (and they really were schmucks) knowing the professor well, better than me anyhow.

I will continue my hunt though. I'm thinking of just moving to a place where I want to be that also should have quite a few potential jobs for me, that way I'll have a local address and can come in for a interview.

yfvu wrote:

You sound like a horrible hiring manager. What in the world does "saying theright things" even mean?

It's simple stuff that one takes for granted until people walk in and can't do it. Like actually researching the organization a bit. We have a website. Read it before you show up. We get people who walk in and don't have a clue what we do. These people can't answer a simple question about how their talents fit in with the organization.

The 58 year old lady came in prepared. Made several comments about products/offerings that were on our website. Closed her interview by relating her previous experience as a teacher to how she could impact us positively with that skill set in regard to what she learned about us online and what was in the job description. Then told us she wanted the job. She got it.

You should become a teacher. Big cities like Boston, NY, Philly, Chicago, etc have programs where you can begin teaching immediately, even without an education degree. You will pursue the necessary degrees/certifications while teaching and earning a full teacher's salary. There's a high need for science/math/English teachers in inner cities. Look into it.

This thread is hilarious. I am reminded that Winston Churchill said it best:

"Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

-- Winston Churchill

All of you highly degreed 20-somethings with no jobs, living at home with mom and dad, will understand the error of your ways soon enough. The Democratic party is NOT going to get you out of this rutt...they will keep you there. 60%+ of the under-30 demographic voted for Obama. You think you are doing the right thing...but you couldn't be more wrong. For the sake of the country, I hope you wise-up before you hit 30. We don't have that long to wait.

Good luck with your job at Starbuck's. Keep voting Democrat.

Married 40 Yr Old White Male wrote:

This thread is hilarious. I am reminded that Winston Churchill said it best:

"Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

-- Winston Churchill

All of you highly degreed 20-somethings with no jobs, living at home with mom and dad, will understand the error of your ways soon enough. The Democratic party is NOT going to get you out of this rutt...they will keep you there. 60%+ of the under-30 demographic voted for Obama. You think you are doing the right thing...but you couldn't be more wrong. For the sake of the country, I hope you wise-up before you hit 30. We don't have that long to wait.

Good luck with your job at Starbuck's. Keep voting Democrat.

Here we have a crazy person. Don't do drugs kids or you'll end up sounding like this guy.

Married 40 Yr Old White Male wrote:

This thread is hilarious. I am reminded that Winston Churchill said it best:

"Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

-- Winston Churchill

All of you highly degreed 20-somethings with no jobs, living at home with mom and dad, will understand the error of your ways soon enough. The Democratic party is NOT going to get you out of this rutt...they will keep you there. 60%+ of the under-30 demographic voted for Obama. You think you are doing the right thing...but you couldn't be more wrong. For the sake of the country, I hope you wise-up before you hit 30. We don't have that long to wait.

Good luck with your job at Starbuck's. Keep voting Democrat.

Nice contribution. Your wife is probably fvcking your friends and you don't even know it because you're too busy trolling the internet trying to make other people feel bad about themselves.

I think the dude named Grizz had an excellent contribution.

B of Sci, where do you live?

You're a very ignorant individual. Don't worry though, I'll keep a position open for you once you graduate.