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Post Grad and Looking For a Job: Setting a Daily Schedule

It was early September, 2008. After a summer of dilly dallying in Ann Arbor Michigan after graduating from college, I finally uprooted myself and moved to California (See http://nowwhat.posterous.com/post-college-should-i-move-to-a-new-city-with for more info about moving to a new city after graduating from college with no job lined up). I was lucky enough to be able to stay with a family friend until I found a job and to have enough in my bank account to focus on searching for a full-time job without having to find a menial part-time job to keep my finances afloat.  However, without work and without any close friends in a new city, it’s fairly easy to slip into a lazy haze of cyclic eating, sleeping, and television watching. I spent my first two weeks in California hanging out with my family, who flew in from Taiwan for a visit, and then finally got down to business after they left. Determined not to procrastinate and slip into the depressing downward spiral of unemployment, I set a daily schedule for myself. Having a routine and structure to your days will help you be more productive. Here’s my Monday-Friday schedule when I was looking for a job:

 Wake up

àBrowse for jobs on Craigslist, Monster, Yahoo, Idealist, etc. and save the URLs for the jobs you are interested in

àCook and eat lunch

àWrite cover letters/tweak your resume for all the jobs that you saved earlier in the morning (More on cover letters and resumes in my next two blog entries)

àRead the news to keep up with current events

àProofread all cover letters and send them out

àJog/Exercise

àCook and eat dinner

àRelax

àRead books that help you with your interview techniques or books that pertain to the industry that you are interested in. Trust me, you want to start now and read incrementally so you won’t be cramming the day before an interview.

Sleep! Zzzzzz...

Approximately 1.5 months and 3 job offers later, I finally landed a job that I thought would be my stepping stone into a career in marketing. 

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QUARTER.

Life in your 20's. Post-college. Not all you imagined while slaving away at a History of America 1965-Present paper due in approximately 2 hours and 21 minutes.

Via BET and MTV, we grew up watching pimps on boats with hordes of girls "dancin' up on them" (imagine Ice T or LL voicing that, sounds much better in my head than when my lack-of-street-cred self says it). The Spice Girls conquered the world with their "I can do anything and still look sexy and quirky, with some Spice-appropriate alias" vibes.

College came and went.

The frat parties, the clubs, the "No, my name really is Kara and I was born in '1980'. I'm an...aquarius?" moments, late nights with bad coffee and left-over Thai food, extra-long twin sized beds, communal bathrooms where random people occasionally have sex when a roommate has signaled, via the sock on the doorknob, NO ENTRY, the ass-backwards crunchy hippie roommate who used one unwashed towel for an entire year to save water and therefore, supposedly, the planet, the really-good-but-really-bad-for-you dining hall cookies.

And that night on the Engineering floor where a bunch of socially awkward engineering students rolled chunks of cheese shaped like cars down the hall. 

Then the post-graduation 20's. Fresh out of the egg chicks for the first 2 years. The world is still so beautiful. Skies blue. New apartment, QUEEN SIZED bed! First job. Paychecks! Then come what I call "the doubt years". You posit the questions, "Where is my life going?", "Career?", "What career?", "Should I go back to school?", "Oh, fuck, I need to dress age appropriate now." Ok, that wasn't a question, but you know you think it.

And there you have it, your almost-to-mid-20s. There really isn't a trajectory in life one is "supposed to" follow (if you believe in "supposed to's", you've probably f-ed it up already). Just a lot of happiness, confusion, love, heartache, obstacles, and some scrapes and bruises in jumping those hurdles. Welcome to the 20s.

This is not intended to be a diary, a memoir, a blog to bitch about life. Rather, just some stories loosely based on facts and fiction (whether from my life or that of friends) that I find humorous and chronicle in an alter ego way. And turn into stories.

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Go Bears!

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Packing my good luck sweatshirt for Big Game vs Stanford Sat. Bought it my 1st day at Cal 21yr ago.

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

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School Junior inspires student body with FACE AIDS presentation

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College As A Counter-Revolution

Interesting ideas from Doug Wilson.

My colleague Roy Atwood is fond of reminding people of the revolutionary origins of our modern system of higher education. We don't think much about it anymore, and simply describe it as "going off to college." But going off to college now is quite a different thing than what it once was, and the difference is the direct result of revolutionaries overthrowing the Christian form of higher education, one that had been established for a millennium or so, and replacing it with the modern knowledge factories of the state university system.

This did not happen by accident; the whole thing was by revolutionary design. And, true to form, many Christians apply their conservative instincts simply by trying to conserve and maintain earlier iterations of the revolution. But what is necessary is a counter-revolution in higher ed, and to get there we have to know where we came from, and how we got here.

Popular views tend to lump the American Revolution and the French Revolution together, as though our Revolution was the source of everything that followed. This is a serious misreading of the history, but not because we have not had our form of the French Revolution -- we certainly did, but the standard name for that revolution is the Civil War. The nineteenth century was the century of foment, with radical and progressive ideas spreading through Western culture like a gangrenous rot. The first great manifestation was the French Revolution. There was also the crisis of 1848 in Europe. Then we had our national convulsion between 1861-1865. One enthusiastic observer of our disaster was a young man named Karl Marx. And the century of revolution was bookended on the other end by the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth century.

During the War Between the States, the U.S. Congress -- a pestilence foretold by some ancient prophet, I am sure -- established our modern system of state universities. This was a radical act by a radical Congress, interested in undermining the distinctively Christian forms of education that had existed for centuries. They did this through the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862, seeking to establish "seminaries for industry." And so they did.

But this did not come as a bolt from the blue. Remember Marx? In 1848, he and Engel produced the Communist Manifesto, and the tenth point of their radical proposals called for "free education for all children in public schools." On top of that -- and this is the kicker -- they wanted a "combination of education with industrial production."

This unholy alliance between higher education and industry was successfully accomplished, and the system has become unquestioned, and almost unquestionable. Moreover, it has become a system that many Christian parents insist on maintaining. Even while opposing Obama's proposals for socialistic health care (because they don't want "socialism"), they insist on perpetuating the central engine of socialism (as well as the central example of it) by having their kids go to the very schools that Marx demanded of us, and got. And on top of that, when someone proposes that their older student attend a liberal arts school that is seeking self-consciously to reestablish the old tradition, the parental (and Marxist) objection is often that "want their kid to be able to get a job." But before we think about getting a job, we need to train the next generation how to get a life.

Now before going any further, it is important to note that this is not written against the idea of gainful employment, or against the central Protestant concept of God-given vocation, which I also intend to address. The point is that you must not start there. The issue is one of prioritization. You need to understand the world before finding your place in it. If you just start by finding your place in it, then, unreflectingly, you are aspiring to become a cog in the socialist industrial machine. You are aspiring to be a worker bee in the great Hive of modern society. And if you get bored standing there on the assembly line of the new civilization, they will give you an MP3 player, so that you can have something to think about.

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So much potential, nothing but time.

"...one thing this massive failure has made possible is ability to come up with radical ideas for the city, and potentially to even implement some of them. Places like Flint and Youngstown might be attracting new ideas and moving forward, but it is big cities that inspire the big, audacious dreams. And that is Detroit. Its size, scale, and powerful brand image are attracting not just the region’s but the world’s attention."

Read the rest of this post (thanks to Matt Sicko for the find via Facebook)

http://www.newgeography.com/content/001171-detroit-urban-laboratory-and-new-american-frontier

With a blank canvas, and creative powerhouses like the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. I know we will be implementing radical, game changing ideas. Detroit is a city waiting for a catalyst.

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Post College: Should I Move to a New City Without a Job?

If you are stuck in a college town located in the middle of nowhere with low local employment prospects, then I urge you to consider moving to another city after graduating. Applying for a job in another state would be extremely difficult (read http://askamanager.blogspot.com/2009/01/applying-for-job-in-another-state.html for explanation. The comments left by others on this blog are useful too).

Like many other disoriented fresh grads, I had my reserves about leaving the familiarity of the place I called home for four years. It took me an entire summer of working part-time as a research assistant while looking for the real deal before I finally faced reality: The economic climate in Michigan was getting worse and the chances of finding meaningful full time employment were slim to none. And there it was...It was time to kiss those blissfully free college days good-bye and pack up.

Now that I’ve decided to leave, where should I go?

Forget about friends and family for now while you consider your next move. You will make new friends and you can always visit your family over the holidays. Allow yourself to picture the places you’ve always wanted to visit or live. You are young, and you are mobile. You aren’t married, and you don’t have kids. This is the time you can live wherever and however you want so SEIZE IT!

OK, so living out on the beach in Hawaii might sound very appealing at the moment, but let’s also consider why you are moving away in the first place: career opportunities.

When I finally decided to leave Michigan, I instinctively knew that I wanted to move to California. The dilemma then was: LA or SF? I was leaning towards San Francisco/Silicon Valley because of the large number of high-tech businesses in the area and its vibrant, growing electronics industry.

A good exercise would be visiting craigslist.com or any other job board and running a search on jobs in the cities that you are interested in. So let’s do a trial run…

I looked through the entire marketing/PR jobs section on Craigslist in the week of November 9th to November 13th, and there were a total of  8 junior level jobs that I would be interested in applying to in the San Francisco bay area as opposed to 5 jobs in Los Angeles and 0 jobs in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The winner is obvious.

Try this with several cities/ job boards and then weigh in other factors before making your decision.

Planning

1. $$$?

To be on the safe side, be prepared to live 3 months without a paycheck! This means saving enough money to cover rent, utilities, food, necessities, cell phone bill, health insurance, car insurance, gas, etc for 3 months at your new location.

1. Where to stay?

Best case scenario: with a relative, family friends, or other friends until you land a job. If not…then it’s back to craigslist! If you do end up renting a place, a month-to-month lease is always desirable in case you end up landing a job requires you to relocate.

1. What to bring?

Pack LIGHT! Remember that you can always have your stuff shipped to you later on, but right now you need to be mobile so don’t even think about bringing your action figure collection or your box of old photos. Do bring your laptop, your printer if you have one (for printing resumes and cover letters), your portfolio, at least one pair of nice shoes and one set of business clothing for interviews, and everything else that is essential for your survival for the first couple of weeks in your new city. 

Now get moving!

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Take Action: Write a Letter to the Editor to Make College Affordable

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The First Cut is the Deepest

“Thank you for your interest but we have received overwhelming responses and after careful review we extended an offer that has been accepted…”

It was March 2008, and I was 2 months away from graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and political science from the University of Michigan, but I still had not landed a job to feed my poor post grad butt. Those with their engineering degrees and holier-than-thou business majors were already planning their big city debuts and had seemingly shiny futures ahead of them. I had made it past a couple of first and second round interviews but was never able to cinch the deal. I even gave up Valentine’s Day that year to fly to California for an interview with a social networking website but returned to bloody Ann Arbor, Michigan with no avail. I felt lost, and perhaps 99.9% of my fellow political science majors who were just as disoriented as I was have already decided to take a hike to law school. As adrift and desperate to anchor my life on something, I knew that I was not join the ranks of the other lost boys in law school.

How did I get into this miserable predicament? Let’s retrace my footsteps.

1. I had defied my Asian parents’ wishes of studying biology (becoming a doctor), engineering (to become just like them J), computer science or finance and instead opted to study what I thought I loved.
2. I hadn’t landed any relevant summer internships throughout my college career. “Well, why didn’t you?!?!” You ask. See #3.
3. By the time I realized what I loved wasn’t really what I loved, my parents had already poured approximately $108,000 into my tuition (did I forget to mention that UM is a money grubbing @#$*&#$ that will suck you dry if you’re an international student). I had only a year of college left and it was too late to break up with the political science/psychology department or add another lover (marketing) to the mix, although I did manage to squeeze in a few marketing classes.

Some of the things that I did do right in college and proved to be immensely useful later on:

1. WORK! Be a lab assistant, be a research assistant! Get your hands on a job that you can later showcase in your cover letters and resume when you start looking for a job after college. It’s important that you work somewhere that will help you develop your analytical and writing skills. Brown nose a professor or bed oops I meant beg your TA! Scour the work study website! Do whatever you can to get that job. It’s ok if the pay is low or there’s no pay at all, remember all this time spent in a lab or a cubicle will pay you back tenfold down the road. Keep your cafeteria or waiting job on the side for some cash if you must, but remember, at this point, gaining experience is above all.
2. VOLUNTEER and PARTICIPATE! Show that you are a leader and that you are capable of working in teams. Get on that executive board for whatever student club/group that you find yourself most invested in and take charge. This is also a great opportunity to network with other student leaders who will most likely become useful connections post-college.
3. Take an EXPERIENTIAL/HANDS-ON COURSE! I took a one semester course on peer advising, and they put me to work right away after 2 weeks of training. It was great to be able to consult other students, listen to their problems and provide options, as well as reflect on my own academic and career aspirations.  This experience also allowed me to gain invaluable communication skills while working with a diverse student body. Find out if your college offers courses on mentoring, peer advising, or peer editing (editing other students’ essays and papers). 

Conclusion: Even if you’re not entirely sure what kind of career you want to pursue upon graduation, you can still beef up on skills that are important for jobs in any field.

Anyways, fast-forward to November, 2009 (after numerous rejections/offers): I’ve been a marketing assistant at a real estate agency in California for a year. Not exactly my dream job, but a job in marketing nonetheless. The following blog entries will review the process I went through that led up to this job as well as what I’m doing right now to prepare myself for a job in social media and web marketing. 

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