Nightmare

Not that anyone follows this blog anyhow, but I think this will be my last post. Dwelling on my lack of employment has proved itself to be very depressing.

I wish I could just beg someone and be like, "Save me! Please?" All it takes is one job to potentially change a person's life. And all it takes is one person, out of the millions who have the authority, to influence a job offer.

I really wish someone would save me from my unemployment. I'm not entitled, just desperate. I have good grades, an amazing SAT score, great work ethic, and several internships under my belt. I graduated within the top 5% of my high school class, went to a pretigious college on a moderate scholarship, graduated from college with honors and a year ahead of schedule, and held temporary positions at some of the largest, most renowned corporations in the world. I have even completed some graduate coursework. But none of this matters because I'm unemployed and can't manage to find full-time employment.


*EDITED*

Originally, I had a cheesy story posted here about a dream (nightmare) I had back in freshman year of college. It's sappy and ridiculous so I decided to remove it from this blog. In the dream, all of my college friends ended up as big-time bankers/executives several years after graduation. I was unemployed, broke, and homeless. They all married each other (LOL) and decided to take pity on me and hire me as their housekeeper / charity case. That dream (premonition?) should have driven me to at least double major in finance and marketing. But instead, it only encouraged me to graduate earlier, while only pursuing a single major in marketing. (Minor in art, a.k.a. underwater basket-weaving.)

So now almost all of my closest friends are going to work for banks while I'm living with my parents and doing my 4th or 5th internship. I don't even have enough work experience to get hired as a secretary/assistant. And this is with me having a slightly better GPA than most of the people I knew (only because marketing was an easier major), and graduating a year earlier so I could get a head start on the job hunt. I should've known that employers shun unemployed graduates but love to recruit on campus. In conclusion, my friends are great and worked hard for everything, instead of trying to take the easy way out like I did. I'm really glad that they made it, and proved all of the gloomy unemployment statistics for our generation wrong. I definitely should've listened to them that this was a bad idea, instead of trying to race to the graduation finish line. (Won the battle, lost the war?)

Was this the co$tlie$t mistake I've ever made? Yep. I didn't even get to graduate/celebrate with my own class.

Diary of Despair and Unemployment

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/5907430/Chinese-students-diary-of-despair.html


Chinese student's diary of despair
Published: 9:00PM BST 25 Jul 2009

Unable to find a job and consumed with guilt about her parents' financial sacrifices, Chinese student Liu Wei took her own life. Her diary charts a voyage from hope to despair.

November 2006


"At school, I had a scholarship but now my family has to pay for me to study. I have to pay them back and I have to give money to my brother so he can build a house. My goal is to study hard, get a good job and provide for my family. If I cannot do that, then it is impossible to say that I have a good life."

May 2008


"I cannot believe it is so difficult to find a part-time job; there were 200 students applying for one part-time job as a receptionist. I cannot imagine what will happen when I graduate."

October 9, 2008


"I am a college student but I cannot find a job. How ashamed will I be when I have to go back to the village after I graduate? I feel so tired, I want to keep sleeping and never wake up. What shall I do? Who can save me? Apart from my parents, I will not miss anything in this world."


October 18, 2008 (final diary entry)


"Why so difficult?"

This is such a sad story. She was probably the same age as me. Her family had sacrificed so incredibly much to send her to college; the pressure to succeed must have been unbearable.

How to fake employment

Don't be embarrassed to admit that you're unemployed. After all, you're definitely in good company.

But just in case someone asks you that dreaded, "So, what do you do?" question, here are several helpful ways you can fake employment:

1. Volunteering. Once you are officially a "Volunteer", you can start reclaiming your identity and picking up the pieces of your battered ego. And you now have a purpose in life other than couch/channel-surfing all day. Best of all, by volunteering for a good cause, you are (hopefully) contributing to society and making the world a better place, one day of unemployment at a time.

2. Negatively paid Unpaid internship. Prestigious unpaid internships are actually very competitive and hard to land these day. But have no fear: you can easily buy your way into an unpaid internship at a national, Fortune 500 company. A 10-15 week internship in the industry of your choice will cost you around 4 figures, including living expenses. If nothing else, you should get at least get a big name added to your resume. Sadly, I was one of those lost souls desperate enough to pay for an internship. (#1 from the previous post addresses this.) Email me for more details.

3. Classes. Take classes at a local college or university. You know the drill already (register, pay tuition and fee$, show up to class).

4. Part-time/temp job. Congrats! With a part-time/temp job, you are no longer unemployed. (Even if it doesn't feel like it because of your minimum-wage earnings and enormous amount of $tudent loan$.)



I've tried all but one of the above suggestions. Unfortunately, none of my opportunities led to a full-time job. Sigh.

I intentionally left off PAID internships from the list. Paid internships are great; they are generally your best bet for getting a full-time offer. As a paid intern, you are officially an employee of the firm. Other people will actually try to teach you things and help you learn, grow, and succeed. Paid interns usually have a much better chance of being hired by the company than temps do. Many interns get hired after 10 weeks, but temps can slave away for years before officially being invited to join the company.

When you are a temp: 1) the firm emphasizes repeatedly that you are NOT one of their employees, and 2) all the extremely tedious filing/data-entry tasks that no one else wants to do (not even the secretaries) gets pushed onto you. Obviously, some temps get to do more than just filing and data-entry. Or so I've heard.

The 5 Stages of Unemployment Grief

*All of the examples below are from personal experience (and for the most part, thoughts that occurred to me on a daily basis over the past week). Thankfully, #1 does not apply anymore.

1. Denial - "This unpaid internship was totally worth my $100k+ degree! I'm learning so incredibly much reading the latest Google News headlines 8 hours a day."

2. Anger - "The economy sucks! This is so not fair! And why do other people get cool jobs but not me? After all, I got to wear the nice little gold tassel thing at graduation, which means my GPA was higher... *pfffft* I. HATE. THIS."

3. Bargaining - "Maybe if I beg my alma mater, they will let me back in school. And then I can actually major in something useful..."


4. Depression - "Why is life so hard? I'm never going to get a job. Why me??"

5. Acceptance - N/A

Life After College

High School Dropouts Fare Better Than College Grads

In terms of unemployment statistics, at least.

Direct Your Destiny?

A multimedia campaign has been launched directing recent college grads to DirectYourDestiny.org. What could this be about? Are we finally seeing something come out of the government stimulus package?



Nope. Instead, our friends at the Graduate Management Admission Council want all us unemployed and underemployed college grads to register for the GMAT! According to their commercials, they understand our plights; they show us how much we want to get out of our minimum-wage, crap jobs (literally, cleaning out dirty stables).

Hmm... Are the number of test takers down? I wonder why people aren't rushing to take a $250 exam during a recession? Who in their right mind wouldn't want to spend another $100k on an MBA education during a recession?? You might as well throw in a $3,000 Kaplan GMAT course. The people at Kaplan called me daily for months before I finally answered and told them to stop calling my number.

I find it hilarious that one of the GMAC's target audiences are people watching MTV reruns. They forget that even MTV viewers know the value of an MBA is more or less zilch without relevant work experience. And we all know that business school graduates were hit hard by the recession.

But sign me up anyway for the GMAT the day the $250 includes the Kaplan course!

Still no jobs, except for Census takers

Surprise, surprise--the stock market is down again because there are no jobs! According to the latest employment reports, 431,000 jobs were added to the economy in May. However, this amount was much lower than expected, and Census hiring accounted for 96% of it. 96% of 431,000 = 411,000 Census jobs.

I wonder how many of the remaining 20,000 jobs added were temp positions??

My guess is that many full-time, "permanent" jobs were actually lost in May, and this loss was only slightly offset by the Census and temporary positions added. What happens when the Census tallying is over?

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Dispatch/market-dispatches.aspx?post=1765590&_blg=1,1765590

Law school student sells grad tickets to pay student loans

New York Law School Student Trying to Scalp Graduation Tickets

http://abovethelaw.com/2010/05/new-york-law-schools-student-trying-to-scalp-graduation-tickets/new-york-law-school-graduation/

"COME SEE 300 OR SO UNEMPLOYED LAW GRADS SWEAT OUT PAYING BACK THEIR LAW SCHOOL LOANS!"

"(All proceeds will go to help one student make his first loan payment.)"


Well, hopefully someone bought these tickets. I actually want one. (I love graduation speeches.) Maybe next year?

Valedictorian says key to 7.62 GPA was time management

A 7.62 GPA (grade point average)! This is utterly and completely ridiculous!

Gaither's valedictorian says key to 7.62 GPA was time management

"When Hillsborough County's high school graduates cross the stage to get their diplomas, there will be some pretty impressive GPAs announced. 

[A student] of Durant High School has a 7.83.

[A student] of Blake has a 7.76.

[A student] from Durant has a 7.64.

And then there's [the student] from Gaither with a 7.62.

They are the four highest in the county.

"Of course, studying came first," [the valedictorian] said about getting the high marks."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37447111/

That's a 7.83 out of 4.0 in case you're wondering. I pity those lazy underachievers with their 4.0s... Seriously, what the heck?! I'm sure these were all exceptionally smart and hard-working students. By no means am I trying to downplay their amazing accomplishments. They should feel proud of themselves because they definitely must have done something right to earn the highest grade point averages in their county. 

However, how on Earth can a school district start out with a 4.0 grading scale and end up with students "earning" above 7 GPA's? I'm sure there were dozens, maybe even hundreds, of students in that county with ridiculously inflated GPA's. The author of the article fails to attempts to explain how a 7 out of 4.0 is possible:

"An A in an honors class nets a student a 4.04. In a traditional class it's a 4.0. In advanced placement and dual enrollment classes, an A is a 4.08."

 My first impulse is to accuse these school officials of being unable to perform basic, elementary arithmetic; they clearly don't understand what an average is, ya kno', as in grade point average? They obviously average the grades from regular classes out of 4.0. Then add this to the sum of everything after the decimal point for the honors/AP classes divided by 3.86740331 (literally, I did the math). Still, how could one student take 32 honors and AP classes within 4 years? Most high school students take 7 classes a year (maybe 8 if they skip lunch). Plus, this student had 7 dual enrollment classes. Does dual enrollment that mean double the GPA? So an A would be an 8.0? Yippee! I'm also assuming there were a bunch of classes like Honors Bask-weaving 1 and AP Aerobics for the students to fulfill their core requirements.

Again, I have to wonder what the people running this school district are thinking. The whole point of a GPA is to have a relatively standardized system of evaluating and measuring the performance of students across the country. How could an artificially inflated GPA be meaningful to anyone?

The author himself raises this question:

"But what happens when students apply to colleges and universities? When a student with an unweighted 4.0 applies next to a student with a weighted 7.0, who gets the nod from admissions first?"

Without a doubt, the school district officials are intentionally inflating their students' grade point averages. Is it to show off these impressive grades to colleges? To get publicity for their students and school district? And the most important question of all, should school officials be punished for academic dishonesty?

Don't forget that one valedictorian's remark, "Of course, studying came first", when addressing her high marks. Sweetie, keep on telling yourself that you earned every bit of your 7.62 out of 4.0 (or 190.5%)!! ;) (Congrats on Georgetown, BTW.)

[FYI, you can memorize entire lectures and textbooks, and the highest GPA you could possibly get in 99.9% of school districts across America is around a 4.8. That's with honors and AP classes being weighted at 5.0 for A's. Remember kids, gym and art class don't count as honors.]