Pep talks should include a concrete bit of take-away advice. Here are two posts and a book by Lindsay Pollack in which she dispenses advice similar to mine (i.e., rarely will forward motion take you in the wrong direction), but she somehow manages to dispense her wisdom in a manner several degrees kinder than mine.

Two posts about job-searching in a recession for the newly graduated:

How Part-Time Work and Volunteering Can Help You Find a Job

Finding a Job After Graduation

Ms. Pollack’s Book:

Getting from College to Career: 90 Things to Do Before You Join the Real World

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Yes, the recession sucks. For everyone. Not just for the newly graduated who are spending their first few post-college moments wondering why they spent four years and an obscene amount of money earning a degree that won’t, as it turns out, guarantee them a job so they can pay off those student loans. Reality, as I have learned after 35 years on the planet, is rarely subtle. It almost always comes in shockingly large, crotch-kicking doses that we coddled human beings tend not to be prepared for.

Which is to say, suck it up, grab onto those boot straps, keep using your brain, and just find a damn job. The job you find will almost certainly not be the career-launching moment you’d envisioned for yourself four years ago. Too bad. Times are tough. Aim for any job that falls under the general category of your dream career, make some money, accrue some experience. Don’t be sad and whiny and pathetic and sit on your (parent’s) couch and bitch about how effing brilliant you are and how heartbreaking it is that no one will hire you.

No one is hiring anyone, and any companies that are hiring have a whole slew of recently laid-off, older, educated, certainly smart and definitely experienced, people to choose from. And that is not you. You, my adorable little newbie, are still wet behind your brilliant little ears, and even though your brain is packed full of ridiculous volumes of facts and knowledge, and even though you were a technology whisperer when you were still pooping in your pants, you have no experience in the real world. Which is why you’re crying on your parent’s couch and don’t yet understand how to buckle down and get it done (as it were).

Again I say: most humans do not enjoy reality. Animals probably don’t either, but they have always resided in the nasty, brutish and short state of nature and don’t have the questionably useful levels of higher thought that we humans are so fortunate to possess. If animals sat around pondering the suckiness of reality, they’d be off their guard and would get eaten by all the bigger, less-thinking animals.

The moral being: It’s okay for humans to employ higher thought and ponder the crapshoot that is our reality, but while pondering and thinking, keep moving forward and get a job—almost any job will do at this point—so you can survive in a down economy. Worry about sculpting your career to a state of sublime perfection later; at the moment the fittest will be surviving by adding interesting bullet-points to their résumés.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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It’s June, and the air is awash with the distinct scent of college graduates sweating in their rented caps and gowns. Here’s my positive spin on having the bad luck to be a college graduate looking for your first job when no one is hiring: the pressure’s pretty much off. Getting any job will do, which means you won’t have to leap any tall buildings right off the bat. Seriously, your parents will be stoked as long as you don’t end up back in their basement.

Going back to school is always an option. I mentioned previously that research has been done (I do love data) on college grads in the early 1980s who hid out in grad school instead of trying to find a job in a recession, and their future career trajectories and earning potential were in no way harmed.

If you’re sick of school (how is that even possible?) and don’t feel it’s necessary to add to your student loan tab, then by all means get to it and find a job. Here’s some advice (which you’ll be needing).

Further Reading and Resources:

100 Best Lifehack Lists for Recent College Grads
100 Useful Job Search Tools for Recent College Grads
About.com: Job Searching
Found Your Career
Jobs for College Grads and Career Changers
New Resource for Recent College Grads & Entry Level Job Seekers
One Day One Job: Entry Level Jobs for New College Grads
One Day One Internship
Stimulus Jobs for New College Grads
Teach for America Attracts More College Grads
The Best Job Markets for Recent College Grads
Tools for a Tough Market: 100 Resources for College Grads
Why Your College Grad Doesn’t Have a Job Yet…& 10 Things You Can Do to Fix That

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Theoretically, the whole point of engaging in higher education is to move (at whatever time frame suits you) from childhood to career-having adulthood. My own personal—and impossibly dreamy–life path would involve never completing the education portion and really just avoiding the career part altogether. (Stupid money-necessitating reality. Why won’t anyone pay me to be a perpetual college student?) This is all by way of explaining that it’s because education and career are usually linked that I sometimes ditch higher education topics and stray over to the career side of the yard.

Dyske Suematsu wrote this essay pondering exactly what I’ve been mulling over in my noggin for years: Why is it that some obviously talented individuals can’t seem to succeed to the degree in which anyone who has seen evidence of their talent, thinks that they should? I had always theorized (as had Mr. Suematsu, as it turns out) that those less-than-successful types either weren’t able to pull themselves together and go out and seek their fortunes, or that they could just never find that one career niche that fit their talent and allowed them to blossom (as it were).

So what about the people who do kick ass on the career world? Are they more stupendous in their talent? What is it that separates them from the talented folks who don’t, erm, blast off into the clouds or whatever? Dyske Suematsu has a profound nugget of an explanation that makes a huge amount of sense to me. I’m simplifying, but basically his theory is this: Talented individuals are of two types, the ones who excel at Everything Else, and the ones who fear Everything Else.

‘Everything Else’ being all the other crap one has to put up with depending upon which career an individual has found themselves swimming in, i.e., a musician can’t play in a vacuum and become successful; he has to work all other aspects of a career in music (and work them really well) in order to get gigs, get paid, promote himself and his music, get a record deal, interview with the press, deal with masses of life-sucking people, etc. If he’s no good at Everything Else, or if he fears Everything Else, then his chances of success in his area of talent dwindle hugely.

So, to be blunt (that’s my special skill) we’ve all got some bit that we’re really damn good at. The trick to achieving success and happiness is to figure out your talent/special skill, find a career that utilizes it, and figure out a way to kick Everything Else’s ass. Alternatively, if you’re just not someone who is ever going to conquer your fear of Everything Else, then either accept the possibility that there will probably not be any super-freaky success in your future, or find the version of your talent-utilizing career that involves less of the Everything Else, like being a studio musician instead of a rock star.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Jason Seiden has written a compelling piece about the concept of college education as we know it, and the vision he has for its future (hint: things are not going to stay the same).

I’m an old-fashioned, pen-and-paper loving girl who adores education in all of its forms, and I’m especially enamored of the halcyon days of the traditional four-year college degree. Which is to say that I am not the most receptive audience for Mr. Seiden’s proposal that college’s days are numbered.

However, since I’m now 35 and am officially an adult (and society makes you act like a grown-up whether you want to or not) I’ve been trying to open my little noggin up to new thoughts and ideas. So, with much wishing it wasn’t so, I must admit that his ideas have merit and I can see logic in his argument.

Hey, college: you’ve been put on notice. My kids will probably not experience you the way I did. My guess is, by the time they get there, a college education could have some of the following characteristics:

–College will be less about the four years that follow high school than about a lifelong commitment to a learning community.

–College degrees may be staged. One of the first areas of focus for many out of school will be basic professional skills, which in many cases will be taught in blended study/work environments.

–Northeastern and Drexel already use this model, where internships are part of the program. Some professional grad schools use this model, too. This will get students into the working world and earning an income quicker.

–Math and science will also get early billing in the curriculum. Not knowing how to divide isn’t cute, it’s dangerous. Our economy today requires incredible specialization, which in turn requires more detailed, and higher level thinking. That means math. From my experience, people are a lot better at math than they give themselves credit for. Their issues aren’t about manipulating numbers, they’re about the teachers they had[link]. We’ll get over it.

–The liberal arts education will become a lifelong endeavor. People will take ongoing courses in English, the arts, history, and the humanities. Knowing something of the world around you will be a status symbol… and for businesses, these ongoing courses will provide tremendous networking opportunities.

That last paragraph is a good one. He makes some good points, yes? Even so, change kind of blows. On the inside, I’m sticking my bottom lip out in a preschooler pout and I’m kicking the ground like a three-year-old who doesn’t want to use her words.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

hat tip: Lynn Mattoon

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The Frugal Duchess has a guest post from Consumer Credit Counseling Service up about graduating seniors and the financial wisdom it behooves them to know. Learn it. Know it. Live it. (Or there will be no home-owning in your future and your student loan debt will pale in comparison to your credit card debt and you will be crushed like an insignificant bug under the weight of it all). Am I over-explaining? Do you over-stand yet? Don’t be one of those idiot college grads who got an ‘A’ in calculus but can’t grok how money works. For anyone who still isn’t sure: if you have some, you can spend it, if you don’t have some, you effing can’t.

I have a theory that financial literacy and parallel parking are the modern-day tests for Survival of the Fittest. Back in our life-in-the-state-of-nature days, keeping the fire lit, surviving the winter without four walls and heating ducts, and avoiding being scarfed down by a wild animal were the tests for survival. Now we’ve got parallel parking and not ending up on the street because you spent money you didn’t have.

Further Reading and Resources:

Consumer Credit Counseling Service
Ramit Sethi: I Will Teach You To Be Rich
Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy
Consumer Jungle
Council for Economic Education
Money Smart
Financial Literacy Through Video Games
Push for Financial Literacy Spreads to Schools
Reuters: New Young Adult Financial Literacy Curriculum
Newsweek: Clues for the Clueless

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image credit: Alex Nabaum

Reading this article in the Wall Street Journal—while being informed fully of the situation —will make you want to beat your head against a wall. The job market has pretty well reached mythical status for recent college graduates; the “job market” was a place other generations did some minimal step-following in order to slip their educated way into a spot seemingly reserved for them. “Them” being the twenty-somethings who had followed procedure: graduated with decent grades in high school, taken all required standardized tests, gotten into colleges and universities, graduated with one or more degrees, etc.

I can’t imagine how pissed off the current generation (are we still on Y? When do we get to Z?) must be regarding their financial futures. They’ve been jumping through academic hoops since middle school in order to secure their spot in Careerland. And now, things don’t seem to be progressing according to plan. If’n I were a Gen-Yer (I’m Gen-X) I would be so done with adults and jobs and school and rules. There are going to be a lot of twenty-somethings living off the grid, far away on tropical islands, telling society to perform expletive-y things on itself.

Here’s the teensy smidge of silver lining…at the end of the article, there are a few lines that give recent grads another option (besides smashing their heads repeatedly against the Job Market Wall:

Others are opting to ride out the slump doing public service. At AmeriCorps, a nationwide community-service network, applications more than tripled to about 48,500 between November 2008 and March compared to the same time period a year earlier. Teach for America received 35,000 applications this year — 42% more than last year. About 70% of those were recent college graduates. Among the most common reasons people cited for applying, according to Teach for America, were poor job conditions and President Barack Obama’s call to public service.

Another alternative to unemployment or a low-paying job: Stay in school.

Graduate applications for 2007-2008 were up 8% nationwide compared to the year before, according to the most recent numbers from the Council of Graduate Schools. Schools such as Northwestern University and Harvard are already tracking double-digit increases this year.

College grads who went to graduate school instead of the job market during the early ’80s recession didn’t suffer the same wage losses, says Ms. Kahn, the Yale economist.

I love school, so I see no downside to sticking one’s head in the proverbial sand (grad school) and waiting the economic slumpiness out. There will be more student loan debts, but maybe there’s a way to keep the course load manageable enough to also work at the lame job you’re ridiculously overqualified for but it’s the only job you could find after months of searching. And, really, isn’t being in school the perfect excuse for having a crappy job and a cash-flow problem? I’m not kidding, I think I’ve found the perfect hiding place to wait out the Recession Boogeyman—a nice, long PhD with a crappy job on the side. It’s perfect.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

As a high school student, I rarely took notes and pretty much only carried my textbooks home for show. Honestly, I don’t know who it was I was keen on impressing with my fake study habits, as my parents weren’t in the habit of breathing down my neck and all of my friends knew damn well that I tended to do my homework at school the following day, usually in the hall five minutes before it was due.

In high school, my study habits and note-taking skills had little or no time to really blossom. If I had been under more pressure or had gone to a larger or more competitive high school, it’s possible that I would have been ready to take notes as speedily and efficiently as my fellow freshmen could the first day of class at Cal State.

My first week of college was an excruciatingly eye-opening one for me. The professors all started right in with the lecturing, no first-day coddling and explaining and handing out of textbooks, just some syllabi and immediate lectures. This caused me to have big, wide, freaked-out eyes that looked around the lecture hall in a panic as I realized everyone else was as ready to start the lecture-giving, note-taking, student-teacher relationship as the professor was.

I was not ready, and would get so behind writing down one all-important professorly sentence that I’d totally miss the next few crucial statements or explanations, and would only know that I’d missed something that was probably pivotal to my understanding of the whole concept, but I’d have no clue exactly what the precious bit was. And you can really only ask the person sitting next to you “What did he just say?!” once, or you risk pissing everyone off and looking like an idiot (which I was, as I hadn’t used my four years of high school wisely and learned how to effing learn before I waltzed into the post-secondary phase of my education.

Once I’d made it past the academic probation hurdle, I got to bask in the crushing defeat of realizing that while I may have been just smart enough to have gotten away with not having to apply myself in high school, I possessed nowhere near the intelligence it would take to glide through college without fine-tuning my study skills. Trial by fire sucks, but it is effective. I didn’t enjoy having to tell my parents that I’d just blown a semester’s worth of their hard-earned money, nor did I take any pleasure in having to admit to myself that I was going to have to work my ass off in college just like everyone else.

The end result of many years of college-level note-taking and learning was this: First of all, I was never going to excel at the freakishly quick and complete note-taking style a lot of other students seemed to have; it was like they all went to some secretarial school at night and learned shorthand, unbeknownst to me. Also, I only have time to listen to a lecture once, so no audio-recording lectures and re-listening to them for me. Which meant that I had to figure out how to listen to the whole lecture, not lose chunks of pertinent info while struggling to write verbatim every line that spilled from the professor’s lips.

My perfect solution was to take limited key-word notes in class. I’d read the chapters that were to be covered before class so I had an idea what the instructor was talking about and what I was or wasn’t clear on. What the lecture didn’t illuminate further, I’d jot down. My lecture notes were basically like a shopping list of stuff to look up in detail and learn completely later. And by “later” I mean that same day, as soon after class as possible.

I learn information best by having a question, reading about it, writing down the info, and reviewing it later. Anything I couldn’t grok through the text, the lecture, or my own research (I inherited my Grandfather’s science reference library, and all the stuff not written in German is quite helpful) I’d force from the brain of the professor during office hours. If they didn’t explain it so I could understand it in class, I’d make them do it again on paper until it made sense.

It’s such a waste to have spent a few years getting really good at something, and then to never again have a reason to use it to that same degree. The learning how to learn I’ll use for the rest of my life, but not so much with the note-taking. It’s all right—it was satisfying to have learned how not to suck at being a student and to never again have to feel like the least prepared doof in the room.

Further Reading and Resources:

Five Best Note-Taking Tools

The Art of Taking Science Notes

How To Improve Note-Taking Skills

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image credit: eileen barroso

An informational interview is one of the more valuable modes of discovery for really understanding a given career. There’s no better way of figuring out what the job actually entails on a daily basis, what the education requirements might be, and what type of person would do well/be happy in said career. And that right there is the best part of the interview: figuring out the personality type that meshes so well with someone’s chosen field, and listening to them explain how they got from Point A to Point B on their career path.

The circuitous routes are fascinating, the direct I-Knew-What-I-Wanted-To-Be-Before-I-Could-Walk routes are compelling for their intense focus, and then there are the one-eighties who about-face partway through and head in the complete opposite direction. Honestly, when I’m at a dinner or a party and I’m forced to abandon my reclusive tendencies and talk to humans I don’t know, finding out how they got where they are professionally is much more interesting to me than what it is they do all day.

The Pursue the Passion project has an entire section of their site devoted to archived informational interviews. The idea behind the project is amazing all on its own:

Pursue the Passion started as a group of college students who had no idea what to do with their lives after graduation. The solution to their dilemma was to hit the road and explore different career options by interviewing people about their career paths. They found a sponsor in Jobing.com, bought an RV, and started exploring the possibilities. Sixteen thousand miles and hundreds of interviews later, their concept has turned into a flagship program of the Jobing Foundation.

Equally fabulous is the collection of interviews they’ve archived. Most of the interviews are conducted by the PTP team during the annual tours they take in their RV. Interviews are also conducted by high school students who’ve hit the school project jackpot and get to pick the brain of an adult currently living the teenage interviewer’s career dream (stuntman, video game designer, etc.). It’s a learning experience, so the teachers approve, and it gives the kids a much more realistic picture of what their fantasy job involves.

Pursue the Passion interviews are listed by Industry, by Name, by State or by Title.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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For any prospective college student (graduate student or undergrad) in the throes of the college application process, you might want to read this hilarious post by Tenured Radical, aka Claire B. Potter of Wesleyan University. It will give you insight into the application process from the letter-of-recommendation writer’s point of view, be they high school teachers or undergrad profs.

The post will help you to understand how much those educators do for their students. And the portion of the post where Tenured Radical goes off on the schools who will be receiving these applications and letters for their asinine, inelegant, time-sucking system is truthful, satisfying and effing humorous.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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