After I graduated from the University of Central Florida a few months ago I felt lost. It was the first time in my life that I didn't have a plan drawn out for myself. When you're in school there is a set timeline drawn out for you. You take class A, which qualifies you for class B and then class C and so on. What happens after you're done with class Z though and you graduate? I was scrambling. It was clear that none of the companies I had interned at had room to hire me and my journalism degree didn't exactly bring companies pounding at me door. I am now happily employed in a job that has nothing to do with what I went to school for, but I definitely learned a lot in that month after graduation before I got my job.
1. You need to be flexible with either your location or vocation.
I was not willing to move to the middle of nowhere to write for a tiny paper. I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin and moved to Orlando immediately after high school. I chose to go to college in Orlando because it was where I wanted to live. I'm not saying I am unwilling to relocate, but I am unwilling to move to a subpar city for an entry level job. I decided to look for jobs almost exclusively in Orlando. I managed to get one rather quickly too. I decided to use the skills I learned from school to get my sales job, but that took a little bit of reaching to relate them to the description while I was in the interview process.
2. Some employers will try to take advantage of your desperation.
There are plenty of sleazy companies out there. That capitalize on you being lost and not knowing what you are going to do with your life after school. I had to sift through plenty of get-rich-quick schemes when I was looking for a job. I even turned down one job that attempted to hire me on the spot after my interview. The hours sucked, the work sucked and the pay sucked, but it was the first company to offer me a job, which made it enticing at the moment. They used tactics to boost my ego and make me feel like if I didn't take the job I probably wouldn't find one right away. It's worth turning down positions that you don't feel good about, weighing your options and finding a job that you feel good about.
3. Apply everywhere.
I was applying to jobs that I had no business applying to and in all honesty, one hired me. I had never worked in sales. I went to school to be a writer. I probably applied to close to 100 jobs. If there was something in the position that I could relate to journalism I would apply. If it said you needed to work with customers I'd relate it to interviewing people for a story. If it said that I had to juggle responsibilities I'd tell them how I had to be working at three stories at once sometimes. If the job said you had to have a sense of leadership I'd relate it to being an editor at the UCF paper. If you're smart about it you can twist things almost any way you want.
Job hunting can be hard and uncertain. You might not end up where you thought you might, but there is something out there that will make you happy if you are open to new experiences.
