There was a point in time, about halfway through my senior year of college, when I realized that maybe I should have majored in chemical engineering instead of English Literature. While my friends were being wined and dined by high-profile companies in Manhattan, I was serving overpriced steak to unappreciative yuppies in the suburbs of Charlotte, struggling through my last semester of college.
In the spring of 2012, half of recent graduates were underemployed, or not employed at all. The country was working its way through a serious recession and jobs for inexperienced graduates were hard to come by. It’s an age-old dilemma: how are you supposed to gain experience if no one will hire you without any? And it seems no one has a good answer for this. Of the people I knew with definite job leads, they all seemed appalled that I didn’t have an internship and 1,500 connections on LinkedIn. But alas, three months before college graduation, I figured I should go ahead and start applying for full time jobs.
Considering my part-time job as a server was literally soul crushing, I refused to be a waitress forever. In just a few months, I would be the only person at the restaurant with a Bachelor’s Degree and I wasn’t going to live with the embarrassment of being way overqualified for a position that I hated. In order to save what little self-respect I had left, I had to at least try to secure a future for myself. Don’t get me wrong—I applied for a number of jobs: junior copyeditors, assistant editors, even legal secretaries. It just seemed as though the jobs weren’t there. Not for an inexperienced 22-year-old steak waitress, at least.
This blog serves as a mash-up of my life as a liberal arts enthusiast, my triumphs and failures in the real world, and my search for employment after graduation.
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