Getting Jobs — The Opinions of the Hullabaloo

With a staff that includes several seniors about to find themselves with bachelor’s degrees that won’t even get them jobs as baristas, The Hullabaloo understands how intimidated many Tulanians must feel in the face of the current job market.

You worked hard to keep your grade point average up, paid innumerable visits to your academic adviser to make sure that anthropology class was outside the European perspective, and managed to navigate through the Kafkaesque university bureaucracy to get your diploma.

Now, however, even that McDonald’s job you always joked about seems unattainable. For those of us who are philosophy and Portuguese majors, finding a job after graduation was always going to be a challenge. But what about all the business school students who thought they were guaranteed a career straight out of school? Simply going to graduate school first instead is only putting off what for now seems inevitable and accumulating another $100,000 in student loans for your creative writing MFA at Columbia is probably not the smartest financial decision.

Despite how things may appear, the post-graduation job search is not completely hopeless. There are many resources available to students at the Career Center. Definitely try those avenues first before completely giving up. Graduates are not entitled to jobs; they have to put in the effort to find them themselves. Whether you make an appointment with a career counselor or simply access the Career Center’s resources online, actively searching is obviously more effective than sitting on your mom’s couch moaning about how bad the market is.

Unfortunately for some seniors, even utilizing the Career Center will not guarantee that they find jobs. Sometimes even the most qualified graduate with the best interviewing and networking skills will still be unlucky in their job search. It is unfair for anyone — from career counselors to parents to peers — to completely brush off the effect of the current economic situation on the future of anyone graduating in the midst of it. It’s justifiably terrifying, and simply patting seniors on the head and telling them that all they need to do is network will neither solve their problems nor soothe their fears.

Even with that in mind, the class of 2010 should stay optimistic. However daunting the task of finding your first job as a real adult might seem, there’s still the chance that with enough effort, you could land the entry-level copy editing job of your dreams.