first night spent at school...

Tonight was the first night I spent at school this semester past midnight. My first thought wasn't, "Wow, that sucks," but rather, "Wow, it's so late in the semester for this to be just starting."

Quite often last semester, I was at school until all hours of the morning.  Group projects, individual work, avoiding my roommate who would bring home unnamed (and probably untested) men for nightly sack-romping sessions and would leave me completely awkward in the morning: 

"Hi." 

"Hi."  

"So you're um...--"

"Taylor."

"Right.  Nice to meet you."

"Same here."

*silence*

"Pancakes?"

This isn't to say I haven't had any work this semester, because I have.  Granted, I don't have a job, but I've had enough school to keep me busy past the 9-5 of most stone-cold careers.  God forbid, I should be able to sleep sometimes, a fond, yet fleeting and completely unfrequent memory from last semester.

The strange thing about last night, when I was at school until the (for us, early) hour of 1:30 a.m. was that when the clock hit that midnight mark and I knew I'd be there a while longer, I felt some sense of comfort.

There were three of us in the computer lab.  I was doing my work.  One guy was looking at porn, and the other was playing some online arcade game, Bloons or something.  I felt there was a sense of community.  Or maybe I just felt serene.  It's like I was a world-class horse jockey and I'd been off the saddle for a good ten years.  Like a gymnast, getting back up o the rings after three years of being denied access for anabolic steroid-use reasons.  As if I were Britney Spears, getting back up the nerve, the songs, and the sanity to perform one last time at the VMAs (though not quite so horrendous, I hope... maybe that wasn't the best simile).  

Despite this feeling, I rather enjoy being in my own bed by 1:30 a.m.  It's nice to know you're productive and one of a collective of freaks staying at school until all hours of the morning, but it's also nice to cook dinner at home, talk to some friends on the phone, and maybe even *gasp* be in bed by midnight.

NOT INVITED...

Logging onto our career services web program today, I was greeted by the following two words in multiple boxes regarding my acceptance (or lack thereof) into interviewing for two big-name companies on our campus:

NOT INVITED

Needless to say, my heart cracked slightly at the sight of those two words.  

Why did they have to put it in such tones of rejection?  "Not invited."  Couldn't they have said something like, "Not selected, would you please consider applying in the future?" or at least something nicer?  "Not invited."  Like it's an exclusive party that I'm just not cool enough to get into.  "Not invited."  I know the last time I felt like this: it was when Greg my down-the-street neighbor had his birthday party in the fourth grade because I started hanging out wiht girls because they played handball and I played handball and I didn't think that was weird, and he and his friends thought it was a little strange because they liked playing football a lot more, but it wasn't really my fault that I'd rather get out my young aggression by smacking balls against walls than playing some pansy-ass touch version of a game where you should be tackling your oppenent and making them pray for mercy.  "Not invited."  It's like being rejected from prom from all of the girls in the school.  "Not invited."  Like the last time I called up some old friends to see if they wanted to rekindle the flames of amicability but instead they brushed me off saying that they had better things to do with their investment banker friends, who are a lot cooler than me because they make more money and get tables at clubs, which, by the way, I probably don't have the right kind of trendy clothes to get into anyway.  "Not invited."  I felt like maybe if I had put a fancy font on my resume they might have thought, "Well, he's cool enough to let into this soiree, let's bring him in," but instead they just said: "Not invited."  

It's funny how just those two days could turn my day upside-down on its head, because until then I was actually feeling pretty accepted by the world in which I live.  I still feel good about myself for the most part, but to not be invited based on a few lousy criteria and not on my actual ability... I tell you, I'd bring ten times the personality, audacity, and panache than any of the candidates who did get invited to these human resources conversations.

Not invited.

Fine.  I'll throw my own party.

being a student forever...

I've decided that I'm going to put my life on a new plan:

I'm going to be a student forever.

I'll have my B.S. in May.  After that, I think the only natural progression is to an M.S. or an M.A.  That should take about two or three years.  Then, I'll go for a Ph.D.  That should take another three.  I'll decide I want to be a doctor then, and go get my M.D.  That'll take another four (let's be optimistic).  I'll go to law school, get my J.D., take another three years.  

I figure that if I can run from student loans so long as I'm a matriculated student, then there's no harm in getting myself into hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt.

I'll have five degrees.  And I'll be thirty-five.  Entry Level Blogger, BS, MA, PhD, MD, Esq.

Not nearly old enough to die.

I hear in Europe and England they have all sort of initials for higher education.  Maybe I can extend this idea over there....

lack of opportunity...

Let me talk about on-campus recruitment again, and how unfair my particular university is.

If you remember from this entry, I am required to attend a pair of seminars before I gain access to our on-campus recruitment and interviewing program.  Well, I attended the seminars and now you're reading the blog of one, certified, interviewing maven.  

The problem is that today I went and looked for jobs to apply for.  I selected all recruitment jobs and came up with a long list, exactly 358 long.  The problem?  351 of them were for financial analysts, tax auditors, investment bankers, hedge fund managers, and entry-level banking positions.

The seven that weren't?  Four of them were Macy's, one was Polo Ralph Lauren, one was L'Oreal, and one was Google.

Can't my school offer me more choice?  What about those thousands of poor kids who aren't majoring in finance and/or accounting?  Thanks, university.  I can see you're looking out for the wee ones.

if i only learned one thing in economics...

It was guns and butter.

But if it wasn't that, then it was supply and demand.

And, if it wasn't that, then it was definitely the scarcity of resources, and the scarcity of time.

Economics professors love to loathe the scarcity of time. What do we have more than enough of? People, and we can birth them, too. Well, not all of us, but about 50% of us. What do we have a lot of? Hydrogen, oxygen, marble, trees.  What do we have just enough of?  Spice Girls reunions, Cat Stevens albums, and varieties of tomato.  What do we not have enough of?  Well, that would be time.

Why do I talk about the scarcity of time now?  Because time has been a big issue in my life.  More specifically related to this whole "recruitment" stint, the scheduling of my timeline.  So let's think about this timeline.

What I really want to do (I think) is advertising.  Specifically brand strategy, but that really has no impact on the discussion of my timeline.  However, as I have come to realize, advertising agencies don't really recruit until March or April, and then it's less of a recruit and more of an, "Oh, we need someone to fill this spot.  Who can start in a week?"  Unfortunately, the way school works, and the pressures of my university and my peers, is that people have been asking me since August whether I have had an offer for the following May.  That, and some jobs that interest me (*cough*Google*cough), though not advertising, are hiring right now.

So here's the timeline:

September: return to school, on-campus recruitment begins, pressure ensues

October: on-campus recruitment interviews, stress begins

November: on-campus recruitment interviews, mental breakdown

December: decisions on recruitment offers (please?) due

March: advertising recruitment

May: graduation

What that means is I can either do this whole recruiting thing and hopefully have a job by December for the following May in a field that isn't advertising but I would still be okay with (especially if it included free lunch).  Or, I could wait, feel pressure and diappointment from my peers, and hope somebody decides to hire me in a very competitive industry in March and, if the case that that fails, return home to my parents and cry on my childhood bed for about three months straight before scrambling together what life I have left in a somewhat valuable degree and a lot of destroyed perserverence.

Which sounds more appealing?

and you're supposed to help me find a job...?

The Office of Career Services.  Your best friend in senior year as you try to find a job.  Supposedly.

I just returned from my school's OCS, and I am thoroughly disappointed.  Should I be trusting these people to help usher me into the world of salaries and the 401(k)?

This is basically how on-campus recruitment goes:

1. Attend career fair

2. Drop resume to employer online

3. Get interview

3a. If no interview received, bid for an interview

4. Interview

5. Receive job (double crossed fingers style)

Now, to be able to drop your resume and complete step two, you must have attended two special seminars offered at our OCS: Recruitment Orientation and Interviewing Skills.  This is understandable, if you are a freshmen.  However, I am a senior.  Not to toot my own horn, but all of this job stuff, this ain't new to me.  I've had jobs for years.  I know how to interview.  And I'm attending a good school.  A business program.  I know how to do these things.  I don't need to be spoon-fed directions.  In short, I'm not a fuck-up.

But, beauaucracy is beauaucracy, and to get to step three, I need to attend these seminars.  Too bad the next ones aren't offered until the deadline of step two.  Now, you might say I should have been more on-the-ball about this whole system, but to that I say nay!  OCS is so far removed from our schooling and any mention of it is in passing.  How was I to know that these requirements were so stringent?  And that, without going through this process, to get your resume even looked at by an HR representative at some companies is impossible.  Believe me, I wish I could drop my resume off in other ways, get interviews at these companies through other ways, but that just doesn't seem to be the way things work in the real world.  And this must be what I go by; I'm not ready to enter the real world yet.  Baby steps, remember.

So, today I go to OCS to get all of this straightened out and see if I can possibly progress normally as step two to step three to step four, instead of dealing with that pesky step three-a.

OCS is supposed to be a professional environment.  I'm supposed to be able to trust them with my post-collegiate livelihood.  And, coming from the background of business studies, I think I can tell a poorly run institution when I see one.  And OCS....  

I get there and I swipe my ID card so the computer can read who I am.  It doesn't work.  I look at the student worker at the front desk.  He looks back, says nothing, then turns his head back down to Blender Magazine.  I manually type in my ID number.  It doesn't work.  I try again, this time removing the first identification letter, as the computer so kindly suggests.  Therein lies success!  The message I get?  "Please inform the front desk attendant of your arrival and appointment."  Why I had to go through the computer to do that baffles me.  So I turn to the student worker, who seems as if I had ruined his day, interrupting the latest article about Hilary Duff's budding music career.  

"I'm here to see Kendra--"

"She's right over there," he says, not really gesturing towards a direction.

"I'm right here," I hear a voice call directly from my left.  I look.  "Do we have an appointment?"  this supposed Kendra says.

"Yes, at 1:45."

"Oh, okay.  Give me... 8 minutes," she says.

Looking back at the front desk attendent, I see he has moved on to an article about High School Musical 2 and when I look back to where Kendra was, there is no one to be seen.  So, I make my way over to the waiting room chairs.

Now, I don't mean to sound like an angry stickler (if the duck quacks), but when your position in an organization involves having appointments with people who come visit you, isn't it common courtesy to look at your schedule ahead of time and a) know when you have a meeting and b) who that meeting is with?

Eight minutes later, Kendra returns and asks me to follow her to her office.  On the way, I notice about 20 new iMacs (at $1200+ each).  Does my university really need to update their hardware every time Apple comes up with some new gizmondo?  I begin to wonder where exactly my tuition dollars are going.  Apparently not to the actual efficiency of our career office, just the visage of efficiency.

Sitting down in her office, she asks, "So what are you here for?"  I reply that I'm having problems with my career account in that I can't reach step two in the process outlined above.  She says, "Well, have you attended both the sessions?"  I reply that I haven't, but that resumes are due sooner than the next ones.  "Well, you have to attend those," she says.  I explain that I understand that, but there are other issues here.  "There's one next Friday," she says.  Yes, I explain that I know that, but resumes are due to be dropped the Tuesday before.  "Well, you can still bid (step 3a)," she offers.  

"But won't that put me at a disadvantage?" I ask.

"No."

"If I drop my resume though, they can pick to interview me from that pile, and if I don't pick, then I can bid.  So if I don't have the first step, my only chance is to bid.  Isn't that a disadvantage?"

"...."

"Isn't it?"

She replies in a robotic voice, as if she were a very, very bad actress: "You won't be at a disadvantage."

"I don't think I understand."

"Let's go up to the front desk to see if they can track down if you have actually attended the seminars."

"...Okay," a bit confused I follow her lead.  Honestly, I'm unsure what else I could have said to make the situation better.  So we walk up to the front desk.

"This student (I don't think she remembers my name) might have taken the recruitment seminars, but we're not too sure, can you look it up for us?"  Expecting him to turn to the computer, I instead see him reaching down to pull up one of those mondo 4" three-ring binders full of pink slips of paper.

"When do you think you went?" he asks.

"Um..." not sure what to say I reply, "Maybe last year sometime?"

And that's when my "career advisor" says, "You're going to have to be a little more specific," then, putting on a baby voice, "See he has that binder there?  Each seminar you sign in with the honor code.  So if you say 'last year,' he'll have to go through every seminar we held last year and look for your name."

And my only question now, at the end of this ordeal, is: what are they doing with those dozens of new iMacs?  Playing Monopoly?

it's a carnivale of potential middle-management positions...!!

I always like being one of the first groups of people at career fairs. Why?  To start, you have the (debatable) advantage of being the premier impression presented to the recruiter.  Second, there are a lot less people to compete with for face time.  Third, you can actually move in the cramped room where there are over 100 companies with representatives working and dining on the corporate card (expense it!).  And, lastly, you get all that shit over with.  

I tell you, the career fair is probably the most awkward time during recruitment.  You’re there, with hundreds of other students, to sell yourself to companies who really are not going to remember you at the end of the day, unless you show up naked (Freshmen: take note).  You’re there with the rest of your interchangeable class, asking the same dumb questions we’re told to ask, getting the same dumb answers they’re told to respond with, you distribute some resumes, you pick up some free goods, and you rarely hear from the companies ever again. 

The last career fair I went to I took very seriously.  I dressed in a sharp suit with a striking shirt and a matching tie.  I had my portfolio notebook with my extra resumes and reference sheets.  I had a smart looking pen and keen eyes, ears, and mouth for conversation.  I gave out 15 resumes, hoping to get interviews and offers for summer positions.  Well, after following up, I got no response from those 15 resumes, and I have an excellent resume.

Therefore, for this career fair, I was a bit more lackadaisical.  Sure, I still dressed in some nice pants and put on my fancy shoes, but gone was the tie and jacket.  If they weren't going to take me seriously, I wasn't going to take them seriously, but it's always fun to pull out those business casual outfits.  Playing the game involves being aloof in that such way, not the tattered jeans I'd normally wear.

I still had my resumes, but only five.  And I knew what I was really going for: free goodies.  Stress balls, backpacks, water bottles, t-shirts, puzzles, soda, food, writing utensils, flyers, sticky notes, and any other crap that happened to be lying around on those employer tables.  Sure, I had no interest in working for Morgan Stanley, but if they'll give me a pen-light and a water bottle, I'll pretend to be into investment banking.  I think any right-minded person would do the same.

So I arrived at our latest career fair right at 11:00am, when doors were supposed to open.  I was greeted by a long line wrapping around the block of my classmates, dressed in black suits with white button-ups and red power ties.  Walking down the line to reach the end, I garnered more than a few stares ("bright blue is no color to be wearing when one is to be in the presence of Goldman Sachs representatives!!").  And then, slowly, we were let into the building.  

After producing my school ID for verification, I was given a map of all the 160-some-odd companies represented, and shoved into the wilderness.  There were three rooms to tackle.  First, I walked through all three, getting my bearings as to who had the best goods and who would be most fun to mess with.  Pepsi had free soda.  Zuirch had backpacks.  Yahoo had water bottles.  And IBM had fake ice cubes with blue LED lights on the inside.  I do believe we've found the winner.

The thing about being one of the first people to arrive at a career fair is that you can see all of the HR representatives from all of the companies waiting for people to come up to them.  Some companies send two reps, and I've seen some send up to seven.  Now that's a little overkill.  If you send seven representatives, it's like saying, "We know we're so cool that we'll have at least seven people at any given time just dying to talk to us.  And we'll probably have a queue, too."  Though, there is something comforting about being a prospective employee, walking down these aisles and being flanked by HR reps, just dying to act excited and enthusiastic about you (yes you!) being their next entry-level employee.

After talking to eight or nine companies, their shtick started to sound the same.  I would ask what majors they have openings for.  If it was not my area, I would feign interest.  They would explain the 2-month, 3-month, or (a record) 6-month training process.  I would look into their eyes and lean forward with a smile and glimmer.  When they turned to grab a pamphlet, I would eye what they had on the table.  I would stare at their finely manicured eyebrows until I could see every individual hair.  And then, when I used all my standard questions and somewhat probing questions ("Are you married?" "Do you have any plans for further education?  Does your company support that?" "How much of what you're saying is in a script?") and I could tell their intonation was getting tired, I said a quick thank you, lunged for the false ice cubes, pen-lights, and sticky notes, shoved them into my Zurich backpack, and made my way to the next clan of human resource representatives.

Around 15 companies and conversations later in my life (and four resumes handed out to actualy potential employers who sounded somewhat interesting and exciting, where I didn't have to feign interest, major, or preferred occupation), I had exhausted all of the goodies and exhausted my endurance for this day's career search.  As much as I would love to, I don't expect to hear from any of the four companies to whom I distributed my resume, in which case I've come out of the experience simply tired, hungry (I wasn't allowed to eat the employer-only food), and with some knick-knacks that will make some great stocking stuffers.

So why continue on with them?  Tradition?  Because you’re supposed to do it?  No... it must be the free goodies.  Believe me when I say I can always use more stress balls.

the beginning of the end...

Summer is over, September is well under way, and school has begun once again.

The Freshmen have invaded, the Sophomores and Juniors have been reunited with each other, and the Seniors well... we're scared to death. Nobody has properly warned us that after four years we would have to go out and get jobs. Or maybe we just weren't listening. Sounds of partying are just so much more enticing.

But we're here. Nine short months until we get violently pushed into the real world. We've never been in the real world before. We entered school when we were five; we went through grammer school, junior high school, high school, and now what is called "higher education." With nearly two decades of straight school under our belts, part-time jobs for beer money aside, the real world is a far off and scary place.

Where do we start? On-campus recruitment, past internships, past jobs, connections, networking, skill sets, creativity, analysis, communication, and work, work, work. This is what we've worked for. This is what we've set ourselves up for. Are we ready?

Are we ready?

Probably not.

And so ensues Senior year, the end of our lives as we know it, and the beginning of our lives-to-be.