Ummmmmm . . . . enough already!

Is, um, everybody, um, ready to, ummmm, read a short entry, um, that’s about something, um, we’ve all been told not to do a countless amount of, um, times.
Helpful tip alert – stop saying “um” so much, no matter where you are because you will come off as a more professional person. Watch them especially during an interview. Read that first sentence again – wasn’t that extremely annoying just reading it?
The annoying awkward silence-filling phrases are extremely distracting while listening to students (and sometimes professors) who aren’t even aware they do it. Just like an alcoholic or a person addicted to Twinkies, the first step in correcting the problem is recognizing you’re doing it. But if I, a mere Journalism and Communication senior student, can recognize the over usage of “ums,” then imagine what employers think while interviewing. They might think you aren’t a good communicator or that you might not be able to work with people or think on your feet enough if “um” is popping out of your mouth every couple seconds.
You could have the most fabulous credentials in the world, but if your job requires communication, then the employer might not hire you because of the way you speak. I’ve had many acquaintances who go in for job interviews and have no idea what went wrong, but I think a lot of those rejections are caused by not only not being prepared, but by not being able to communicate efficiently. Remember everybody, you don’t have to spurt out an answer right away – some silence is good; it shows that you think before you speak.
Watch the ums in your life; you never know where they’ll pop up, whose ears they’ll invade, or how they can affect your career.

Might as well face it I’m addicted to job searching

A lot of us who are looking for jobs use online search services, including myself. Wow, what an overwhelming experience huh? There are tons of search options and even if you put some limitations on your search like a general area you want to work, then there are still tons of listings you have to sort through.
Last night I found a new college job seeking site with new listings I hadn’t seen on any other site. Yay, a new play toy! Then of course, I became addicted. No, that wasn’t just a figure of speech – I seriously searched over and over using different key words in different areas of the Journalism and Communication fields I would like to go in for over four hours.
After clicking, searching, and basically gluing my eyes to the screen, I said to myself, “Wow, did I just waste all that time searching and didn’t discover anything? I could have been doing something to take my mind off the stress of lookingi for a job. . . especially on a Friday night when looking for a job is the last thing on all my friends’ minds.” I figure, from all the skills, requirements, and experience needed listings on every job opening that I read, I should at the very least know what employers are looking for and how I can improve myself by learning those skills. Is it a bit sneaky to find out what they want and then make yourself exactly what they want? I don’t think so.
Hmmm, I’m having the strange urge to go do some more searching now.

Affection for connections: They can change your life

I will be graduating from a four-year college this May, and then attending graduate school for a B.S. in journalism and communication. My trek from undergraduate school to graduate school would have been a longer, more arduous task, if it weren’t for my friendly little sidekick – the connection.
The connection is an almost blessed occurrence in life and most of the time we aren’t even aware of it as it’s happening, much like a severely-repressed memory only discoverable by means of appearing on an episode of Dr. Phil. The connection sits and waits to spring up at an unexpected time and then sends us ahead of the pack like a nifty little convenient ladder shortcut in the ever-so popular children’s game.
Two years ago I impressed one of my journalism professors with a series of news stories I wrote in her class dealing with the shortage of flu vaccinations. She said that the university’s school paper needed more writers like me and that I could easily get hired. That’s connection one.
Some time passed and I got hired at my university’s paper. After writing there for a semester, the same professor told me she was impressed with my writing yet again, and that I should try to get an internship at my town’s newspaper. She dropped a few names and after I left the room as giddy as a teenage girl who just caught a glimpse of her favorite boy band lead singer, I contacted the editor of the paper. That’s connection two.
After a couple of interviews, I got the internship at the paper. I wrote almost 100 stories that summer that now fill the pages of my portfolio, I ate a few too many doughnuts, I got that much-needed, sometimes-hard-to-get “thing” called experience, I made a lot of other connections that may help me in the future, and I met the public relations director at my college at an event I had to cover. Let’s call my town paper connection three and the public relations director connection four.
Going back to school my senior year after the internship, I came with a lot of confidence. I wanted to do more than just the school newspaper and freelancing for my town’s newspaper, so I contacted the public relations director I previously met, asked him if I could help out his department, and got a job as a public relations writer for my university. You guessed right – that’s connection five.
Previously this year, I started searching for graduate schools and after picking one, I knew I had to get an assistantship. (Tuition wavers are always nice.) I searched through the lists of available assistantships full of computer lab attendants and professors’ aides and then the holy grail of assistantships crossed my eyes; it was to be a public relations writer for my graduate school’s PR department. I submitted my résumé, waited, waited some more, took some naps, ate some food, went to school, checked my e-mail far too many times and low and behold I finally got a message back.
The PR director from my future graduate school knew the PR director from my undergraduate school and thus, another connection helped me out. Connections are why we should never burn our bridges or disregard somebody because they can’t help us right now. The more people we know, the more help we can get and the more opportunities we may be given, so hey, contact me some time and make some more connections because just like Forest Gump’s mother said, “You never know what you’re going to get.”

Interviews for ‘zombie jobs’ still beneficial

Today I had a job interview, but it wasn’t to progress my skills as a journalist, it wasn’t for “hey this looks good on my résumé” purposes, and it definitely wasn’t for a title I could go around dropping while speaking to females to impress them.
The interview was for a menial, retail job that many college students like me have to get all the time to survive. Students need books, food, clothing, personal hygiene items, and the occasional recreational item to take their minds off of school for a few hours of the day like a video game or a DVD, and those costs can add up quick.
We have to suck it up, disregard our college education, put all of our highfalutin phrases away (like highfalutin), and get an entry level job in retail, industry, or business where customers have to talk into a giant head to get their ordes, to help pay for the costs of bettering ourselves through college.
Catch-22 situations such as these are all over the place, where we as students decide we don’t want to have to work at an entry-level job our whole lives so we go to college, yet we have to get a job there to help pay to avoid it.
As I sat in the chair being asked questions of how I would improve the company, what my good and bad qualities were, and all the other cliché questions college professors told us we would definitely be asked, I did realize something however.
These interviews are great learning experiences, especially if they are for jobs that we won’t be greatly disappointed if we don’t get hired. If we mess up an interview for stocking shelves, then let’s be frank, there are tons of other shelves that need stocking out there. If we mess up our dream job interview where we only get one shot, then lots of ice cream consumption is likely to occur as we spiral downward into a massive pit of depression and self loathing.
Students about to graduate, like myself, should understand that these interviews for temporary jobs can be far more helpful than any professor can give us in class. By going through interviews such as these, we can become familiar with some of the more obscure or oddball questions employers might throw at us and we can even become so comfortable with the interviewing experience that we can gush confidence in later interviews in far larger amounts that could be provided by anything purchased on an infomercial at 3 a.m.
So get out there and interview, even if you don’t want a job, because you might as well learn how to interview before you’re sweating like you’re under the hot seat on one of those television cop drama shows during your dream job interview. Interviews for ‘zombie’ jobs can still be beneficial.

Howl’s Echo

What constitutes a dream job exactly? I knew a girl who wanted to sing from the time she had lungs. I’ve heard about another guy, sort of an anonymous hero of mine, who lives out of his van in Bar Harbor, Maine and fixes motorcycles for money. They both had the pipes to succeed and are well contented, but what about the rest of us? Where is the Promised Land for the weeping majority? How was your Monday this week?
There are some who contend that the American dream has changed and that youngsters these days are too particular, and too picky around a safe paycheck, with its promise of basic cable, bread and milk. They may have a point. Still, given the sweeping cultural changes that birthed the sentiment to begin with, and the related evolution of the American labor market, is it really necessary to settle for a position that doesn’t engage you? This is not a rhetorical question – I’m opening the forum.

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Placement Agency

I applied to an advertisement for an administrative position that led to an interview with a placement agency. After a short talk about what I was looking for, I was tested on MS Word and Excel and suddenly had an office in my corner. They noted that I was: “Green, very green. Oh wow, you’re so green!” but seemed confident that they could find me an entry level suit-and-tie gig with someone interested in teaching and molding a recent grad. I wish I had done this earlier. It was the first appointment I have had in the city that was both professional and helpful. A lovely coincidence of wants has been forged – they get paid if I do. So I plan to find some similar organizations and put the hiring apparatus to work for me. Also, I am thinking that, if I can survive on temp work offered by them, I will probably find am opportunity to transition from the optical world much sooner that if I simply continue to work and hope for a break.

Pitfall on the East Side

On a crisp Sunday morning I hiked my way over to the East Side. Perched inside a starched, white collar; streaming a tie in the wind; flashing my shoes in the sun – they were “made in the mountains of Italy” and the world was going to know it! My destination was an expensive residential building. It housed a woman who (allegedly) spoke a language for each finger, was acquainted with royalty, and did quite well in the bizarre realm of Middle Eastern finance.
“Have a cup of tea. Take your tie off if you want. You’re a writer yeah? How would you change this document?” Whoosh!
I took a deep breath, thinking, “I’m being tested,” and eventually settled in to edit the dense bit of marketing copy.
She provided only a brief explanation after I handed in my assignment: “What I basically want to do is dive in for a few hours and see how well we work together.”
I know what you’re thinking, oldest trick in the book, right? Well, yeah, actually, but her resume was so impressive I hoped that it wasn’t true. How could a successful business person, a liaison associated with millions of dollars of financial transactions, dare to abuse the green, hard-searching hopefuls of NYC under the guise of an unpaid internship?
The tea must have sedated me. Some sort of compliance chemical stole my wits. Maybe she was stocking sodium pentothal, I don’t know, but, before I could say “MS Word,” I had redrafted her corporate summary, consolidated, edited, searched…lions and tigers and “I don’t know where the new file is, it’s your computer! ”
I stared into the irrational face of evil, my friends. At least, that was my impression. When I finally begged off my replacement was on her way in. She had us working in shifts.
“Now I want to see how you two work together.” The newcomer and I exchanged looks. Our “interviewer” was improvising.
“Sorry. I have a lunch. You only had me allocate four hours.”
I was dazed when I hit the streets. The sun glanced off the high-rise mirrors into my eyes, not my shoes. Where had my Sunday gone? What was in that tea? As I retreated towards the nearest downtown train I realized that, in a way, I had done well. She wanted me to come back and do more of her work for her.
In the hallway, before my escape, I managed to address the issue at hand, after the woman expressed that I could contribute alot. “I think your right. I can do this for you, but I need to know that it’s heading somewhere.”
She hadn’t taught me anything, or even been pleasant (though the tea was nice). As the train rolled into the station, I reflected that she had not even offered the courtesy of subway fare. Sharks man! Next time I’ll have use my skills for someone who is willing to pay for them.

Wahoo Redux

The interview for the unpaid internship worked itself out: It was like trying to shove a shirt and tie shaped peg into a hole full of sequins and cappuccino; like holding the Olympics in Lewiston, Maine; like hunting a gibnut with napalm – in short, worlds collided and did not mesh gracefully.
My host had no idea I was coming, never mind the confirmation, and thus seemed unable to articulate what she did or what I was meant to do. Based on her body language and the course of our conversation I realized two things. One, an unpaid internship is either a temp to hire gig, or a ploy for free labor. Two, I was never going to answer a phone for this particular post-production company, let alone climb the ladder, even a literal step, to change a light bulb. My time would have been better spent at the Starbucks, two blocks away, finishing Hemmingway’s Farewell to Arms – and probably less depressing.
Nevertheless, it was a useful experience and a confidence builder. It finally hit home that a company really is just a group of people doing something. Analogously, a fit (or lack there of) within a particular group is dependent upon everything from your degree, to your shoes, to who your uncle is. That is a both a pain in the gluteus and a grace, I think.
Based on my luck, so far, applying for work in Manhattan, I changed my tactics. I focused my searches on the entry-level, intern, and administrative, I altered my cover letters and was more candid in my correspondence, and I
started tooting my own horn as if the trumpet might disintegrate at any moment. Really, out of sheer frustration, I began to sell myself….and it worked. Within two hours I scheduled two more interviews. Wahoo!
I do not purport to generalize for the entirety of the graduating population, but I think college sets its products up for a shock. We buy into the idea that a degree is an accomplishment in itself and, by virtue of the four year routine, nurture a typically narrow set of skills, that are really only good for getting a diploma. Though the notion that one has to learn the game of job-searching is perfectly reasonable (and increasingly verifiable), in our bones we feel like we shouldn’t have to do it again. After all, I just spent every dime and the last four years institutionally “learning!” But there is a curve, and even when you get better at it, there’s a chance you’ll unknowingly bring the wrong shoes or uncle to the table. Fortitude pays off in this limited metropolitan pool; time is the great forgiver of bad haircuts and inexperience.
Happy Hoboken faux St. Patrick’s Day!

Wahoo!

I have an interview tomorrow. It’s for an unpaid administrative internship, not overly exciting, but certainly worth a wahoo! It’s the first response I’ve gotten from the big, mean city, after all, and it’s nice to have some token acknowledgment.
Actually, I find myself in an odd position because I’m not sure I want anything to do with an unpaid administrative gig. I think the interview itself will be a worthwhile experience. It is (almost) as much of an interview for them as for me: I already know how to operate a fax machine and answer the phone, so why would I want to spend my two days off playing gopher for a digital effects firm? Could it provide a flashy name on the ol’ resume? A helpful segue out of tech-land and into the skyscrapers? Something more?
Some wise folks have mentioned that I ought to abandon my dismal commute altogether, shy away from this opportunity, suffer through temping for a while and get some baksheesh for my labors. I think they are probably right. Still, it is difficult to abandon the stability of a known, full-time position and the good people I work with. So wahoo… but what to do?
Further bulletins as events warrant ~

Indiana Jones: Not Unemployed

The New York job hunt is dragging on. It is a tiring process of honing and patience just a short step away from faith. It occurred to me that I know an expert, a prominent career counselor from my home-sweet-home town of Portland, Maine, who has spent years rubbing elbows with the newly educated. I asked her for an interview to see if we could reformulate the challenges faced by new graduates and make them easier to understand. I wanted a new way to measure my efforts. She graciously agreed to help and did one better by providing the metaphor of the chasm.

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