Got a Job?

If you are one of those few that answered yes to this question you do not realize how lucky you are. Indeed, jobs are getting difficult to come by nowadays. I have been in New Jersey for a month and have been looking for a job for almost double that time with no positive results. Sure, I have been on several interviews, but none of them ended up being the job for me. Sometimes because they were down right awful and sometimes because the pay was way too low. I always thought (maybe wrongly) that if you had a college degree you would always be able to find a job after you graduated, even if it was just an entry-level position. Well, as has been proven to me over the past few months this is clearly not the case.

It leaves one feeling as if the degree you received was a waste of time, and more and more I am realizing that mine also falls into this category. College is great IF you chose the right degree. A trade degree is exactly what one needs in order to be successful in today's hostile job market (Ie; engineering, nursing, physical therapist, etc). Another inportant reason to get a 'specialized' degree would be because most jobs look more for experience in a given field than they at your actual education and GPA. In a specialized degree you get exactly that through internships, and trade oriented in-classroom education. But with a general degree like mine, you dont receive that and when applying for a certain position the employer will most likely hire the person with the experience and no college degree over you with your general degree and high GPA.

These are just some of the things I have learned over the past few months. I have realized that in order to be successful I will either have to go back to school or jump through an endless amount of 'hoops' to get into one of these specialized fields that provide a secure career (for me probably education/teaching). So, next time you hear someone say 'hmmm, what should I major in?' or 'I really like philosophy or political science', you should say NOOOOOOO!!!! Really think about it in light of today's world and not the world as it was ten or fifteen years ago.