Looking for a job after college (part 1)

The following is an excerpt from a book I am currently working on. I'm currently posting the pending work in process to my blog in case I never finish this piece and end up scrapping the project. Currently, this book is over 60 pages long in Microsoft Word format.

By the time I graduated my state’s university, it was May of 2010 and I came out of it with no student loans or credit card debt. I had a little bit of money left over from scholarships. I started out with about $2000 to my name. I was in a better situation financially than most of my peers however I faced my biggest challenge just trying to find employment after college.

All throughout high school and college, I kept my lifestyle very limited to ensure having the most amount of time to study and maintain a high grade point average. Until the age of 22, I had never worked a real job before, never had a car, and barely even had a cell phone. If I wasn’t studying, I was either playing video games or skateboarding. Both were cheap forms of entertainment and did not require time commitments. It was a decision on my part to avoid part time jobs and vehicles because those required time and resources. This was a decision that hurt me right after college.

During my last few years at my state’s university, business majors were encouraged to network, join a business fraternity, and submit applications for job openings in order to have a better chance to get employed before or upon graduation. I did none of this because I wanted to focus more on my studies to maintain a high gpa and I really hated interacting with people I don’t know. Networking just always felt incredibly phony. Again, these were decisions that hurt me after graduation.

The prior year of 2009 was when the financial meltdown occurred. During my last few semesters at university, I kept hearing my peers talk about how no companies were hiring, current students were competing with older students for the same jobs, and current employees were getting fired from their positions. It really filled me with a sense of hopelessness but I had no real choice but to just keep going.

After college was done, I enjoyed myself for about a week before I started trying to look for work. It was then when I first felt like the training wheels were kicked off. In college, you attended class, studied, and took exams. It was very routine and you knew what to expect on a daily basis. But when all of that is in the past, you realize that you have to figure out what you want, set your own plans up, and see if you can achieve those goals. I didn’t really have someone give me instructions to find a job, I just had to jump in and see what happened.

I logged into my college’s career database, uploaded my resume, and started looking for positions. And immediately, I saw the desperation of the situation I had walked into. As a college grad, I had no actual work experience in the accounting field. My resume just had my name on it, education, and career aspirations. Ideally, I was looking for an entry level accounting position where I could enter a company and the managers would train me how to do my job. As I looked at the positions available, I saw only a total of three positions available that were related to accounting. What was worse was that two of those positions were higher level management positions that required at least 4 to 6 years of experience. Worse still was that the only position that was entry level required 2 years of accounting related experience.