A Brief Job Hunting History Part 1

Ok, so I'm in Ecuador! YAY! But Gee Alex, how are you posting in third world country conditions? Simple, pre-written posts :)

I will not be here to comment or anything until around the 30th, so please, fill my inbox with comments in the meantime.

Now where to begin. I first started looking at jobs and potential jobs back in November of 09. I had fancies of being an FBI agent or working for the government. Or for writing novels. Or for working as a graphic designer. I went to several career fairs, made a pretty impressive resume for having no real work experience outside of "Cook" and "Barista" (Those are actually on my resume). So, around February I started applying. My first application was to some tech company that waS looking for a desktop publisher based out in Arizona. I got a lovely 'Thanks, but no thanks' e-mail from them pretty much right away. No big deal, I knew that in this economy the chances of me getting a job right away were slim to none.

So I considered internships as a possibility to pad my resume while still looking for that elusive 'Big Boy Job'. I applied to about 10 companies for internships in May and June. Three were for design, five for random marketing, and the other two for writing positions. I got call backs for the two writing positions but no interview.

Fast forward to the beginning of July and there's me, still working my crappy part-time job, and working more or less full time scouring the Interwebs, the local paper, and the school's Job Board for any job that I could possibly fill. I think I must have sent out close to fifty resumes and cover letters and writing samples. The resumes, most of which were tailored to the company to fit it's specific needs, and the cover letters all were. After a while similar companies start to get the resume I already had fixed for another company but with the names replaced. I think I only ever sent out three resumes to a company that was just my stock and standard resume.

I stayed level headed the whole time. I knew from the get go this would be work. But after several months of nothing, and with the school job board slowing to a grueling pace of very few to no new job postings, things began to look bad. I remember being up until the wee hours of the morning searching Monster, or looking through wikipedia for the top job providers in the state/local cities for places that I could just send a resume to.

It wasn't until mid July that I heard back from one of the random marketing internships that wanted to do an interview. But that's a case for Part 2.