Notes

In an attempt to keep the blogging going, I present more awesome things part two!

More awesome things include:

• Having a pigeon try to land on the front wheel of your bike while you are riding it. Dumbest pigeon I have ever seen.


• Sleeping


• Mochi Ice Cream

The semester is almost over. Throughout I've had many meandering thoughts, questions, revelations, etc... but I have been very bad at writing them down, and when I sit in front of the computer all sense of productivity leaves me. On occasion I'll bother to write down a scrap of something into a notebook, and that's all I have as proof that my mind was working for the past four months.

Such random notes include "Philosophy is to be consumed and absorbed until it becomes manifest in one's own breath," another feeble attempt to outline a parable I have been mulling over in my head for years (statues are self aware, but can only understand themselves through men, philosophy ensues), "Past-laden presents bearing various possibilities." (To be fair I think that may have been a transcription of something else), and a dozen admonitions to myself on the vein of "GET THIS DONE FFS," "Stop sucking", "WTF is this shit?" and a few "GDI"s thrown in.

Things I love in Life

• Midget Tandem Bikes. The people in the car with me refused to believe that we had passed one until a fortuitous red light forced them to look twice, and then a third time. Pretty damn awesome.


• Cinnabon. So delicious.


• Kicking a habit. I am so done with WoW.


• Eternal Recurrence, aka the purging of regret.


• HTML. I love a good puzzle.


• Bikes. I need to bike more.


• Libraries. While every other passion of mine has died down or been put on the back burner for more "pressing" priorities, my love for the library has only grown.

Looking for Work and the Employment Gap

This was day one of my hit the ground running employment search. I'm graduating in about a month, and so it's time to start preparing for the next big phase of my life. Step one in that preparation is getting a job. Of course, I've been doing job research for years before this on the Publishing and Library science industries, but now I am looking for particular contacts and actually destinations for my resume.

The biggest problem so far has been that I am either over or underqualified for every job offering. Internship is big in the publishing industry, but in an effort to get free labor without being sued for exploitation, most companies will give internships to people who can be 'paid' in college credit. Therefore, if you are not a college junior or senior you can't get in on a lot of these programs.

The next most common job offers are for senior level positions. Managers, executives, etc... These usually come with the caveat 'Prior experience required.' Luckily for me, I do have some prior experience because I wormed my way into getting a position at the university press, but that is not the two to three years that most people are looking for, and at 10 hours a week it has given me experience, but not enough for me to be experienced.

All of this is making me feel as if I am being punished for graduating in four years. I worked hard to concentrate on my studies and my studies alone so that I would graduate with a minimum of debt, but I now fear that this has actually hurt my chances of employment at the moment. I'm in the ugly position of having not that many extracurricular accomplishments to illustrate my passion for books and learning, and at the same time leaving the place where I can develop my resume in that direction.

But all is not lost. The job search is frustrating for everyone right now, but if I keep at it and keep all of my options open I still have a chance at finding my in. If I can't find any traditional listings that I fit, I will simply start sending out direct e-mails to places that may be hiring, and once I graduate I can start doing that on foot. There are jobs if you look, that's what I'm hoping. Even in a recession some things just need to get done, and the world needs good people to do them.

I've been doing a lot of employment research, and sometimes looking through the mistakes of others makes me feel a little bit more confident about what I can achieve. I found a good example of this today via NotHired.




When I saw this I started thinking of a similar situation I ended up in last year when I was looking for a summer internship. I had sent in an e-mail inquiring about working for a smaller publishing house in New York and received back an e-mail so riddled in errors that I crossed that house off my prospects list immediately. What's crazy is that in this case the error went the other way around, and it was the publisher that failed, not the applicant.