College Grad Lessons

About two weeks ago, @Falldog sent me an article that he thought would be fitting for College Grad Lessons. The article, “Job Forecast for College Seniors: Grimmer Than Ever,” was featured in Time and highlights what many of us are experience or trying to avoid. For recent college graduates, like myself, having any job is considered lucky. This might mean a rough start to our ideal career path, but it’s a reality. For college students thinking about graduating from college, the grim job forecast means flexibility and preparation are imperative.

The article highlighted the colleges and universities are amping up their career services because grad school might not be the best option for student that already have loans and even those with job offers need to keep handing out their resume:

Meanwhile, schools are pulling out the stops to help students beat out the competition. Counselors everywhere are encouraging students to turn to their alumni networks for help. The University of Maryland has conducted workshops with an emphasis on networking. The career office shared by Haverford and Bryn Mawr recently gave each senior 50 business cards listing their name and major.

For students who have already managed to snag an offer, they might want to keep their business cards handy. According to NACE, as many as 8% of employers will be forced to rescind at least some of the offers they made in the fall. “In this economy, we don’t even use the terminology ’sewn up’ anymore,” says Roseborough. More like coming apart at the seams.

The college that I graduated from and currently work for has certainly increased the number of resume and job-hunting workshops, but honestly I don’t know if they are even throwing a career fair.

What is your college or university doing to help students find jobs in the tough economy?

Liz did a two part post this week about the question, “What is success?” I caught myself frequenting her blog to read all of the comments, but it took me a few days to come up with my own response. Liz is a college student and questioned, “How can you be successful in your chosen career without having a corporate lifestyle?” Comments on her first post about success centered around happiness, but defining happiness and the so called “balanced” life is tough.

After some thought, I finally came up with what to post as a comment on the second post:

It’s been less than a year since I graduated college and this is a question I wish I had the answer to. The one thing I have learned is that it’s okay to change your mind about your career, the lifestyle you want, etc. I majored in Economics, thought I wanted to go to law school, changed my mind, took a post-grad internship at a top PR firm that I thought would be perfect and didn’t like it. I ended up working as a web developer (definitely wasn’t in my plans) at the college I graduated from (also not in the plans) and LOVE it. The point is the definition of success and happiness changed for me many times between junior year of college and now. Luckily you don’t necessarily need a degree in what you want to do. I want the experience of the big “corporate” lifestyle at some point in my life, but not my whole life. For me, I think that’s how I’ll reconcile the conflict between wanting to have career success/challenges and also wanting a laid back, slower life where a career isn’t my focus.

Over the past day I thought about the balance I’m looking for in life a bit more. I figured this was an important thing to reflect on given that I’m 95% sure that I’m going to be quiting my job this summer and going to grad school full-time in the fall. Given the state of the economy, I’m lucky to have a secure, challenging job (even if I feel it’s underpaid). At the end of the day, I’m happy with my job, so I need to be 100% sure that grad school is the right step toward “success” and “happiness.”

Ten years from now, I want to have a senior or mid-level position (depending on the size of the company) in the IT industry doing a mix of consulting and actual development projects relating to knowledge management and/or web development. I want to be making enough money to be able to own a comfortable sized condo or home and have money to spend on fun stuff. Accomplishing these things would make me feel successful.

On the other side, I want to be married, have a kid or two and have time to spend with family and friends. I want to have time for a hobby or two and an occasional vacation. I think having these things in my life ten years from now would make me feel happy.

Beyond the next ten years, I’m less certain what I’ll be looking for in life. Currently, I consider my “dream life” to be one in which I work for myself/have a small company (something web development/business consulting related), have a flexible schedule with free time (I realize the first two don’t always work together), can work from home if I want to and live in the South and close to the beach. Accomplishing these things in the next twenty years would be the next level of success and happiness for me.

I try to make decisions about things like grad school based on whether they will get me closer to these goals. I suppose the challenge is that I’ve changed my mind a lot (as I mentioned in the comment I posted), so what’s to say I won’t change my mind again.

Do you have goals that you use to evaluate big decisions? Have they changed in the past few years? Do you feel them changing now?

This post was written for Twenty-Something Writers, a new blog that promotes writing, sharing ideas and motivating each other to sit down and write. Be sure to check it out if you haven’t already.

As twenty-something writers, most of us are students or young professionals that wouldn’t mind making some extra money. Although writing might be something that you just do for fun, you can use your blogging and other writing to help land freelance or part-time jobs.

I’m attending grad school full-time starting this fall and have been looking for a part-time job. I currently work full-time as a web developer and training specialist and recently interviewed for a part-time/contract web design position with an interactive design firm. One of the samples I sent to the firm was a blog template that I built for WordPress, so the person interviewing me asked if I had experience writing. Although I hadn’t planned on talking about College Grad Lessons (something that I do for fun and still needs a lot of work), it was the perfect writing sample for web content. The positive response that I received regarding my blog made me realize that I should consider freelance/part-time copywriting as another type of part-time job to pursue during grad school.

As a twenty-something writer, here are ten freelance/part-time jobs to consider:

1. Copywriter - Search job postings and contact local PR and design firms to find potential copywriter positions. Send a link to your blog and few other writing samples and highlight your computer skills.
2. Blogger - Blogs are becoming increasingly popular for small business marketing, but business owners often lack the time to research and write blog posts related to their business. Watch local job postings and search for businesses with blogs that need more or better content to find potential blogging jobs.
3. Web Content Editor - Small businesses and design firms may be interested in hiring a web content editor to edit copy and add content to web sites. Look for job postings with WordPress listed as a desired skill.
4. Tutor - Local schools or private companies may be looking to hire English tutors. Also consider posting flyers or an ad in a school newspaper to find interested parents and students. In high school, I tutored as a part-time job and made a decent amount of money. In addition to helping students with homework, you could offer creative writing lessons. (more…)
   

Over the past two years I’ve used Turbo Tax to file my taxes because I parents always buy it and I usually was home often enough to find a time to sit down and fill it out. Plus I typically just had one W-2 and only few thousand dollars of income. Since I had multiple jobs in 2008 and now work full-time, I decided it was worth researching what tax filing method would work best for me.

My needs were as follows:

• Input multiple income sources (W-2s)
• Document my savings account interest (minimal) even though I didn’t have the 1099
• Document my “scholar” money that I didn’t get a W-2 for, but wasn’t used for tuition (so had to be claimed)

Initially I looked into H&R Block’s TaxCut. Someone told me it was free (under a certain income level) and easy to use. I created an account but ran into issues because I had the data needed, but not some of the forms. H&R Block’s TaxCut asks for numbers in certain boxes of form if you answer “yes” to having that type of income in 2008. Since I didn’t know what box numbers were what on the form, I was afraid that I would fill it out wrong.

At that point, I decided to wait to file my taxes for awhile. I thought I might get the forms in the mail, but didn’t. I did a bit of research and decided that using Free File from the IRS web site would probably be easiest. I gathered up all of my documentation and a calculator and filled out the form online. It was nice and easy. Personally, I liked using the actual form much better than a user interface that asks you questions and fills out the form for you. It was easier for me to figure out where everything needed to go on the form and why it was being asked for since I could see the entire form at once. After using Free File for my federal tax return, I used a similar program for the State of Maryland. In a couple of hours, my federal and state tax returns were filed and I had received an e-mail confirmation saying they were being reviewed.

A couple of weeks later, I have my tax returns in my savings account and don’t have to worry about April 15.

How did you file your taxes or what method are you planing to use this year?

Today is the official launch of Twenty-Something Writers. The blog/community is a new place for twenty-something writers to talk about their ideas and get inspired. For the blog’s first post, Ashley asked readers to respond to the following prompt:

Tell us about your writing history. Have you always enjoyed writing? Did you hate grammar lessons in school? Who have been your greatest influences? What kind of writing do you enjoy most? Take any creative spin you want. Post your response on your blog and leave the link in the comments below. Check out the responses of others as well.

As a kid, I loved to read and write. Thinking back to my childhood I remember the constant ideas I had for poems, stories, plays and movies. Summers at my grandparents’ farm meant the annual cousin play, written and directed by me of course. I was the oldest cousin, so the role was somewhat logical, but I’m also pretty sure I was a bit obnoxious as a kid. Either way, I miss the creativity that I had as a kid. I didn’t hesitate to fill notebooks with the beginnings of novels. Unfortunately they were always left unfinished, but always because I had a new idea. (more…)

Yes, the idea sounds a bit crazy, but it turns out that paying for an internship is not that unusual. The Wall Street Journal explained:

“Faced with a dismal market for college summer internships, a growing number of anxious parents are pitching in to help — by buying their kids a foot in the door.

Some are paying for-profit companies to place their college students in internships that are mostly unpaid. Others are hiring marketing consultants to create direct-mail campaigns promoting their children’s workplace potential. Still other parents are buying internships outright in online charity auctions.”

Obviously in an ideal world college students would be able to apply and be accepted to well-paid internship that gave then an advantage when entering the job market after college. Top-notch internships are hard to find, especially when the economy isn’t doing well. However, The Wall Street Journal seems to have over-sensationalized the story. Although there are parents paying tons of money to help their children get ahead, internships come in a variety of shapes and sizes. I’m sure there are exceptions to this, but my experience with internships was that the program I did that had a tuition fee was the most valuable.

My personal experiences with internships included the following:

The summer after my first year of college (though technically a rising junior), I participated in a program called The Washington Center. Yes this program had tuition and room fees, but my college had an affliation with the program that basically paid for the tuition. Since my family lives in the DC suburbs, I lived at home. The only cost I actually paid was for the 8 credits I earn and my internship was a paid internship. I accepted a position with the U.S. Department of the Treasury after interviewing for several others and receiving a few offers. So why do people paid for a program like this? (more…)

When offices slow down around the holidays, new employees (that lack vacation days) often struggle to find something to pass the time with at work. This is the situation I’ve been in since about Wednesday last week. While a slow day at work gave me a chance to check some low priority tasks off my list, and a second slow day gave me time to research for some upcoming projects, by the third and fourth slow day I needed something to do.

I had originally planned to spend most of my day studying for the GRE at work since I knew most people that I work with wouldn’t be here. Of course, when I got to work at 8 a.m., the last thing I wanted to do was study for the GRE. So I started thinking about what I could do that would be both productive and fun. Despite working on a web design team, I know very little about Photoshop because I usually use Fireworks to layout site designs and create simple graphics. So I started searching for a good tutorial.

I found this one on PSDTUTS and decided to create an image to attach to one of my sister’s Christmas gift in place of a gift tag with her name on it. A few hours later (took me awhile to get started), I had created the image to the right of my sister and her best friend.

Using my free time at work to pick up a new skill helped me pass the time in a fun way, be productive and learn something that benefits both my job and personal projects. So if you have some down time at work, think of something you’ve wanted to learn for awhile and get started! Strive to work on learning something that is relevant to your job, as well as fits a personal interest.

Anyone have suggestions for other ways to pass time productively during a slow day at work?

This morning I realized that I had 757 e-mails in my inbox at work. Not okay.

So I set a goal for myself - never have more than 100 e-mails in my inbox. Eventually I’d like to get that number down more, but I’m going to take it one step at a time.

I went through all of my e-mails and deleted e-mails related to completed projects, as well as newsletters, LISTSERVs and college-wide e-mails. Then I combed through more recent e-mails and got read of anything that I had responded to already and did not contain important information. Finally I managed to get down to 75 e-mails. Not bad!

In order to better manage my e-mail inbox, I plan to:

1. Save documents I receive to the appropriate project folder on my desktop immediately.
2. Delete e-mails that I’ve already replied to, especially if I expect a response back. Their reply will contain the chain of e-mails that I have gone back and forth anyways.
3. Clean up every Friday morning. When my day is busy, I often leave e-mails untouched. I see them and respond if necessary, but leave the e-mail in place to remind me of any action items.

Hopefully next Friday my inbox will be down to 50 e-mails.