Career Path

I hate looking for jobs.  It’s awful.  My hatred for this is probably equivalent to my hatred of dating.  Side note: the thing I hate my ex the most for is that he made me rejoin the dating world.  Well not really, but let’s say that anyway.  But seriously, dating is terrible.  And so is applying for jobs.  There’s the fear of rejection.  The sea of undesirable, unfulfilling options.  And all the good ones are either taken or otherwise unavailable to you.  Waiting to hear back.  Playing hard to get.  Feeling obligated to pretend to be interested when something turns out to be not exactly what you were looking for.  Also, you have to send out impersonal applications online which sound at once pompous and unremarkable.

In the job world, these impersonal pleas take the form of cover letters.  The bane of my existence.  Not that anybody likes writing these really.  They’re tedious and boring and full of formatted bullshit.  She’s a writer so she must be good at writing these, right? No.  Nope, that is the opposite of true.  I would rather write a 20-page paper on data-mining than write a fucking cover letter.

If you ask WikiHow, here is the proper format for one of these fuckers:

1. Kiss up to this person you don’t know and will probably never meet.
2. Say how you found the job opportunity.
3. Bullshit about why you and this lame company are two peas in a pod.
4. Bullshit some more, then tell them how to contact you if they wish to request more bullshit.
5. Kiss ass some more.

Here’s the link to the real article.  http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Cover-Letter  Honestly, I’m too bored by it to even finish skimming.

On top of this nonsense, if you actually get an interview, these employers always want you to tell them that this is the ideal job for you.  What you want to do for the rest of your life.  So much commitment and so many lies.  More analogies to the dating world?  Why yes, I spent 4 (in my case, 3) years at an over-priced university studying Literary and Cultural Studies because since I was a little girl, I’ve always dreamed of being a secretary/bank teller/paper pusher/insert other underpaid, life-draining position that I’m overqualified for.

Jobs you actually want, of course, require more experience than you actually have.  Classic catch 22.  How do you get experience if no one will hire you?  You can either lie or wait for an entry-level position that about a million other people will apply for.  In the mean time, your student loans are due.

So my solution is to get my name out there on the internet, make my portfolio site look pretty, and make as many connections as possible.  As you’ve heard way too many times, it’s not what you know it’s who you know.

P.S. here’s a link to my portfolio site: http://mackenzieschroth.wordpress.com/.  And to a review I just did: http://theumbrellaman.blogspot.com/2012/09/rich-ferri-last-one-out-of-this-town.html.