First Job Search…Don’t Freak Out

By ​Marci Bott

“College is stupid,” thought every college student ever at least once.

It interrupts your day, companies will use it as an excuse not to pay you, nothing makes sense,
and no one knows where the administration office is. But most importantly, it eats up your time
and often leaves students with the difficult choice of choosing to be a full time student with no
job, a part time student with a job, or (occasionally when a crazy specimen comes along) a full
time student with a job. Time constraints make resume building hard and you can’t just put you
went to school on your resume and get a job anymore.

Businesses want experience.

I’ve noticed around me that my college brethren can sometimes be particularly picky when it
comes to choosing their first or second jobs, saying they were offered a position here or there
that they weren’t sure if they should take or not because it wasn’t in their field. That’s an
outrageous concept to me, that someone would demand their first job in their area of study and
deny any other offering they had.

It is hard to get to where you want, it is a process, and it is something no one tells you about.

I have taken every job I’ve been offered; I’ve worked graveyard shift at a fair, as a roller skating
waitress, at a rabbit shelter, for ghost hunters, for food critics -- because I understand
experience is experience regardless of what field it’s in. I admit I mostly took these jobs simply
for having things to put on my resume, but I still learned a lot of useful things (like how long I
can stay awake, hint: it’s three days).
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I’ve also been rejected a lot though, I apply to random jobs, but I also apply to big companies
like Warner Bros and Disney. It can be frustrating to get a big ‘NO’ from places where you
actually want to work, but that can’t stop you. I let it drive me to do more and help fill in the blank
spaces where they saw reasons not to hire me.

The point is, you should always take the jobs your given, you shouldn’t be picky about it,
because anything and everything will help you. The perfect position will not fall into your lap,
employers want experience and they want to see that you put yourself out there.