Tesar-Reynes

I have a confession to make. As a graduating senior, I am paralyzed with fear at the thought of getting a job.

I hear bad stories about this whole category for entry-level positions: lower pay, 10-hour workdays, cutthroat coworkers, not to mention, GULP, the recession.

I’m wondering if our resident guru can provide some advice to all of us dealing with the same fears.

Tony, can you help us out here? We’re kind of freaking out.

Tony’s response:

The pressure and the anxiety of landing the first job are amazing. Everyone handles this differently. I was fortunate to be able to defer the process for a while. After I graduated from college, since I was NROTC, I went into the Navy. When my time was up I extended for 6 months to figure out where I would work. A few weeks later I decided to go to grad school so I was able to put off the decision for another year.

In retrospect, the biggest fear I faced was not the issue of getting a job; it was trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. It was real easy when the Navy told me what to do or when all I had to do was figure out what courses I took.

Grad school, aside from delaying my job search, served two other purposes. It gave me a menu of career areas I could explore (undergrad was all liberal arts) and it served as a launch platform for employers interviewing at school. I was very fortunate. Firms were hiring and I had a choice of options.

My advice – research yourself

I give a couple of lectures a year at Columbia College on career planning and interviewing skills. This is augmented by interviews that I do for kids of friends and clients. The major problem I see for these people is lack of self -knowledge. A great many graduates don’t know who they are and what they want to be when they grow up.

You can’t point yourself in the right direction if you don’t know what product you’re selling. There are a number of books that will help. What Color is my Parachute comes to mind.

Other sources of self-knowledge include asking your friends, asking a person you are dating, asking people you have worked for, asking your teachers or even asking your parents.

The end product of this research should be a list of your strengths, weaknesses, passions and areas you don’t know yet about (sort of “in process”). This list should have just as many positives as negatives: don’t be too hard on your self. This list should be typed out and put into your “career folder”, and should be updated every year.