Diving Into the Job Search

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Hello! My long absence on WordPress has honestly been a little embarrassing and I apologize for once again jumping ship for way too long. The last two quarters of school I’ve been concentrating on doing well in school and finishing up journalism classes. My final quarter at UCI started Monday.

For the last two weeks I have been organizing my job search. It is nice to have an extra week of Spring Break (it’s my last one ever!) since I managed to finish my finals early. I had some anxiety last quarter about this exact point in my life–the next step for me–and while I knew I should’ve started doing a job search then, I chickened out. Now, there’s no more time to hide: this is it.

I decided that in order to have the most success in my search, I needed to think about organization. I needed to ask myself basic, tough questions, like where should I live, who should I reach out to in my network, who is in said network. I spent a couple of days last week doing a rudimentary brainstorm, writing things down on paper and picturing myself finding something I loved to do. Now, what was that exactly? I thought about my skills. Did I still want to pursue public relations, and what were my motives in that career?

My former boss very kindly offered to chat with me about career strategy. We wrote down our brainstorm on a whiteboard in his office, and seeing it all written down in one place really helped. He also told me a few of his tricks to get noticed by potential employers or key employees, which I thought was very clever. Since our chat I am now updating an Excel spreadsheet regularly with notes on my network and leads, as well as trying to work through daily goals. I am having the teachers who know me best and my former employers write letters of recommendation.

I am now in the process of finding leads on my own and doing company research. It sounds so simple, but in reality I dread it! I would so much rather watch ‘Gilmore Girls.’ Last night I did a preliminary search on a couple of job boards just to write some names down to explore later. This afternoon’s attempt at perusing the Orange County Book of Lists was better. I felt like the list was much more narrow, given the rigorous selection standards of the Orange County Business Journal.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I’ll be back with an update soon. 🙂 How about you? What did it take for you to find your first job? Share your advice in the comments!