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The Front: a Job-Hunting Perspective

Blaine is a guest contributor who graduated from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo with a BS in Aerospace Engineering.

I have been searching for a job now for about a year. I would not let this scare you as I graduated from college at the worst possible time ever — at the beginning of a recession.

But regardless of the fact, I have had much experience in job hunting, so I have compiled a list of things that I think might help an undergrad student in finding a job.

• FIND AN INTERNSHIP!!!! I can’t stress this enough.

• Internships help an extraordinary amount, but if you did not have one, try to make/save as many contacts as possible when you have the opportunities to do so. (Including classmates)
• Start early and look daily.
• Make a list of jobs and companies you are willing to work for. If you don’t care so much as to what company you work for, make a list of sites that you can visit daily to check for new positions.
• Using Google can be an extremely powerful tool. For instance I want to stay in California to work, so I can simply type “california engineering jobs” into Google and get a wealth of resources to choose from.
• If you do get a call back from a company, be persistent, but do not bug them too much. You want to show them that you really want the job, but not be annoying about it at the same time.
• Going back to the first point, you want to use as many of your contacts as possible. I would say about 80% of my call backs for an interview was due to internal referencing. Having an employee refer you to a job is extremely helpful. Make use of the friends and people you meet.
• Before an interview, do research into the company as well as the concepts that may be in the job description. You never know when you are going to get a technical interview, so it is best to be prepared for anything.  Also, from my experience, the managers you interview with tend to like it when you know a little bit about the company because it is less bullshit that they have to regurgitate.

A lot of this may sound like common sense, but it is nice to have a routine down. It makes the entire process easier to deal with and is more efficient. A typical day for me in the job hunt has me looking at new jobs first thing when I wake up. I usually will go to my normal sites such as careerbuilder.com, craigslist.com, californiaengineeringjobs.net and californiaengineeringjobs.com. These sites contain some bigger companies, but mostly consist of smaller companies around the state of California who post their job positions.

I usually will check the bigger companies websites about once a week because they post new jobs less frequently. After all this, I tend to submit 0-2 applications per day. I am not sure as to how this normally is, but I have found that during this recession there have been many mid-to-senior level jobs available. What this means is that the experience required for the position ranges from 5-10 years of experience. It is because of all the recent layoffs that so many mid-to-senior level jobs are available. This in turn makes it even harder for the recent graduate to find a job because not only are you going up against other graduates, but now you have to go up against engineers with more experience.

This is not meant to scare you, but only to inform you of the real situation that is going on in our economy. All in all, the job hunt is fierce and very competitive right now. It is best to try and keep yourself busy and to stay sharp on all the material you have learned because you never know when your next interview will be.
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Blaine: birdie495 at gmail dot com.