Underemployed and begging to differ

"Job Climate for the Class of 2008 Is a Bit Warmer Than Expected"

So writes the NYTimes today, as I spend my entire day scouring the internet for jobs that are more and more outside the realm of ideal.

Walking from the graduation ceremony, I heard one of my classmates fathers giving her a hard time about not having a job. "Dad, lots of people don't have jobs."

I felt bad, I knew how she felt. "I don't have a job yet," I told her so her dad could hear. "Me neither," chimed in two friends I was standing with. "See?" she snapped at him and we all felt better for a moment.

The first week post-graduation feels like a breakup. The sort where you still love each other but its best for you both if you move on. Somehow though, I feel like Vassar is not lamenting the way I am.

It's fitting then, that job searching is eerily similar to firing up match.com. You adjust your personality to fit the person on the other end (or the business, as it were), you act overly enthused about things you know next to nothing about, you agree to eat at a thai restaurant when you hate it (here think: entertaining the possibility of moving 500 miles away or lowering your pay standards $10,000).

"The graduates who are struggling to find work now typically earned degrees from less prestigious institutions and were not the top students.

'A poor economy magnifies the differences between student groups,” said Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard. “Those graduating from spectacular schools with spectacular grades will continue to do well, while those in the middle and lower end will have a much harder time finding jobs and will be offered much lower salaries.' "

Hrmm... if you say so...