“Dear Stan:
“I’m a twenty-six year-old woman with a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy and a love of art, music, and writing. I’ve been living in San Francisco for seven months with my fiancée, a tech savvy nerd with a Bachelor’s in Applied Computer Graphics. We are both intelligent, creative, innovative, responsible, and willing to work hard to get where we want to be in our lives. So, why is it that he is out of a job and I’m still working coffee shops?
“Benny got an amazing opportunity straight out of college with the help of a professor, as part of a group of Chico State University students that landed a contract job with a computer animation company in San Francisco. The group was given a project working on the cinematics for a video game that was outsourced by another company. All went well for six months. Benny continued to get work on various projects, hopping from one train car to another. But at the end of last year the train rumbled out of sight, leaving every contractor to fend for themselves. He and I were both confident that, with his new experience and tech skills, he would have no trouble finding something pretty decent. Not so. After a month of searching, applying for positions from Dreamworks to Radio Shack, he’s still jobless. The appalling unemployment rates glaring from the front pages do nothing to spark his hope. With San Francisco being so expensive and competitive, we’re wondering if we’ve picked a bad time to move here. We’re finally being strongly affected by the recession that we’ve been hearing about for so long.
“My situation is a little different. My aims for a career have always been vague to say the least, and I lived by the cosmic philosophy that opportunities would come along when I needed them. Being an artist, musician, and a writer, my job path was never too obvious; making money at those things didn’t seem likely or even very attractive. So I stuck to odd jobs, mostly along the lines of food service and coffee shops. For a while that was enough, and I enjoyed it, until the time when I graduated college about two years ago. I had slowly been realizing that customer service was eating away my soul and didn’t pay much. Parts of it I still liked, but I felt overqualified. After quitting my job as an Assistant Manager of a deli in Chico, I took up a job at a breakfast place as a barista promising myself, ‘this is the last food service job I will ever have’. After eight months, Benny and I had finally saved enough to move to San Francisco.
“Job searching, I found, was not an easy task in the city. Luckily, Benny was making enough to support us both during our first few months here. Initially, I looked for writing jobs, administrative positions, art gallery jobs, anything where I didn’t have to wear an apron. This is difficult when there is nothing on my resume after the Bachelor’s Degree that would encourage someone to hire me in a professional position. After two months, I was praying for a coffee shop job. I finally got one at an espresso chain downtown. Five months later, I’m still there, wondering what the hell my next step is. I figure I better pick a path to go down or I’m going to be steaming milk my whole life. Should I go back to school? Get an internship? Do freelance articles and blogging until I have enough material to show employers? After eight years of working minimum wage type jobs, I’m intimidated by the challenge of breaking onto a new scene.
“This is a strange time in our country to be starting a new career. This is not a time of growth; it is a time of cutting back, conserving, re-evaluating our needs and methods. It’s difficult to know in which direction to aim when the state of our nation is in transition, poised on the verge of a new era. When weighing my options, I can’t help wondering what professions are more secure than others in this present economy. What will people always consider a necessity? I did some research on the Internet to see what people consider recession-proof areas of employment, and I found a ‘Top 25’ list that actually suggested these industries: Gambling, Liquor, Debt Collection, and Bankruptcy Law. If life gives you lemons… profit off of someone else’s misfortune? Now that’s inspiring!
“If things get too bad, I guess we could just do away with the monetary system completely and go back to farming and bartering. ‘I’ll trade you a pig if you mend my shoes’. Although I guess nowadays it would be more like ‘I’ll cook you dinner if you install this operating program on my PC’. Might not be such a bad thing. We might get more cooperative as a society, sharing skills and possessions. Widespread hardship can either bring people together or set them against each other. I’d like to think that the people in this country can discard the competitive survival instinct and embrace a little neighborly we’re-all-in-this-together kind of mindset.
“I hope so. Otherwise, Benny and I are screwed.
Signed,
Serra Starting Out”