Wednesday, June 09, 2004

Job options

In December, for the first time in my life, I will have to find full-time employment that isn't just a summer job. So I've been looking at the various openings posted by my school's job search program to try to determine what my options are. Unless I have more than five years of work experience, I don't have many.

Most jobs require one or more traits that I simply don't possess - fluency in Armenian, knowledge of Albanian, native Russian, experience managing NGOs, experience feeding refugees, experience in agricultural development, experience in setting up pyramid schemes in small developing countries, experience negotiating settlements between Hutus and Tutsis, etc.

Those jobs that I manage to be somehow eligible for have a geographic problem. They seem to be largely located in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone, or other such delightful places. My guess is that the organizations in need of employees have completely given up on trying to get qualified people to work in such places and will now hire anyone who is willing to move there. Which means that most of their employees are insane. I'd be willing to move there, but somehow I doubt that my friends and family would be overjoyed.

My major realization is that I'm overqualified to work in those jobs that I would have been eligible for after receiving my bachelor's, and underqualified to do anything else. This puts me in the odd situation where I'm likely to end up working at Starbucks because no one else will be willing to hire me. And after they taste my coffee, it's doubtful they'll want to keep me around.

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