It’s a tough job market these days, but some college grads are refusing to accept their fates. According to Huff Po via the AP, Trina Thompson is suing Monroe College because the school’s Office of Career Advancement “hasn’t provided her with the leads and career advice it promises.” She is suing for $70,000, the amount she paid in tuition because she’s been unable to find a job since she received her information technology degree at the Brooklyn school. Meanwhile, the Monroe insists her charges are without merit. We’re excited to see how this case plays out!
Over at Philly.com, former DP ed Zoe Tillman tells us a depressing tale of blood, sweat, tears…and recessionomics.
Jobless and frustrated, ‘09 grads Sean Christman and Andrew O’Malley passed out their resumes on the Ben Franklin Bridge yesterday.
Christman, who graduated in May with a degree in finance and management from La Salle University, estimated that he had sent out at least 250 job applications to companies, mostly up and down the East Coast, since December.
“I’m not going to stop until I find a job,” he said.
O’Malley also graduated in May, with a business management degree from Rutgers University. Both graduated cum laude and have several summers’ worth of experience at local investment and money management companies.
Being an unpaid intern means you leave the summer behind with but one tangible bit of compensation: the recommendation letter. While this non-monetary reward can’t buy you, well, anything, it can in fact help you get a job. Career Services used to keep students’ rec letters on file for free and send them out to potential employees for a small fee. It was a nice service, and being as though these documents take up what we assume is insignificant server space and that we pay $45,000+ a year to attend Penn, we took the whole no-filing-cost thing for granted.
Until today, that is. As per an e-mail sent out today, Career Services has announced that is partnering with Interfolio, “the premier web-based credentials file management firm.” The service actually sounds pretty good, but it comes at a price. The $19 a year fee won’t exactly break the bank, but it looks like your rec letters (yes alums, even the ones you have had on file for the past decade) will be destroyed unless you cough up the dough. Uncool.
It’s early in June, which means that some people are still surfing Craigslist for the perfect job, while others pass long days in the halls of General Hospital and the audience of Maury Povich. We’re confident, however, that you, our loyal readers, Penn-Linked your way into internships across the country.
This is where our desire to hear about what you’re doing finds perfect harmony with your quest for eternal fame! Whether you’re already getting carpel-tunnel from stapling, or doing something so awesome that those of us in the former category cannot even come up with a good example for this comparison, we (might) want to know!
All you have to do is send us an e-mail at underthebutton@gmail.com telling us who you are, what you’re doing, and why we should choose you, and you’ll be on your way to becoming UTB’s next Internal Dialogue star!
Think Ego of the Week except…summer. And with the possibility of “Where are they now?” follow-ups.
For consideration in Round 1 of interviews, entries are due by noon on Wednesday, June 10th!
One grad’s funny mortarboard message — the graduation version of fling bling — made the front page of today’s New York Times and page two of the Wall Street Journal. According to our sources (read: according to our merciless stalkage of a friend’s gchat status), the identity of said mystery jokester is (former) senior Nate Weiner.
Here’s hoping that a human resources exec somewhere out there responds to this bold gesture.
Finals have been kicking our collective ass, but the news never sleeps. Here’s all the dish you need, in convenient digest form:
Image credit: The Clog
Oh look, Penn is once again the setting for a perfunctory “college graduates can’t find jobs” article, this time on NPR. Especially ridiculous considering the abundant opportunities available on PennLink — didja know that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is hiring Correctional Officers, and you can earn up to $73,000 a Year? Get those resumes in, people!
Notice any angry dudes outside Gia today? The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America is boycotting Gia Pronto because the company is opening another store in Philly and is using a contracter that supposedly pays substandard wages. Somehow we don’t think a whole lot of sorority girls moonlight as construction workers. Unless it’s Halloween, in which case: plaid + toolbelt + cutoffs = slutty construction workers.
This year’s College graduation speaker and Penn alum John Legend made the 2009 Time 100, and he’s also featured in a video recap of the Time 100 gala. We wish he would come out with another song, ’cause we’re running out of ways to make “Ordinary People” puns.
Hooray, we have some additions to our growing dossier of noninspirational career advice! Via the New York Times this weekend: “All Is Not Lost for the Class of 2009.” And via our very own Claire Kleiger of Career Services last week: “It’s tough but hang in there.” One of the great listserv e-mail headlines of its time, no? But read on, because it gets worse. Like telling us to take comfort in a broadway musical about puppets worse: “I leave you with another potential personal theme song from Avenue Q (can you tell it’s one of my favorite musicals?), ‘For Now,’ about a recent college grad from an ivy league institution struggling to figure out what to do with his life (sound familiar?). And, as the song says, remember that this poor economy is also ‘only for now.’” Oh, Career Services…thanks for that.
Everyone seems a little panicked that there aren’t any jobs and this may be the end of the economic world as we know it. You all obviously just need to chill out (we have some tips on how to do that if you need advice) and look at what America has to offer. Case in point: the latest post-grad job Claire Kleiger suggests in her most recent “Liberal Arts Jobs” email sent to the College Listserv:
ELEPHANT KEEPER: Observe elephants for signs of injury or disease; report behavioral changes; prepare food and feed the animals; keep careful records; recommend living condition or diet changes; assists vets with treatment. Req. HS diploma and at least 2 yrs exp. working w/ elephants in a zoo setting or equiv combination; valid AR driver’s license. This position provides learning and teaching opportunities to develop potential leaders in the practice of elephant management. $24,432 – $29,211 + bens.
Well, we know you graduated from high school, and more likely than not have at least two years of experience working with elephants in a zoo setting (or equivalent combination?) If you’re interested — we’re assuming you are — e-mail HR-Employment@littlerock.org.
We love logging into public computers and finding other people’s assignments, resumes, cover letters and assorted miscellany. Because it’s internship-hunting season on campus, we decided to do a round-up of the best and worst job materials we recently came across on one anonymous Huntsman computer. Apart from removing identifying information, the examples below appear just as they did in the original documents.
Lame:
“Graduated as Valedictorian; SAT Scores: Math 770, Verbal 680, Writing 770″
Get over it, you’re in college now.
“Cumulative GPA: 2.86″
Eek, don’t reveal that information unless you have to.
“Babysitting, Caregiver, 2003-Present
- Cared for children ages 5 to 14
- Managed their activities
- Entrusted to watch children and residences overnight”
It’s fine to put babysitting on your resume, but don’t elaborate as if you were managing a Fortune 500 business.
Gee, Time magazine, thanks for pointing out that there won’t be any jobs for graduating seniors this year. We kind of had an inkling that something was up re: our future unemployment this morning when Career Services sent out a lovely pep talk in the form of an e-mail blast to the senior class. The subject line was: “Seniors — Freaking out about your post-grad job search?” Um, 1) Why shouldn’t we be freaking out? We are coddled college students who expect everything in life to be easy for us. Life is hard!!! 2) Wait, so if you’re saying we shouldn’t be freaking out, that means some people must be freaking out, and that freaks us out even more. So now that you mention it…hey seniors, let’s all freak out about this!
If you’re eager to be part of Philly’s beloved Inky before it goes down in flames, applying for the Inquirer’s “Off Campus” editorial board may be your way in. Once again, this seems like awkward timing. We’re guessing that due to the recent filing for bankruptcy, you’ll probably be paid negative pennies (if that) — even Brian Tierney, the CEO, is giving back his $232,000 dollar raise from last December. Despite the lack of pay, this could be your shot at fame. And who knows? The Inquirer always has a shot at being included in a newspaper bailout.
Our visit to yesterday’s Career Fair yielded no job prospects, but we did walk away with a handful of swag. After testing out all the pens, mini-footballs and chapsticks, we narrowed down our favorites, which we will now pit against each other in our patented SWAG-O-METER!
The finalists were insurance company Alfac and The Choice Program, a Maryland-based community service organization. The Choice Program definitely scores points for usefulness and green-friendliness with their water bottles. Aflac, meanwhile, brought swag up to the level of carnival prize with their giant stuffed geese. So who wins?
Check out the fly outfit the provost gets to wear!
You guys, Penn is in the market for a new provost. And guess what? You can apply!
Check out the job description posted on The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is a proto-craigslist-type website that people with Ph. D.’s use to find jobs. Are you an “eminent, energetic, and judicious academic leader”? Um, you go to Penn and you were probably on student council at some point in your years of school, and that’s good enough for us.
Applications are due February 13, two weeks from today. It will be tough to balance overseeing “the conduct, coordination, and quality of all of Penn’s academic programs” with pledging and midterms, not to mention writing this blog, but think how good “provost” will look on internship resumes–we’re totally applying.
BlackRock, Rothschild and UBS, oh my! On Campus Recruiting ‘09 may be a far cry from the boom years of yore, but there’s still a fair amount of recruiting going on inside Huntsman (and, from time to time, the Inn at Penn). And you know what that means: swag!
Swag comes in all shapes and sizes, from the mundane (pens, keychains) to the pretty cool (t-shirts, backpacks). But how do you know which presentations are worth sitting through (for the koozie at the end) and which ones will culminate in some rather elementary PowerPoint effects? Well, you don’t. But now, you can publicly shame the companies that leave you with bupkis!
Here’s how: e-mail us with swag reports: who gave out what and who left students empty-handed. We’ll post the swag roundups here, along with their ratings on our patented Swag-O-Meter. Happy recruiting!
This is a show we can all relate to. Ivy League grad Megan Smith (JoAnna Garcia, so adorable, she’s like a talking puppy) has trouble making strides in the literary world, so she takes a job that has nothing to do with her career plans in hopes of making connections. In this case, that job is working as a live-in tutor in Palm Beach, FL, for the granddaughters of a cosmetics giant (the take-no-prisoners Anne Archer).
Of course, Megan’s Dudley-Do-Right-meets-Rory-Gilmore disposition clashes with the teenage twins’ sensibilities, which makes for lots of scrappy conflict and snappy one-liners. Privileged is a bouncy comedy that deftly slips in little life lessons about family and friendship and all that good stuff without ever detracting from the humor. Plus Allan Louis, as Marco, is the chef we all wish we had… if we could ever afford one:
Over at Philly.com, former DP ed Zoe Tillman tells us a 
Being an unpaid intern means you leave the summer behind with but one tangible bit of compensation: the recommendation letter. While this non-monetary reward can’t buy you, well, anything, it can in fact help you get a job. Career Services used to keep students’ rec letters on file for free and send them out to potential employees for a small fee. It was a nice service, and being as though these documents take up what we assume is insignificant server space and that we pay $45,000+ a year to attend Penn, we took the whole no-filing-cost thing for granted.
Hooray, we have some additions to our growing dossier of 
We love logging into public computers and finding other people’s assignments, resumes, cover letters and assorted miscellany. Because it’s internship-hunting season on campus, we decided to do a round-up of the best and worst job materials we recently came across on one anonymous Huntsman computer. Apart from removing identifying information, the examples below appear just as they did in the original documents.
