Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Busy, Busy, Busy

This last week has been pretty busy for me. The pace has been running pretty hard at school lately, between exams and presentations and reports. I have even had a few job interviews thrown in here and there. When I was in the Navy, I used to be able to function pretty well on just a few hours of sleep when it was necessary, but that is apparently a skill that has deteriorated for me. I am sure that I am not working as hard as I did when I was on a boat, but this last week has kind of worn me down.

I will be graduating in May, and I plan on sending out resumes next month. Our school has just had a job fair last week and I have had a couple of interviews already. It is pretty nice to be in demand. The job fair that I attended this year was targeted at people with technical degrees, mostly looking for engineers. They seem to be pretty enthusiastic about hiring people. Apparently, there are still more jobs out there than there are qualified people, and that is good for me.

The job fair I went to last year was more of a general one, than a technical one. I thought it was kind of depressing. There were a lot of retail stores, like Macy's and Sears. They were looking for business students, of course, but they were hiring for retail sales positions. I have to say that if I had just graduated with a degree, I would have been pretty disappointed to be offered a retail sales position. I guess you have to start somewhere. Better than a few journalism students that I overheard last year. They were going back home to live with their parents, because they weren't able to find anyone looking to take on a new journalist.

Anyway, I hope that things get back to a more sedate pace for a few weeks. I would still like to get a few more resumes out there and hopefully get a few more job interviews lined up. All in all, the job market looks pretty good for ex-nukes with a degree in chemical engineering. Hopefully, I will have a good job lined up in the next few months. It is a pretty novel concept that I may actually get to consider geographic location when deciding what job to take. It seems that my last ten years in the navy was a choice between Groton and Pearl Harbor.

1 comment:

reddog said...

My advice is proven pretty shitty but here goes. Get a research job at a good tech school. Carnegie, Cal Tech, MIT, whatever. Usually they will give staff preferential admission to graduate programs and even comp tuition.

I'm not being a booster for advanced degrees, but the really fun jobs go to PhDs from the research departments of good schools, because that's where the employers look.

Can you think in mathematics? Can you use it like a poet uses language? Spare? Concise? Elegant? That's the key. It's kind of like being Charleton Heston in "The Planet of the Apes". Everyone else is just tagging along, mutely.

On the other hand. They're always looking for good high school science teachers. Decent pay, great benefits, Huge amounts of time off, ironclad job security, generous pensions.

Congratulations on being so close to your goal. Don't kid yourself that anyone could have done it. Just look at how many actually do.