Dude, Where’s My Job?

Searching for a job is difficult.

I’m in a strange position where I’ve been studying Psychology for the past four years, and as I am about to graduate, I am not going straight into graduate school. This was a personal choice because I honestly did not feel that I was ready to dive right back into 6-8 years in a doctoral program right out of my undergraduate life. I’ve essentially been in school for 16 years at this point, and I need a break. I need a break from school all day and school all night. I just want to be an adult with a job and alone time at night. I want to be able to cook dinner for myself and have time to eat it while watching my favorite TV shows in real time or reading a book for the pure sake of reading a book.

However, having a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology can only get you so far. I love psychology, and I went into college knowing that studying psychology was exactly what I wanted to do. But looking for a job in a relevant field for me is torture and almost tearing me apart. I have already accepted the fact that I will most likely become the stereotypical millennial who has to move back home with one of my parents after graduation, but I’ll be damned if I don’t have a job to go with it.

Last semester was a weird one. I go to a school where people around me are engineers, business majors, or computer geniuses. It was hard to see so many of them being offered jobs left and right from previous internships or from all of the recruiters who come to the employment fairs held at my school. Don’t get me wrong. I couldn’t have been more happy to see so many of my friends figuring out their future plans so early. They could sail through the rest of the year without having to worry about the job search anymore. But with psychology…if you’re not going into graduate school, it can be hard to find job opportunities so early in the year.

The job search for research in psychology can either be easy…or it can be incredibly hard. I just decided to make it really hard for myself by looking for jobs that are specific to my own interests. The nerve of me, right? Wanting to have a job where I actually enjoy the work.

I’ve used so many resources to look for these jobs – faculty members, academic advisers, counselors in my university’s career development center, the Internet…the list goes on. And I’ve learned that while, yes, it is important to find a job that I could somewhat enjoy…at this point I need to broaden my horizons.

I went into my job search wanting jobs that would make me an ideal candidate for any PhD program I applied to in the next couple of years. Of course, schools will want to see that I spent my “time off” being productive and getting valuable experience. I had to realize that I wouldn’t get rejected from a program just because my job did not exactly align with the focus of my future dissertation.

So much time was spent looking for something so specific, that I probably passed up so many great opportunities because they didn’t “fit.” I need a job. Anything will fit. Ok, not just anything…most things in psychological research will fit. I will stick to my guns on that one. Psychology and research are going to be my focuses…the specific fields will come later.

I just wished I could have realized this earlier on. I’m still looking for a job, but I’m less frazzled because I’ve broaden the search terms. I’ve spent so much time worried that I wouldn’t have the ideal job, but this is just a hiatus for me. I need something to give me experience and skills as a stepping stone toward my future.

This job search isn’t end game for me and it’s about time I realized that.