This is where it begins

So I have been about seven months out of college and still adjusting to life in the Big Apple. It was really interesting how I found my current job after spending nearly every other day in my senior year interviewing with corporate recruiters at the career services center, occasionally flying out to corporate headquarters on all-expense trips for an all-out interview, and then the occasional phone interview.

Most of the time, I was just applying to jobs for the sake of applying. I really had no idea what to do with my life and my career services counselor wasn’t too helpful in that area. Half the time, I lost interest in the company when I allowed the recruiter to talk about his or her career and their office life. Nevermind relocating; that was never an issue as many people would be more than happy to leave New Jersey. In a nutshell, the job search just seemed like a never-ending struggle and sometimes it just felt worse than being rejected by a string of nice girls.

So anyway, it was time for graduation and nearly all my friends had found lucrative positions, with summer vacations and signing bonuses. For me, it was still a struggle searching on monster.com, classifieds and even submitting my resume to temp agencies. Then graduation came and I was still unemployed until I decided to do some part time work for the college phone bank.

Basically, all I had to do was randomly cold call a alumni for college donations. The upside is I get to keep half of my earnings, but the earnings were really peanuts compared to what a Indonesian sweatshop worker made. I was still looking for meaningful work while cold calling random alumni. One day, I got a callback from one of the recruiters for a phone interview. During this interview I really didn’t care about the guy’s company, the job position or even what he thought about me because I just kept giving random answers to all of his questions.

Somehow, I had made it through this phone interview for an in-person interview at their corporate office. About three days later, I went there suited up and continued with the interview on a rainy day. Most of the questions really had very little to do with my experiences in the business program or my major. Instead he kept asking questions about what I thought about the 2008 election, Iraq and even the credit crisis, which were all politically charged questions that would never show up in any corporate interviews.

I did my best to give neutral, fact-based responses to them and I somehow got the impression my recruiter was more concerned about finding someone he can work with. I later learned that I was the second person out of two candidates that were interviewed for the position with the other candidate being a very attractive Korean girl from New York University.

To make a otherwise long story short, I got the offer for the position to be a brand manager in an NYSE-traded company. They were nice enough to let me start about 3 months after I signed the agreement along with a signing bonus. It seemed like things worked out in the end after all that struggle with rounds of job interviews. Now my story begins in New York, where I am still adjusting to the lifestyle, looking for love, and even the occasional challenge with the bills.