It’s been over four months and, while I’m doing contract work, I still haven’t found full-time meaningful employment. So I’ve come up with a new plan: a bounty. That’s right! If you are the person to help me find a good, solid, full-time job, you’ll get a brand-new iPod nano in the color of your choice. This offer won’t last. Hurry and act now! (Offer only valid for the job I accept, and you must notify me prior to the job offer.)

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My dedicated reader(s) will recall that, during my tour of duty in the Willamette MBA program, I was editor-in-chief of and contributing writer to Atkinson Management Today. AMT is, of course, our humble semi-annual publication of interesting and relevant business articles written, edited, and published entirely by volunteer students. So it is with great pride that I announce the availability of my second article for AMT, entitled “We Got Lucky“. The gist of it is that Oregon is, by and large, in a pretty good place to ride out the housing crunch and resulting fallout. I wrote it several months ago, though, due to time constraints, the current editorial board is just now in the publication process.
Anyway, give it a read and tell me what you think, please!

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It’s been over a week since graduation, and I’m still unemployed. Apparently I’m not alone, though. As of last week, only about 40% of our graduating class had found positions, which is significantly lower than in previous years.
So let’s talk about my job hunt for a minute.
First off, there are two kinds of rejection. There’s the explicit rejection, where some company is good enough to tell me that no, they’re not interested. Or they’re looking for something else. Or they’re not filling the position. Or the salary I’m looking for isn’t in the range of what they’re looking to pay.
I can deal with explicit rejection. It provides a nice closure, and at least there’s feedback. What I’m experiencing a lot of, though, is implicit rejection. Implicit rejection sucks because there’s no feedback whatsoever. I just don’t hear back from a company. I put a lot of work into my resume, a cover letter, and putting all my information into their database online (which asks for the same information that’s in my resume, which they also want a copy of), yet they won’t do me the common courtesy of returning any of my follow-up phone calls or emails. Many companies just have a wall and a “don’t call us, we’ll call you” attitude which is, quite frankly, extremely disrespectful of the time I put into try to find employment there. So job hunting is unpleasant. It’s unrewarding. It’s frustrating to call a company to try to follow up and hear, “Oh, our recruiting department usually handles that… and they don’t take phone calls.” (Yes, that’s an actual quote.) It’s painful to try to get feedback so I can modify my search and search behavior… but I can’t even get an echo from the void.
Job hunting sucks a lot. That’s all I’m going to say.

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And I officially have my MBA. It started in August of 2006 and, this morning, ended when I was hooded and handed my diploma.
I’ve been asked several times if it was “worth it”. I can’t answer - I simply say that there has not been enough time to put the experience in its proper historical context. I can say, however, that I would not have finished had it not been for the support of my family and friends - and that I’ve made even more good friends while being here. To all of them, I can say “Thank you.”

Next step in the adventure: Find a job, which has thus far been eluding me.

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As I mentioned in my Final Grades post, I’ve achieved some level of scholastic awesomeness. I thought I would take the time to post a couple of the certificates that I’ve received.

Yes, I was given these, a couple pins, and a couple sets of colorful ropes to wear at graduation last night at a nice little reception. There were great hors d’oeuvres, fun stories, and - the staple of any successful event - free bottles of beer and glasses of wine.
In other news, graduation is on Sunday (just two days away) and I’m eager to get my diploma. Unfortunately, however, Sunday is when I go from “being a student” to “being unemployed”.

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My final final grades have come in: Data Mining: A Operations Management: A Leadership: A- GPA for this semester: 3.90 Cumulative GPA: 3.76 This means that, on average, I have received slightly better than an A- in all my classes. I’m pretty happy with that, especially considering my undergraduate performance oh-so-many years ago.
I have also been invited to join two separate “honor societies”: Pi Alpha Alpha, which requires a 3.7 GPA for graduate students, and Beta Gamma Sigma, which requires one to be in the top 20% of his or her class.
Sweet.

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