I am currently in possession of one Master's degree, and no job.
I began searching for employment a few months before graduating, rather than waiting until afterward. Here is a small snippet of the past explaining why (skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to listen to me rant about past employment): Last time I graduated from college (B.A.), I began the search for a job after I had graduated. I ended up working for Sprint through a temp agency, then getting hired by Sprint directly. I worked there for a grand total of six months before I quit. Why did I quit? Because they were stupid. We did the work of twenty-seven (I did count, yes) of their thirty-something customer service call center departments, except all via email rather than by phone. I was fine with this--completely fine. I liked it quite a bit, in fact. Then someone decided we should have to answer phones in addition to providing all these services via email. So, we needed to do the work of 27 departments (for which they already had entire call centers) both by email and by phone, and still keep up with the hourly email quota. If you know me, you know that I really am not a fan of talking to people on the phone (even people I like), so dropping the task of answering phones (and talking to people I mostly didn't like) on top of the already heavy workload was too much for me. I was good at my job there, when it was only emails. In fact, the reason I originally applied for the job was simple, and was in the job advertisement: no answering phones. The reason I had applied for the job had been removed by (I was told) higher-ups completely ignorant of the day-to-day operations of the company. I left despite my supervisor asking me flat-out how much of a raise I would require to keep working there, because that is how much I do not like answering phones. The biggest problem with this plan was that I didn't have any other potential employment lined up, and since a bachelor's degree is no longer anything but a glorified high school diploma, I had some trouble finding employment.
For a while afterward, I tried to work on my writing, while looking for a regular job sort of as a pastime. It took about five and a half months before I found employment again--this time as a proofreader, which I liked for quite awhile; but eight hours a day of proofreading, over time, becomes mostly just straining on the eyes and the mind. It was after working there for two years that I decided to pursue my M.A. degree and hopefully find some time during my coursework to develop some of my own writing (eventually, I would like to be able to earn a living through my writing alone).
So, for the last two years, I have been working on my M.A. in English. I have officially graduated with the degree; I just haven't received the diploma in the mail yet. I have also spent the last two years teaching Composition classes. So, I have the experience and education to (potentially) get a job teaching at a community college or teaching lower-level classes at a university. But I have also learned that grading is the biggest time-killer a teacher faces, and I have to be extremely organized with my time if I want to write and teach.
So, I suppose, back to what I was saying at the beginning of all this:
I have been looking for employment for the past few months, seemingly to no avail. I have had several good leads (one of which I feel I may be over-relying on just a bit), but nothing is really set apart from working with another temp agency--which I really don't want to do. I am hoping to get a job as an instructor for an online university (a specific one), but I don't know exactly how I am doing in the seemingly very formal-and-informal-at-the-same-time application process. I have applied for a management position at a video store, but I'm not expecting to get that job. To potentially work again for ESU, I need to "throw my CV in the pool," as one instructor put it. I plan to do that sometime this week. I even applied at Aldi, but they didn't call me back. Maybe I'm "overqualified" with my fancy degree and whatall, or maybe they just thought I looked stupid; I may never know. But apart from those things, there do not seem to be any real employment opportunities available in the city of Emporia that would have the earning potential to pay for both rent and food.
So, as I wait to hear back from these places, I look up potential online employment--editing copy, writing articles, filling out surveys--pretty much anything for a couple dollars here and there. I think I may get the online teaching position that would pay well enough. But as a part-time realist, I also know that I may not get it. I am currently unemployed and not eligible to collect unemployment, and savings go a lot quicker than I had expected them to. It's a bit frustrating, but there's currently absolutely nothing I can do about it. Except maybe work out a deal on paying rent late, talk to the student loan people who are expecting me to start payments up again in June, take random odd jobs (which are just as rare around here as regular jobs), work as a fill-in employee for the aforementioned staffing firm, try to find more online jobs, and I don't know what else.
So that's where I am at the moment: waiting and hoping and frustrated and gradually going broke.
The most interesting thing I have learned in all of this: it is nearly impossible to do research on available jobs in a smaller city/town. The information is neither available in the single local paper nor online. It's more of a go-door-to-door-and-see-who's-currently-hiring type of situation.
