The big project now is finding meself a job for the ol' summer. I tackled my college's career office website for the first time tonight. That was a mistake.
I fumbled through the labyrinthine website and found a job search engine. After lightly restricting the search results to "during the summer" and "in the United States," I scrolled through 132 consulting jobs with increasing rage. I think the problem is that I'm not interested in grown-up things like "implementing media campaigns" or "providing financial advisory services". My interests are a bit more elemental, like "eating" and "not dropping crumbs on myself while eating".
I tried to prod the search engine into giving me something that wasn't consulting by putting in keywords related to my interests. The formerly infinite job list erased itself. "Share and Enjoy!" smiled the career counselors from their homepage. After another twenty minutes of fiddling with the Advanced Search Options, I ended up with a handful of things that didn't sound awful--but none of them were paid. I let out a velociraptor screech and dragon-kicked my computer across the room.
What am I looking for? Well, my IDEAL job would probably be Humor Filter, if housing was included.
To help myself out, I decided to brainstorm a list of my skills:
--I can read really fast
--I can walk on my hands
--I can run long distances without getting bored
--I can speak French proficiently (and I hope to be fluent by this summer)
--I can curl my tongue and make a lot of startling faces
--I can draw cartoons in response to realtime stimuli (and I've got more coming soon)
--I can make people laugh
--I can write and edit very well under pressure (according to my parents, it isn't really good that I've discovered this about myself)
--I can beat almost anyone in Bananagrams
--I can organize and take responsibility like nobody's business
--I can wake up early, no problem
--I can hang out in the woods at night without getting scared
--I can cook really good fried eggs
--I can bellydance a little bit
Huh, that's not so bad. What I'm NOT good at is managing my time and finishing things by their due dates. Sixteen and a half years of schooling have gradually numbed my reaction to deadlines to the point where I have basically become immune to them.
"I lose 1 out of 10 points if this is late? Ehh, that's not so bad," mumbles my complacent brain. And another night of frivolous time-wasting slides by. I think the part of me that used to be afraid of academic consequences up and died sometime during my freshman year. That would explain the smell, anyway.
Unfortunately, potential employers think the ability to complete tasks is really important for some reason. So I'll have to try attacking the job hunt from a different angle. I'll do that later.
