Job Searching

I have officially entered the stage in the graduating student’s life know as, “oh dear, I have to find a job…no seriously I have to find a job.” Yesterday, I attended the job fair that is open to graduating MSW student in the local area. The experience was an interesting one. I was able to scope out who my competition is and I was able to distinguish what makes USC students different from student from other MSW programs. I found that the fact that we have an array of concentrations and dual degree programs really allows us to distinguish ourselves.

The job fair was pretty interesting, and I found a few positions that I am truly interested in. So, I have spent the last three hours revamping my resume and my curriculum vitae, and I submitted my application materials for one of those positions. I was really happy to find at least two positions that will allow me to continue doing research as it is one of my passions and two that would allow me to conduct research within the Latino/a community, which is an area that I am highly interested in. However, I seriously do not feel like I’m on spring break as I sit here and try to strategize about my job seeking process. I even developed a job position excel worksheet to track the status of the various jobs I’m applying for and the requirements of the job. I have come to realize that finding a job that truly fits my interests is particularly challenging because we can do so much as social workers. I have found myself at a cross roads professionally speaking because I can take the research route, the clinical route, or the public administration route, and I just can’t choose so I decided to apply to at least two jobs that fit in each of the abovementioned categories, and then I’ll take it from there.