I’m wondering this because my nephew just graduated, and is getting really frustrated that he can’t find a job. I’m wondering if he’s even considered looking at something not in his chosen field.
So, did you step out of engineering school and start work as an engineer right away, or was there an in-between period where you asked people if they wanted fries with that?
Do you really expect many affirmative answers to this? Usually the “dream job” is the one in the family empire business given to the scion, who went to college only to maintain appearances of propriety.
I said dream, with a caveat. I moved after graduation, took one professional job I hated, and soon found ANOTHER job that was much better and it was perfect. Great pay, great bennies, great mentoring. Worked for them for several years until my travel bug got me again and I moved on.
Perhaps I should have said “Decent job in your chosen profession.” I used to work with a bunch of kids who could claim this. They all drove expensive cars and it occured to me that not one of them ever had to wear a paper hat.
People do dream of being doctors and lawyers and astronauts and naturalists, you know. I wanted to be a paleontologist, so I majored in political science.
Ok, if the choice is “decent job in chosen profession” then my answer would be yes. It certainly wasn’t my dream job though. That would be pro tennis player or rock star.
Hawaiian Tropic oil boy.
As soon as I finished my education I got a job building sets and touring with a theatre company. The pay was crap but it was a real professional job that got my foot in the door. Since graduating I have never had a job that was outside of my field. Which in my given occupation is rare.
Let’s see, I think it only took about two or three years before getting the job I have now and I have been with this company about 6 years. I am second to the top of my ladder, and we will see where it goes.
I can happily say that I have never had a fast food job.
Ah, well I posted before the poll went up. I see that the second choice is an important one, because this idea that because of your degree you should be making big money immediately is crippling higher education.
I didn’t find my dream job until I was 44, so no.
Well, not college but grad school, though getting a free ride through grad school doing research I loved was pretty much my dream job at the time.
But I went right out of grad school into a nice research job at Western Electric, with funding no problem, with great pay and benefits, with almost no pressure, and with a great boss and a great bosses boss. Plus, I came in right at the beginning of a period of growth in both size and recognition for our department.
In 1980 I was one of only 168 CS Ph.Ds graduating, so life was good. Comes from being born at the right time.
My dream job requires a graduate degree, so no, although I did get it more-or-less straight out of grad school, in the sense of having a full-time teaching job with benefits at the type of college where I wanted to work. It was another nerve-wracking year before I had a full-time tenure-track job, but that’s nothing in the grand scheme of the academic job market. I got very, very lucky.
Over 30 years later and I’m still waiting for my dream job. It took me almost 2 years out of grad school just to get an above minimum wage job so I hung onto it. A decent job, not a dream job.
Of course, my dream job would involve being paid huge amounts of money for doing whatever happened to interest me at the time. So maybe my requirements are too high.
My dream job is rock star. Or working musician. That was my major. I realize now that it’s probably never going to be more than a hobby. I now work in a profession that I love, but I never would have dreamed of it in my younger days.
The early 1980s had a recession much like this one. It took me a year to get a full-time job after graduating. In that 13 month period I did some home renovation stuff for a friend of my parents, and worked for a few months as a construction labourer. So, no I certainly didn’t land a decent job right away in my chosen profession.
ETA: Can’t really pick either option in the poll.
I picked the second option; none of them entirely fit.
I went to school to work in market research (not my “dream job”, but my major, at least). I did get a job in the industry right out of grad school, which paid fairly well, though it was an entry-level job.
My dream jobs would have been an NFL placekicker, or a pen-and-paper RPG designer. The first was unrealistic, the second doesn’t pay. 
I graduated in 1991 (during a recession). I worked three McJobs for about six months until I scraped enough together to move to a state that had a slightly better economy at the time. (And where my friend, the Roommate™ was). I do not count the first three McJobs straight out of school because those were basically taken to fund my move away from my home state.
My first job was sort of tangentally related to my major. I’d majored in Public Relations and I took a job as a Customer Service Rep. for a car rental company. By the time I’d completed one year in that job, I found a gig as a magazine editor and actually used my degree properly (Journalism degree, PR major).
Shorter answer: Advise your nephew to give it a minute.
I didn’t read this thread too closely, but I’d bet that very few of us, ever, get that perfect dream job straight outta school. There’s nothing wrong with a McJob to pay for gas, student loans, and rent in general until The Perfect Dream Job™ comes up.
Sure it does, you can make a small fortune in that industry!
Assuming you start out with a large fortune, that is.
My answer is that essentially, yes I did get my dream job straight out of college. At least in the sense clarified by the OP, “decent job in your chosen profession.”
The salary wasn’t huge, but it was a lot more than I had been making as a poor grad student, so to me it felt enormous. The job itself was really interesting.
And what’s more, I’m still working for the same company 16 years later, having survived numerous mergers, acquisitions, and layoffs. In that time I’ve received many raises and several promotions.
You could say I’m happy here.
I voted for the second option regarding the bottom rung, but I didn’t realize it was dream job at the time. I was working in pharmaceutical research and got paid nothing (seriously, starting salary with a BS degree in 1991 was $22,000). However, we got free stock, and then stock options, which at the time didn’t mean much because it was a small company of 50 people. The people, however, were awesome. It was the only job I ever had where the co-workers got to interview all candidates, including any Ph.D.s hired above us because we were very big on company culture. Everyone in the lab was friends and we would spend time with each other on weekends, go on vacation together, etc. It was the most amazing group of people I ever worked with. At the time I was 21 and didn’t have a care in the world and most of my co-workers were the same. My wife today tells me the reason I am so miserable in every job is because I try to create the environment that pharmaceutical company had and fail miserably because everyone is just at a different point in their lives with mortgages, kids, etc. Still, it really was a dream job based more on our age and the coolness of the work we were doing. In the end, we discovered two drugs and the company went public, providing us each enough money to go to grad school or buy a condo (I was in the grad school group). I am still friends with many people from that job over 20 years later, and they also agree it the greatest job they ever had and wish they could find that kind of excellent working relationship with their co-workers again. Since for each of us it was our first job out of college, we all naively assumed all jobs worked like that one, and I can’t tell you how wrong I was…