The Feds hire a lot of Professional level jobs (like IRS Tax Auditor, Revenue Officer, etc) with any 4 year degree.
Today, I suggest enrolling with every area Temp company. A lot of jobs now are Temp and even Temp to Perm.
I hope you realize how exceptionally lucky you are to be an '09 law school grad and be employed in this economy.
OP, don’t go to law school.
I have a Masters in Fine Art, emphasis on Jewelry and Metalsmithing. But I also went to cooking school and started the sommelier program.
Most of my life has been as an executive assistant while I moonlighted as a food-and-wine writer and after the last two years – where I took an artistic sabbatical to explore my art – I am going back into the workforce (as soon as someone hires me).
Is it hard to even get a McJob with a degree? Too overeducated?
Yes. If you have any degree at all you’re overqualified to flip burgers and say “you want fries with that?”
My degree is in Music History. People tend to hear “Music” and assume that it means “performance,” i.e. that you’re unqualified to do anything but sing or play an instrument. I got my first job in a totally unrelated field (a field in which I still work) by emphasizing that Music History is all about research / reading / writing and *not *about performance. Perhaps you can spin your degree that way?
Hey, I got a job with medical researchers once by pointing out that I had to study anatomy to get my degree in Fine Arts, and thus was already familiar with medical terminology.
Political Philosophy degree 2000 --> barely paid (meals only, lodging with volunteers/party supporters) campaign organizer for the Democrats --> Marketing Analyst in a B2B dotcom --> Sales/Marketing in IT Services --> Law School --> federal attorney, full-time corporate/business transactions, volunteer counsel for labour union --> business school. I’m planning to make a switch into the business end of what I did as a lawyer.
Also, if you need quant skills to get a good job, go out and get them. Just because you avoided them in undergrad doesn’t mean you’re doomed to be a non-quant forever and ever more. I hadn’t touched math for 14 years (like since I was 17 years old) when I decided to go to business school. I had tested out of my freshman year of college, so the last time I did anything quantitative was my senior year of high schoo.
To make up the gap and show schools I was serious about excelling at the quant elements of the business degree I took extension courses in stats, calculus and “business math” (this was a waste in terms of intellectual development, but looked good to all the b-school I applied to) and am now doing completely fine in all the quantitative elements of school. It also helped me achieve a really really high GMAT score, so that was nice too, since it helped me get into a well regarded mba program.
In short, just because you avoided learning certain things in school, it doesn’t mean you are barred from acquiring those skills if they’re required in the types of jobs you’re looking for.
It’s more difficult than many people think to go from a high-paying professional position to a menial one. When you’re used to being in charge and managing people, you tend to take on that role automatically, even when you haven’t been asked. It’s frustrating and is why many businesses like fast-food franchises, etc., won’t hire out-of-work professionals. They usually don’t want managers; they want followers.
When I took a temporary job selling RVs, I went from making $160K/yr to working for commissions. That was fine with me. Two months later, I found myself being pushed forward as a spokesperson for grievances of the sales staff, a position that I absolutely did not want to be placed in. Management was less than pleased and I had to explain that all I wanted to do was make some money, and had zero interest in being the leader of a mob of dissatisfied employees. That said, many people try to rise to the top when that’s not what they were hired for, and the result is to be fired or disciplined. That’s why employers are reluctant to hire them.
That’s very true. However, many professional positions are actually quite low paying. See that spot on my list where it says I was “lead content editor for a major international bookseller”? I made $34,000.
I don’t know if its a coincidence, but I didn’t have any trouble getting a job as a cashier/deli drone/ice cream scooper the summer before law school. They even let me take home the leftover roast chickens on sunday night, which was a real budget booster.
In all likelihood, your ability to find menial work with a BA probably just depends on where you are.
Low paying is relevant. My last non-temp job was as a production worker and I was putting in 50 hour weeks. My last full year, 2006-2007 I made roughly $35,000 which was the most I ever made. I was hoping after going back to college to get out and get a $40,000 year job, and I wouldn’t have considered that low paying at all.
I think you mean “relative” but it’s also very relevant. Chefguy posited that it would be hard for a professional to adjust to menial work after being high paid. My point is, lots of “professional” people make $34,000/yr or less – and that’s only about $15/hr – if you get a fast-food job paying about $8/hr, its a step down, but not a HUGE step down to where you can’t adjust. Especially if you can score some overtime.
I totally hear you though. $40k would have sounded like a dreamy amount of money at many points in my professional career. Hell I started at $27k - the year I got a huge raise to $31k was like… wow. holy discretionary income, batman.
:smack: Yes it is. I can’t believe I missed that. :o
The other day I was thinking about jobs I had, and jobs I didn’t have. When I was a young pup - probably 1989 - I interviewed for and was offered a job at a book distributor with a minor publishing house attached. I was young - 21 - and probably looked younger. And I was making $15k a year as an “office girl” at the company that had employed me part time through college.
They offered me the job for 11.5 a year - salaried and there would be overtime. I said I couldn’t possibly take it for that, that amount wouldn’t pay my bills. I think I shocked the guy offering me the job because his reply was “I have people with master’s degrees lining up to take this job and get into this industry.” And then I shocked him further “hire one of them, then - I can’t take that job.”
That isn’t an industry that pays well - at least, not until you reach the top of that industry.
Oh great, there is a degree in mean girls now.
Declan
Actually, I think you’ll find the quote is from The Graduate (and at least two of the Civilisation games) 
Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in English, which can be spun a couple of ways:
Optimistic: English majors are (or should be) good at reading, condensing, critical analysis, and writing, all of which can be useful for just about any potential career path.
Pessimistic: All you can do with an English degree is teach or flip burgers.
The truth, like so many things, is in the middle. I had a pretty good idea when I got to my junior and senior years in college that teaching English at the post-secondary level was what I really wanted to do. Still, I knew that the amount I’d have to borrow to finance a graduate degree would more than double my debt load–I was able to get a BA with somewhere between 11 and 14k of student loan debt. Because of my job at the time, and my family situation, and the desire to not relocate, I knew a distance-ed program would be expensive, and it was.
But I decided that the advanced degree was important to me for personal reasons above and beyond money-making potential. So I bit the bullet, borrowed the money, and got the MA. I ended up about $39k in the hole when all was said and done.
Backing up a bit, once I had my Bachelor’s degree, I decided to take 6 months to look for job opportunities, and because I’ve always had an interest in railroads, I applied to several entry level management positions. I ended up getting offered a job with a Class I railroad, earning about $50k to start with. It was a real nut up or shut up decision, but I ultimately decided that I had enough knowledge to go to the railroad at any time, and I opted to do grad school.
I actually got my teaching job before I’d graduated–the school asked for and received permission from the regional accrediting agency to allow me to teach for that semester (all my coursework was complete; I was finishing the thesis.) Then, when a full-time job opened in the department, I applied and got it.
Yes, it’s at a junior college, and there’s no tenure where I work. Yes, my salary is less than I could have made at the railroad (I started teaching at $41k per year.) But I add about $10k to my salary by teaching an extra class or two each semester, and a couple during one of the summer terms, and the state benefits are good. I’ll never get rich doing this–if I make a career out of this job and stick with the same college, I might eventually make upper-70’s as an administrator. The trade-off is that the gig is one of the best anyone could hope for: I “work” 30 hours per week, all of that time inside a nice, climate controlled classroom or my office. I see my bosses maybe twice per semester and am otherwise left alone to do my job. And I get to turn students on to some neat ideas–anything that’s on my mind can be woven into a lesson, because English is so broad. When teaching logical fallacy, I get to talk about the 9/11 troofer movement. When teaching the process analysis and the cause/effect essay, I get to talk about United 232.
All in all, I think I made the right decisions. I should probably add that the median household income in this county is $25k, so even my little starting salary is excellent money for the area.
The real use of any degree, I think, is in how the person uses it.
I have a degree in Technical Journalism, and I couldn’t get a job as a tech writer. They wanted an engineer who could communicate, not a writer with a familiarity with technical subjects. Only they wanted to pay him like a liberal arts major. I found another carreer path.