Life is not a binary choice between minimum wage jobs and what your degree was for. Your hatred for accounting and all options related to it is palpable so drop it, kick it to the curb, move on. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
You have a 4 year degree, a BS in accounting will get you in the door in entry level manger and office work positions and similar scenarios. But you need to stop and ponder. You seem to be making questionable decisions based on seeking out stability in income and have dug yourself into a hole. To be frank you don’t seem very suited for things that require a tolerance for tedium. You might want to look at sales of some kind. There are few income guarantees but it’s usually not all that boring and you can (in the right field) be self directed. .
Not to berate you or anything, but you’re making some odd assumptions. First, any degree is better than no degree. Why would you want to un-degree yourself? It’s not holding you back in any way. The only thing you might need if you pursue an unrelated field is a story about why your degree is at odds with your pursuits. Make something up, it doesn’t have to be true - it only has to be sincere.
Some jobs that require a degree, any degree in my building right now:
HR Specialist, Generalist
Office Manager
Receptionist (degree not required)
AP Clerk
AR Specialist
Administrative assistant
Event planner
Security (no degree required)
Jobs in the kitchen
Building maintenance
This. In some cases, there are jobs that hire fresh grads with conditional GPA requirements, but leaving it off completely is the best option. I haven’t seen a professional resume with a GPA included unless it was specifically for such a requirement. At 2.67, all you can do is shoot yourself in the foot. I know, I was in that boat. Your employer isn’t going to care what your GPA was as long as you’re able to deliver on what you put in your resume.
Again I know I made a mistake getting a degree in it but during those your years can you honestly blame my line of thinking? With the way the economy was going and still is going it wasn’t looking like a lot of prospects were out there.
Maybe having a degree is better than no degree but this degree has only brought me grief and thousands of dollars in student loan debt so it shouldn’t be a surprise that I wish I could un-degree myself.
I still have another two weeks until I should be hearing a response back from the teaching fellowship program however I’m not putting all my eggs in one basket. Next week I’m going to go pay the Army recruiting station in my town a visit and see if maybe there is anything they can do for me.
Here is another question, since accounting and any prospects of me going into it are shot at this point should I change the kind of degree I got on my resume? What I mean by that is instead of it saying accounting I would just list a general business degree. It’s not lying I mean accounting is a business degree after.
An accounting degree will get you in the door, but you don’t have to be applying just to accounting related jobs. As others have mentioned a 4 year degree will get you in the door in many places. As an example the management trainee programs at Enterprise Rent a Car are quite well regarded and allow room for rapid advancement. They require a 4 year degree.
You are not listening. We have said there are hundreds of jobs where a accounting degree would be required or useful but which are not really 'accounting". Rather than whinging on, read the posts here, the actual great advice people are giving you.
Government jobs aren’t more drudgerous than any other kind of job (nor is there more bureaucracy than any other enormous corporation; people who think so have never worked for an enormous private corporation.)
OP, you said you took some civil service tests (was it Staff Analyst Trainee, by any chance?)-- but are you aware that most City jobs are not through the civil service testing system? Many jobs are gathered at the nycjobs website, but note that hybrid City-state agencies (anything with “Authority” in its name: Housing, Transit, Triborough) and non-mayoral agencies (Office of the Comptroller, City Council, etc) post their jobs separately.
I find the NY state civil service system to be indecipherable, but usajobs.gov is very easy to use for Federal jobs.
Yeah, back in November you could have gotten H&R Block’s tax certification - they eat people at this time like crazy. It wouldn’t have been a permanent job and it wouldn’t have been pleasant, but you’d have four months of steady work.
Now would be the time to go back to all the temp agencies and say “I have an accounting degree and I’m available” AND hang out your shingle.
Accountants who don’t work over tax season and want to work and try and work - they are rare.
To chime in, I have an Accounting degree, received in the last ten years, and GPA is standard.
The only people who don’t put GPA on a resume with a recent degree are people who have been working for a while, and people whose GPA was so horrible that they want to hide it. The first will get interviews - the second will need their resume to stand out for another reason.
The higher up the job food chain you shoot the more GPA will matter as a winnowing tool for the first job or few jobs. It does matter (a lot) for entry level jobs in Wall Street analyst positions and similar high end, super competitive jobs that pay pretty well right out of the gate. Mid and lower mid tier positions not so much. People with 3.5 + GPAs from a name school in accounting are unlikely to be applying for entry level IRS and H&R Block tax prep positions. You can get into the better numbers related jobs with a non-stellar GPA but you’ve got to “know” someone with influence or have some kind of an in.
In that the OP really hates accounting his best bet is to leverage the doors his business degree will open. But … really the issue here is that (I think) the OP needs to take stock of his desires. To go from a “history and an art teacher” orientation into accounting is about as much of a 180 degree spin as I could imagine. Is ANY kind of business going to work? Most mid tier management jobs require that you have to be on top of your numbers.
But they dont care. They actually need your entire college transcripts, all they care about is did you get the degree and did you *pass *those units of accounting required.
According to the IRS recruiter I spoke to, they’ll take someone with a high GPA over one with a low GPA, all other things being equal. So if they have fifty applicants for an job and are going to interview ten people, and four of them have job experience (that’s going to be the first cut), the next six they cut by GPA.
So it a tough economy, and the IRS hasn’t had a lot of funding to hire, GPA does matter. You won’t get the interview without a GPA that is more competitive than the other people applying.
They can’t interview everyone who applies. Vets get priority. Then people with job experience, then GPA.
Why not a job teaching Accounting at a middle school? History is a thousand times oversaturated than Accounting is. Plus, that’s what **blackbolt_1987 ** has a degree in. Rather than any further history classes, it would be better to invest all of that money in a lottery, or, perhaps, a nice Ponzi scheme. The payoff would be better, quicker, and more certain.
Echoing this. Some, if not most Wall Street analyst jobs might also ask you for your SAT scores as well. I’m not an expert on the history of Wall Street. But my impression is that over the decades, it has gradually moved from the exclusive domain of white-haired old money Duke & Duke types through the Liars Poker era of used car salesmen and is now more focused on hiring MIT quant nerds.