How to Deal With Questions About Your Job Search During the Holidays
Dec 03, 2024
The holiday season is a time for joy and festivities. Until an extended family member asks the dreaded question over dinner: "So, how is your job search coming along?"
Finding a Job 101: How to Identify Opportunities and Position Yourself Competitively in Your Search
Sep 16, 2024
You go to college hoping that by the time you graduate, you’ll know exactly what you want to do and your dream job will be waiting for you. Unfortunately, that’s not always how it works out. Maybe you’ve spent your college career acquiring specific skills and you know exactly what you want to do, but you’re having trouble getting responses from employers. Maybe you’re unsure exactly what you want to do after graduation, so your job search is stalled.
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What Defines Youth
Everyone keeps telling us that we are so young. When they say that, I think about the First World War. At twenty-three, I would have been a well-seasoned soldier. Or, of course, a well-seasoned nurse, stenographer, fiancée. War crosses my mind in these moments not out of morbidity but in some attempt to contextualize that word: young. At twenty-three, I leave a plastic packet of rice boiling for too long while talking to a friend on the phone. The packet is charred and smoking. In some other slice of time and space, I could be a mother. There is no 10-minute, boil-in-bag option for trench warfare, or babies.
It Doesn't Have to Be This Way
There comes a point in life when you realize: the government isn’t real. It’s a collective delusion. We have all agreed to respect it. Its enforcement may be real; it is not.
Looking for the Wreck
I met Mona on the same day the plane crashed in Findlay, Ohio. Early Sunday morning, my editor called me to say that a small plane carrying two passengers had gone down, nobody had any details yet, and that I’d be going with Mona, a photographer, to find the wreck and cover the story.
College Relationships: A Romance That’s Extra Zesty
First published on October 29, 2015 on Modern Love
Who You Lose on the Path to “Success”
The summer before my junior year of high school, I flew across the Pacific Ocean and touched down on North American soil after a shaky landing at the Ottawa MacDonald-Cartier International Airport. I was fifteen years old, alone, and without a return ticket. The border control officer glanced at the birthdate on my passport and, brows furrowed, scrutinized me through the glass panel.
Turning Television off in Adulthood
I have TV amnesia. I can’t tell you if Don Draper got married a third time or if Walter White walks among mortals. A few months upon viewing, I’ll have forgotten the most important broad strokes of a television plot. My friends marvel at this forgetfulness: but you’ve seen these shows! I have; this is true. But in many ways, I might as well have not.
The Value of Starting Again from Zero
Gene taught himself computer science in his twenties, which, for some time, worked out splendidly. He spent three years in Sweden as a network administrator at a local university, making ends meet while enjoying life as a young expat. When he returned to Colorado, his home state, job offers abounded for anyone who dabbled in IT. This was the tail end of the dot-com boom in the late nineties: as Gene recalls, “say the letters HTML and you were hired.”
The Girl on the Boat, Or, Post-Graduation Travel Reflections
The girl on the slow boat to Luang Prabang was trapped in the developing body of a young teen, her frizzy brown hair tied back in a messy ponytail. Her prepubescent breasts protruded from her thin t-shirt, braless, a sight parents in more puritanical countries would have kept well hidden. She was a moon-faced child, plump and jolly, squawking in French and staring back unabashed, exploding into sudden bursts of strident giggles. There is, my boyfriend and I whispered to each other, something off about her. (We had, naturally, started gossiping about the other passengers seconds after they stepped onboard).
