For Some Jobs, It’s Now or Never Accelerated Learning Resources

For Some Jobs, It’s Now or Never

When I decided to attend the University of North Carolina four years ago, I breathed in a sigh of false relief. I had mistakenly believed that the days of standardized testing, GPA-comparing and intensely competing among peers was over. Now I see it was just the beginning of a new challenge.

Nothing bad ever comes from being pushed to your limits, but senior year of college is beginning more and more to resemble senior year of high school. From the cries of “one more semester!” to the senioritis of those with jobs, nostalgia—or something like it—has begun to set in.

As with the college of your dreams, when the dream job just doesn’t pan out, you don’t give up the search altogether. The logical person looks for the next best opportunity. I’ve heard it many times: you might not get your dream job right away, but you get experience and then build up to it.

That is, unless you are unable to “transfer.”

The importance of starting out in the right field or even company hit home the past week, as I noticed the slew of training programs and entry-level positions available only to college seniors. Most pressingly, I realized this was my one and only opportunity to apply for one of my dream jobs: a one-year rotational program in marketing communications. Fortunately, college graduates are the only category of candidates where companies look at inexperience as an opportunity and not a liability—a fact that I try to keep in mind as I work to keep the odds on my side.

After all, Harvard has an undergraduate class size of 1,500, and the number of positions for my dream jobs? Well, significantly less than that. If job and college applications truly had lottery-ticket odds, no one would apply. Instead we keep wishing, hoping our resumes have something more than luck to keep them out of the wastebasket.

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