The future is scary. I want to place blame on the coronavirus and the fact that no one else is really prepared for what is to come either, but I can't. The truth is, I am preparing myself for a future I'm not even sure I know yet.
Search job postings, sending in my resume, emailing people I have never met. That is my new life. That is the life of thousands of college seniors, who quite frankly aren't ready for this new normal of job searching in the midst of a pandemic.
For a lot of us, we had a careers class, but none of those classes taught us what it would look like to find a job in the middle of COVID-19.
I know the basics. Online interviews mean perfect hair, plain background, good wifi, nice dress shirts, and sweatpants. Job searching is limited to Indeed, LinkedIn, and if you're lucky, previous connections. The things I don't know are, how do I get a job when hiring is paused? How do I know if I like the company if their website hasn't been updated since 2008? How do I finish getting my experience hours when the place I was job shadowing closed due to the pandemic?
My university didn't prepare me for this, but how could they?
We never would have guessed there would be an outbreak to this capacity and that is what is so scary. No one knew this would impact everyone the way it did, yet we hardly know how to control it. Our world has been shaken to its core, but for so many, that doesn't mean the world stops spinning.
There are millions of college seniors around the globe who are juggling online school and the job market that is hanging on by a thread. Trying to navigate all of this in the dark, with a flashlight that is about to run out of battery life. We are lost, we are scared, and we are under the pressure of a society that is understanding of everyone except us. We don't want to complain and we don't want to place blame, but it's hard.
Our life has become a nightmare we can't wake up from.
We are fighting a battle we simply won't win and still trying to manage to pay rent even though most of us don't have an income. This is our normal. This is our "wow your life sounds like a movie." This is COVID-19.
