I graduated, what next?

My first job after Amherst College was with a “service” magazine—that is, a magazine which publishes articles intended to inform the readers. My own writing tends to be more narrative, but I picked up some stylistic points in the magazine world. And since this is a “service” article, well, expect bullet points.

I majored in Russian Language and Literature, and because I tend to deal with “first things first,” I didn’t worry too much about what I was going to do after graduation until late in the fall semester of my senior year. I got job listings from the Russian department, but few, if any, of them appealed to me; in addition, my language skills were barely passable and many job openings were looking for fluency.

I attended several group interviews for private school teaching jobs, and even sent some cover letters and résumés, but I couldn’t get excited about those, either. One monumentally wrecked interview (I actually forgot the appointment) convinced me that subconsciously, I didn’t want to be a teacher.

The reed I eventually latched on to was the time I’d spent as a Computer Center Supervisor. I was not a CS major, like my roommate, so I wasn’t interviewing with big consultancies or think tanks as he was, but he convinced me to send résumés to a few tech companies. They turned me down.

• Note 1: Not everyone knows what they want to do with their Amherst degree.
• Note 2: You don’t have to follow your major.

Sometime in the fall, I sent a cold letter to Runner’s World magazine, noting that they did not (at the time) have a website, and perhaps they might employ me in building one for them. I was surprised, a few weeks later, to find a message on my machine from the editor (a Wesleyan alum, as it happens) suggesting that they did have plans for a website in 1996, but perhaps they could make some time to talk with me?

• Note 3: It can’t hurt to ask. You’ve got nothing to lose; all they can hurt is your morale.

Sometime in May, after two interviews, they offered me a summer internship working on their website. With no other offers, I took it, figuring it would be a good thing to put on my résumé even if it led nowhere. Jon Prokup ‘99, the only person in the area I knew, helped me find an apartment; this was the extent of my Amherst “networking” in the job process.

Midway through the internship, I started seriously looking for “real work” in the fall. I had an interview in early August with Cahner’s Multimedia, near Boston. When they offered me a job a few weeks later, I went to RW to see what they could do. They matched the offer and allowed me to count my internship as my “start date” of full employment (which meant benefits like vacation days kicked in sooner.) I decided to stay there, and ended up working for Rodale just over five years.

• Note 4: It can be more useful to take a temporary job in a field you like than a more solid job in a field you don’t like.
• Exception 1: It’s not the late ’90s anymore. It’s a lot harder to get a web development job without experience than it was when I graduated.
• Note 5: The “alumni network” may or may not be useful. Don’t count on it.

During those five years, I not only built experience and a network of contacts, but I discovered the wonders of night school and realized that graduate school was an option. I started at the Muhlenberg Evening College, then when I moved back to Amherst to work for a small publishing company in Sunderland, I took classes at Westfield State College. Now I’m about to start a graduate degree in computer science, nine years after graduation.

• Note 6: You can change direction, with some work.