At break of day, I'll trudge away, I'll wander for employ,

[teenybuffalo]

...To plough and sow, to reap and mow,
And be a farmer's boy-oy-oy-oy, and be a farmer's boy.

Aaand real life kicks back in with a vengeance as the job search goes on.  I called up a place offering "part-time work in cleaning", and found out that it involved helping to clean a greasy-spoon diner, six nights a week, between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and

Comments

[negothick]

Yes indeed, that's quite a load of introspection.
The ESL course might help with the scholarship we discussed, but it's by no means a requirement. And you hit the proverbial nail head-on with the line about using volunteers: Groups like Literacy Volunteers do a lot of the new-American teaching. Our local school system, most of whose new students come from non-English speaking homes, just laid off two of their three "World Language Teachers." And those were fully-certified, experienced teachers.
What about Your College's library? Or does work-study work have to wait till the Fall term?

[teenybuffalo]

"Our library has no employment openings at this time. Please check back in August for fall job opportunities." That said, I didn't get a work-study award this past semester--just scholarship money and the offer of loans--so I don't know whether I'll get one this year. Yet another thing to check on.

[rushthatspeaks]

You are much much much more likely to wind up in Southeast Asia somewhere with an ESL job. That said, the last acquaintance of mine to do this permanently settled in Japan and is very happy about it.

[teenybuffalo]

I should have figured. Not that I'd mind living in Japan or Korea or somewhere, but I wouldn't get the job just for the sake of being able to live there.

[teenybuffalo]

You can ALWAYS change your mind.

You're 100% right about that, though it's hard to assure myself as much, in my current state of mind.

[teenybuffalo]

Thanks. It helps.

[justawench]

When I quit my job, I flirted briefly with the idea of being a real estate appraiser. They're probably harder hit than the real estate agents, but it's a fairly good-paying job without the "sales" crap that I'm not good at. In Kentucky at least, you have to apprentice to an established appraiser for a period of time, and this seemed like the biggest hurdle, though I never seriously looked into it. I'm sure like most things, there's more to it than appears, but after seeing tons of appraisals while working at a mortgage company, it seemed crazy easy, especially considering that these days, a computer program probably generates a lot of the info much in the way TurboTax does.

I have no idea what type of job opportunities exist in these days of gov't cutbacks, but since you mentioned hiking, what about getting a job at your local parks department or state or national parks service? The latter could definitely be a career.

[teenybuffalo]

National parks service = really good idea. One of my ideas for after graduation is to be a park service historian. Some of my best times as a kid came as a Junior Ranger--this program where you sort of pretend to be an apprentice park ranger.

[justawench]

It seems like there's a lot of different areas to focus on in the Parks Service - forestry, conservation, safety, fire protection, learning about flora/fauna, etc. Of course, depending on the site, there could be historical buildings (since you mentioned history) or lakes where I imagine there would be positions for everything from collecting fees to patroling.

Hm, rather than trying to think up things off the top of my head, I could just look at their site:

http://www.nps.gov/personnel/permanent.htm

Park Site Interpretation sounds really cool.

[negothick]

It does sound great. Unfortunately, since it is a Government Job, that means dealing with USAJobs, by all accounts the most user-unfriendly website in this part of the world, anyway. The process of filing a resume on that is meant to rule out all but the most serious candidates. Still, you only have to do it once for all federal employment.