ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 20, 1996 TAG: 9604220007
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELLIOTT SMITH STAFF WRITER
AS COLLEGE GRADUATION looms, some seniors face a stressful employment hunt, others their first job.
Adrienne Ross is a nervous wreck.
The 22-year-old German major at Hollins College is a couple of weeks away from finishing school, which is normally a happy event. But instead of basking in the glow of her impending graduation, she's concerned about looking at her impending joblessness.
"I'm so nervous," said Ross, who is looking for a job in the field of event planning. "I can't eat, I can't sleep, I'm very nervous, because I worked really, really hard on my job search. I put more into that than I did into my studies, and I know people who I've never seen in the career center who already have great jobs."
Ross said she has sent out more than 30 resumes and cover letters, but has found that at larger companies, things can be rough. "The larger companies can care less, and I hate job hot lines because they're not helpful. It's just hard to put your foot in the door along with thousands of other seniors."
She is one of many seniors across the country who face graduating without a job, or taking a job that they don't believe compensates them for the time and money they spent getting a degree.
But not to worry, said Toni McLawhorn, director of career services at Roanoke College. "There's no need to panic," she said. "We still have seniors who don't have jobs, so they experiment for a year, doing a fun job, like working on a cruise ship, and then look for a job."
McLawhorn's office at Roanoke College assists students with their job search - building resumes, working on interview techniques, finding internships and even placing students with potential employers.
"More employers are calling us with jobs within the region," McLawhorn said. "We do a lot of direct referral. We try to match our students with them using our database; and we may fax them their resume for pre-screening, and they let us know who they want to talk to."
Kristin Doig, a 21-year-old psychology major at Hollins, found that a job fair was her ticket to finding the job she wanted.
"I definitely knew what field I wanted to get into, and I felt it was a waste of time to send in a lot of resumes, but the job fair helped me out," Doig said. She was recently hired at Richmond-based Sysco Food Services in the company's marketing and sales department. "It was unfortunate that a lot more students didn't come."
According to McLawhorn, these seniors are entering a job market that has changed over the past five or six years. The sales and service sectors seem to be the most plentiful, and computer science jobs are "jobs I can't fill, because of the technical requirements," McLawhorn said.
But she warned that the new corporate structure, which eliminated most of the mid-level jobs that went to college graduates in the past, may present students with a job at a lower salary than they expected with a college degree, starting at about $20,000. However, she said that mobility within the company will be faster.
For Melissa Raub, a 21-year-old accounting major at Roanoke College, factors of salary and location were important while looking for a job. She found one with Robins-Gioa, a Northern Virginia management consulting firm.
"I was specifically looking in the Northern Virginia area and about $25,000 a year at the very lowest," she said. "Everything just seemed to work out."
While things haven't always worked out so easily, the seniors agreed that the job search process has been quite interesting.
"It was a real roller coaster," Doig said. "It definitely wasn't easy, because the job market is so competitive. If you sit back and wait, it's not going to happen.''
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS/Staff. Adrienne Ross, a senior atby CNBHollins College, has embarked on her job search. This year, she
says, she's had to split her time between classes and looking for
employment.