Why A Lousy First Job Is Good For You

Graduation is six or seven months ago or five or six months ahead but either way, recent grads and soon to be grads are thinking about or experiencing their first jobs and it is scary.  First jobs are usually awful and there seems to be some mystic force that makes them that way.  First jobs are not designed to grant immediate life fulfillment.  First jobs are designed to make you figure out WHAT YOU DON'T WANT TO DO. 

Some people know what they want to do after college and have known since they entered middle school.  These people end up as Certified Public Accountants or mechanical engineers.  For the rest of us, there is a great terrible void, or swamp, out there that scares us to death because it is uncertain (like life itself is not uncertain.)  So the best thing to do is do something, anything--get in the car, drive to a city where you don't know anybody, take the first job that comes along.  You might as well get it over with and experience your first lousy job because it will be terrible but it will 1) define and crystallize what you don't want to do and 2) bring into focus what you do want to do.  Doing nothing only makes the situation worse.  A case study.

My daughter, Margot, graduated in August from Texas A&M University with a degree in marketing.  To an employer this is good and bad news.  The good news is she was smart enough to get into the business school and smart enough to graduate.  The bad news is marketing is one of those wishy washy degrees--not as bad as history or political science but not easy to place like accounting.  Margot had some vague idea about getting into the music industry but what 22 year old doesn't?  Graduation came and went and a job popped up on the A&M career center website--Houston, recruiter for tech jobs, client list including Halliburton, Baylor Medical and a bunch of other Houston biggies.  Recruiting is a tough business but some people make a lot of money at it so why not?  Lifestylewise, Houston is away from home but not too far, there are a lot of A&M alums around, and only two hours from A&M so close for seeing friends and football games.

Got the job, got an apartment (nice, right downtown, relatively cheap by big city standards, bus to work), and I financed a four hour visit to IKEA. 

Set up and ready to go and...hated it.  Work from 8 in the morning to 7 in the evening.  Two other women started the same week and got fired on Friday.  Yikes.  Told to work on Saturday which was ok but told at 4pm on Friday afternoon--that is really unprofessional.  And no business since the market is so tight that if tech people want more money they just walk into their bosses' office and ask.

But Margot hung in there until Mother Nature came calling.  After Hurricane Katrina, there was Hurricane Rita and Houston shut down.  I called Margot on Wednesday and told her to get out of town, fast.  Her boss said stay till Thursday.  I overruled that and for once Margot agreed with her dad and got out of town to College Station.  The trip took 2 hours.  The next day, Thursday, the trip took 14 hours because everybody decided to get out of town at the same time.  Margot had had enough.  Back to Houston after Rita hit somewhere else, called her boss and quit.  Two months of a rotten job BUT Margot had learned a lot.

She learned that 1) she likes to work, 2) she likes getting up and having a place to go and earn money 3) she is good at managing multiple projects 4) she is a fast learner as she didn't get fired in the first week 5) she presents herself well over the phone and in person 6) she can relate to people and get them interested in talking to her.  Margot knew all that stuff, the job just verified what she thought.

She also learned she didn't like unreasonable bosses and organizations (who does?) that are, at best, dysfunctional and wanted to avoid them.  In summary, she found out what she didn't want to do and got a pretty good idea of what she wanted to do.

So what happened?  Find out tomorrow.