When you parallel the path of your graduates…

Nature’s first green is gold.

Part 16 in this series.

One of the oddest sensations of my job search has come from the way it’s mirrored that of my former students who graduated *with* me at the end of the spring term.

An oddity of my role as an academic: I taught creative writing and professional development with students in my major.

As a result, I spent copious hours talking with students about deciding between various resume and cover letter styles, networking, leveraging internship and indirect experience in interview settings, responding to gamed online application systems, building brand and platform…the list extends…

At the end of each term, I wrote letters of recommendation for students ejected into their professional future-turned-present. For graduate programs and schools and law firms and corporations and nonprofits and news outlets…the list extends…

And then May arrived and I was one of them. Asking colleagues for my own letters and references. Contacting people in my various professional networks. Doom-scrolling job sites. Shaking my fist at the heavens and stress-writing through every empty space left in my days of unemployed sameness.

Months have stretched on. Interviews and near misses. Hopes raised and ghosted. My file of application materials has grown fatter, my list of job search sub-labels in my email longer. A job? Still elusive.

In the interim, emails and texts have arrived from students about their own job searches. The lowest lows. (What if I can’t find work and I lose the room I’m renting?) The frustrations. (I can’t even find an option that’s connected to what I care about.) The wins. (I got a job with benefits!) The moments of affirmation. (My boss is impressed with my ability to pick things up that weren’t part of my major.)

I’m proud of them. I hurt with them. I want to call some of the places that turned them down and tell them how badly they whiffed.

And…I’m jealous of their youth and energy and the stage of the process they are in. They are all potential and hope. Their stories are in the earliest chapters.

I am by no means romanticizing the circumstances they find themselves in. I may be older, but I remember the mad scramble to find my first job in journalism and the year I spent going to work expecting it to be the day when they figured out they’d hired an impostor. Realizing not long after that how quickly the work of trying to be successful was killing me.

But these were all firsts for me, as they are for most of my former students. Branches in a path full of possibilities. Meanwhile, I’m standing at a dead end I didn’t see coming, scanning the tree line for the hint of a path out.

Best believe they’ll hear about it when I find one. Even though I lost my job, I’m still teaching. Them and myself.