Falling down the rabbit hole on my way to post-grad

All it takes is one click and I’m on my way down the rabbit hole of job hunting.

It usually goes something like this: open Annenberg’s daily job and internship email, scroll through the list, find at least one company that makes me think,“Hmm maybe I could work here,” search their site, find their “Careers” page, “About Us” page and masthead, proceed to stalk the entire staff on LinkedIn, stalk a different company that one of their staff members worked at previously, search the company itself on LinkedIn to see if any of my connections already work there, find a new job posting on the recommended pages tab … repeat cycle.

Plus, you can add a few more repetitions of this cycle for each time I forget to write down the available position and company and need to go through the process all over again to find it.

This cycle has become my most commonly used way to procrastinate this semester. I guess I can justify it as productive procrastination, but I won’t tell you how many times I went through the above process while writing this blog post. I will say that the Excel sheet I made to document all these job postings, saved as “HIRE_ME” on my computer, filled up a lot more quickly than this page.

Oftentimes, I’ll fall so deep into this black hole of LinkedIn and Google searches that I’ll end up looking at a job posting and have no idea how I found it, or if I can apply any of my previous experience to this particular listing.  If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that looking for a job is exhausting, time-consuming and overwhelming to say the least.

It doesn’t help that I’m not sure exactly what I am looking for. I know I want a career in print or digital journalism, but other than that, I find myself looking at jobs with a variety of focuses: some in print media, some in video, some magazines, some newspapers — in all corners of the country. If on Monday I was picturing myself staying in sunny Los Angeles, driving to and from work every day, on Tuesday I was longing to be back on my native coast, experiencing all four seasons and trading in a car for a New York City subway metro pass.

So far, the best approach I’ve found to combat this indecisiveness is to just apply to everything that seems remotely interesting, and see what choices I’m left with come graduation day. Read: leave the decisions until later. For now, I’m able to hide behind the veil of the potential. Potential job, potential company, potential new city, potential apartment. There’s part of me that appreciates the hypothetical nature of my future right now. Nothing seems set in stone yet, and I still have time to change my mind (even a few times over).

The multitude of potential choices at the bottom of this rabbit hole seem to go on forever, but my indecisiveness and the overwhelming feeling of being confronted with so many options is making it difficult to make this black hole a little less vast. Can I search for an answer to that predicament on LinkedIn?

Emily Goldberg is a senior majoring in print and digital journalism. Her blog column, Diaries of a Second-Semester Senior, runs every Thursday.