BY | Danny Lachance

It’s one of the hardest questions a potential employer can lob at you during a job interview: “Tell me about a time when you experienced conflict with a co-worker. How did you respond to the situation?” Answering it well is difficult: If you talk about something too banal, the interviewer will feel as if you’ve dodged the question. But if you bring up a complex and painful experience from the past, you may come across as difficult or melodramatic.

Last February, at a weekly meeting of Macalester’s Job Search Group, a five-week “how to find a job” seminar run for seniors by the college’s Career Development Center (CDC), students had a chance to practice answers to that and other challenging questions while their peers looked on. As one student took the hot seat, she offered an answer to the conflict question that nobody anticipated.

“She said, ‘Well, I don’t have conflict. I’m from Wisconsin, and we’re all passive aggressive,’” recalls Mary Emanuelson, assistant director of the CDC and co-facilitator of the group, laughing. The group cracked up. It was a much-needed moment of levity in a season of job hunting that has been inordinately stressful for college seniors across the country.

Last spring, the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported that employers expected to hire 22 percent fewer new college graduates in 2009 than they had the previous year. Fortunately, by July it was obvious that these dire national predictions had proven wrong for Macalester students. In 2008, 45 percent of Mac graduates had jobs by Commencement and in 2009, 43 percent did, according to Career Development Center statistics.

In other words, the news wasn’t as bad as expected. But what did change is the kinds of jobs that new graduates had accepted. In a year in which people with newly minted degrees were urged to be flexible, Mac grads truly were: Almost 20 percent of those who reported getting full-time work had accepted volunteer jobs, compared to 11 percent in 2008. Forty percent of those with jobs in 2009 were making less than $20,000 a year, compared with 27 percent in 2008. And 13 percent of the employed had settled for summer-only jobs, compared to 5 percent in 2008.

Volunteer jobs, internships up

That volunteer job statistic, with a 75 percent increase over last year, really startled career center associate director John Mountain, although he and his office had urged students to do this kind of creative thinking. Whether it’s volunteer work or internships, getting that foot in the door is crucial, Mountain says. “You do a good job, and all of a sudden you’ve got their connections. They can pass your name on, or things uptick and they have a position for you.”

That’s the strategy Katie Clifford ’09 (Olympia, Wash.) adopted. An environmental studies major, she was looking for an entry-level position doing environmental advocacy or policy work. As she scanned employment ads last fall, she noticed entry level positions for office assistants at environmental agencies. They sounded like good back-up jobs at the time. “I’ve been a secretary and a receptionist, and I’ll have a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies,” she recalls thinking. “I can be super-competitive.” But months later she received letters saying that, due to the volume of applications, only candidates with master’s degrees or experience were being considered.

So Clifford pursued a summer job, landing a paid internship as a naturalist at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. She spent the summer working with the center’s educational outreach programs, leading hikes and scheduling guest speakers. It was temporary, but Clifford is looking on the bright side. She built her communication and outreach skills, and throughout the summer met environmental studies professionals and scholars, which gave her opportunities to try out the networking skills she learned in the job search group. Says Clifford, “Getting a summer job gives you one more experience, one more thing on your resume.”

Grad school applications up

Graduate school, of course, is a popular choice for Mac students, and this bad economic year not surprisingly saw that figure go up 3 percent to 14.2 percent among 2009 graduates. Victoria Harris ’09 (Plymouth Meeting, Penn.) was one of those students. She had been on the fence about whether to head directly to a graduate program in urban and regional planning or to start out in an entry-level position. When the economy plummeted last fall, however, she decided to head to grad school right away. “I figured that in two years it’s going to be better: more money, more jobs. And it’ll definitely be worth having a competitive advantage if the market keeps getting worse,” she says. She is enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania this fall, and feels lucky. All four of the schools she applied to had record increases in applicants this year; some applicant pools grew by as much as 130 percent.

Job hunting strategies vital

Those who decided to stick with job hunting were smart, availing themselves of the CDC’s services in increasing numbers. In past years, the job-hunters support group was spottily attended. This past year, thanks to the poor economy and a successful overhaul of the program by intern Lisa Novack, attendance was way up: twenty-five students came to the first session, and most attended every session. “That just didn’t happen in the past,” Mountain says. “It wouldn’t be uncommon for us to have an event and maybe only four or five people show up.”

An annual Communications Careers Conference sponsored by the Minnesota Private Colleges Career Consortium has usually attracted three or four Macalester students. This year, 20 Mac students signed up. Attendance at drop-in days, during which students can get advice without an appointment, was so strong that CDC staff members decided to continue holding them after spring break, when they usually pull back on events as students turn their attention to end-of-the-year commitments.

Even in the best economies, finding a job can be a daunting proposition for liberal arts college graduates, including Macalester students. If Macalester is like a four-year cruise ship for the mind, then graduation often feels a bit like hitting an iceberg. The shrewdness and marketing savvy required for a successful job search can seem oceans away from 4 a.m. residence hall debates over political theory.

On the one hand, Macalester seniors have a wider set of career options available to them than do their counterparts in more narrow and vocationally oriented undergraduate programs. And once they’re in the door, their talents are quickly recognized. On the other hand, a kind of paralysis can ensue as graduation approaches and, for the first time in 21 years, there’s no clear path in front of them.

Fortunately, the CDC has the expertise to guide seniors (and alumni) through the job search process. Part of her job, explains Christina Cowens Gholson, a CDC career counselor, is to teach basic marketing skills that aren’t learned in class. She’s found that selfpromotion doesn’t always come naturally. “Some Macalester students do not see themselves as economically valuable. They may not always see that a service experience was important or they think they have to be paid for something for it to count on a resume,” Gholson says.

Some Mac students don’t realize how exceptional their experiences are, since those experiences may be almost run-of-the-mill among their Mac peers. Katy Petershack (Madison, Wis.) was searching for jobs doing international poverty relief. After meeting with career center assistant director Emanuelson, she rewrote her resume to include a section called “international experience,” which highlighted her study abroad term in Tanzania and her participation in archaeological digs in Israel with the Classics Department. When she interviewed with prospective employers in Washington, D.C., over spring break, she was surprised at her interviewers’ reactions. “Their response was something like, ‘You’re actually worth my time. How do you have all this international experience?’” she says. “I had internalized a sense that no one would want to hire me.”

To help students like Petershack realize their job potential, CDC staff focus on two messages in particular: versatility in strategy and flexibility in outcome. In a bad economy, Mountain says, networking is more crucial than ever. “It really gets down to those personal connections. Employers often don’t advertise because they have so many people trying to get a position. So they send an email and ask, ‘Does anyone know of any recent graduates? Send them my way.’ Then all of a sudden, if you’re connected to that informal network, you’ve got an interview even though that position was never posted formally,” he explains.

Hours spent on job-posting boards, then, might be useless. “There might be 1,000 people applying for the same position,” Mountain says. He urges students to use online job postings only along with other tools, such as LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking website, and MacConnect, the CDC’s database of alumni who have agreed to become contacts for career-seeking Mac students. For example, if a student sees an opening online for a specific company, he’s encouraged to seek alumni who work in that company. He could then leverage those contacts, Mountain says, to get his application noticed.

Alumni network proves useful

Networking with Macalester alumni proved invaluable to Todd Copenhaver ’09 (Wellesley, Mass.), an economics major. Copenhaver remembers waking up on September 15, the day Lehmann Brothers announced that it was filing for bankruptcy, and “opening up my web browser to a picture of the most depressed Wall Street analyst you’d seen in your life. That’s the look I had on my face as well because I knew it was going to be difficult for all of us,” Copenhaver recalls. And indeed, it has been a particularly brutal hiring season for economics majors. Copenhaver estimated that 30 of his fellow majors were gunning for jobs in the financial industry but as of July, only 11 had received offers.

He counts himself among the fortunate ones. Following the advice of friends, he started networking early. From July to October, he did about a dozen informational interviews. The stated purpose of such meetings, of course, is to gather information about how to best position oneself to enter an industry. But if they go well, those meetings can often be valuable networking experiences that can translate into job interviews.

Using a contact from an economics faculty member, Copenhaver scheduled an informational interview with an alumna working at Wells Fargo. Buttressed by references provided by other Mac alumni with whom he’d met over the summer, Copenhaver made it through three rounds of interviews and by spring had accepted a position as a financial analyst for Wells Fargo’s U.S. Corporate Banking Unit in Minneapolis. In July he noted of his new career, “A lot of work, but loving it.”

In a year in which many of his peers did not secure jobs, Copenhaver admits to having some survivors’ guilt. “There is a bit of an awkwardness there, but not as much as I would have expected. People understand that there was a certain amount of luck involved.”

Petershack also saw the value of an alumni network. Her spring break interview in D.C. was part of a larger trip she and a friend designed to explore what it would take to launch a career in the District. The two were weary before their trip: all the media would talk about, it seemed, was the dire state of the economy and rising unemployment rates. But by the end of a week spent meeting with Mac alumni, they felt much more hopeful.

Alumni offered to write letters of recommendation and volunteered space on their couches as temporary places to crash when they first moved to the city. And they were reassured that everyone starts off in D.C. paying their dues in temporary positions. The D.C. job that seemed elusive on the flight out seemed, on the flight back to Minneapolis, possible. By summer Petershack’s optimism was proving to be well founded. She was interning at the White House’s Office of Presidential Correspondence and shadowing various Mac alumni— including United Nations Population Fund attorney Sarah Craven ’85—to learn more about permanent jobs. Says Petershack, “The Mac alumni in D.C. have been wonderful.”

That sense of possibility that Petershack feels is one she senses in a lot of her Class of 2009 friends as well. Yes, they’re making compromises. And no, it’s not a great year to be graduating. But it’s still their year. “We know we can do this,” she says. “We just know it’s going to be a little bit harder.”