And the good news is...

I have a job!  Well, sorta.  I found a seasonal job doing flu shot immunization clinics throughout the area this fall.  It's not exactly what I wanted, but hey, it's way better than the nothing that I have had for the past several months.

I am still looking for a "real" job in the mean time, but this job hunt has been difficult and discouraging from the start.  Economic hard times lead everyone to tighten their belts, even hospitals.  It costs a lot to train a new graduate to be a nurse, so a lot of times, those are the first jobs places get rid of when times get tough.  Many of the hospitals in the area have been in hiring freezes for months.  That was something I was well aware of when I graduated.  We were told many times over that it would not be easy to find a job in this economy.  Philly in particular is a bad situation because there are so many nursing schools in the area constantly turning out grads. The competition is stiff.  In fact, the number one piece of advice they gave us at a career workshop as we were about to exit the nursing program was move out of here if you can.  If that wasn't possible, they encouraged us to look in different places than hospitals for employment, particularly nursing homes.  Well I did that.  I looked every place I could think of. I perused newspaper ads and hospital websites.  I called nursing homes and assisted living centers.  I met with the stake employment specialist and attended a huge job fair.  I found very little that I was even qualified to apply for (still, I applied to a ton of jobs I was not qualified for), and I know that for every job I was eligible for, there were probably at least a few dozen other candidates out there vying for it too.  I am not solely blaming the economy or the Philly situation.  I'm not sure I am very good at this job hunt thing.  I absolutely hate to call people I do not know on the phone, and it takes me hours to build up the courage to call a nursing home to ask if they are hiring.  I guess that aggressive would be one of the last words I would use to describe my job hunting style.  Unfortunately, I think that's what it takes in this economy.  The quiet yet persistent approach just isn't cutting it.

Anyway, time is running out.  If I can't pull a pretty awesome "real" job out of my hat in the next few months, I do believe we will be decided that grad school in Philly may not be our most viable option, and we will move on to somewhere else come January.