So you're in between college semesters and it's about that time: you have to figure out what you're going to spend the next couple months doing.
For whatever reason-- whether you grew up here, or you go to undergrad or graduate school here, or you just decided you wanted to have the best summer of your life and moved here-- you're in New York City.
Now you have to find a job... we know, horrible.
Here are the 7 grueling stages of finding a summer job in NYC.
1. Decide what you want to do
You're in the most assorted, ethnically and linguistically diverse city in America. Your options for summer jobs are pretty unparalleled at this point.
[anad]
Here's what you don't want to do: work at any sort of corporate chain minimum wage job. What's the point of working at Panera Bread when you live in NYC?
If you wanted to work at Panera over the summer, you should have chosen a city with a lower cost of living, and with less crazy, eclectic, independently owned businesses that could have a job for you that you'll love.
2. Apply online
Inevitably, you spend hours on end sending out resumes and applications to job openings.
Even when you apply for jobs you think you're overqualified for, like hostessing at a restaurant, or being a barista at a coffee shop, you don't hear back. All of your internet applications go unanswered.
You're starting to feel like you live in a Harry Potter book and you left your invisibility cloak on too long. Or you start to lose yourself to the depths of despair feeling that you'll never get a summer job.
You start to get desperate, and apply to jobs that you really, really don't want to do.
You weigh the pros and cons between having an unpaid internship that may enhance your future career, and having an actual paid job that feels menial and mindless.
You hear back from the jobs you applied to that are unpaid. You're not surprised. Who wants to work for free?
3. Use your resources
Of course, your grandmother knows someone who knows someone whose sister is one of the top editors at Cosmopolitan, or some equally high-profile magazine or corporation.
So you make plans to have lunch with this person so they can explain to you how to break into the market... at least, this is the hopeful delusion from which you make these lunch plans.
You try really hard to look nice, print out way too many copies of your resume with shaking fingers, and proceed to listen to this person say a lot of things that may or may not help you with your career.
The truth is, you weren't looking for career advice, you were looking for a job, and this conversation wasn't very helpful.
4. Attend a job fair
Your Googling is even more desperate than it was in step 2, and you've even started looking for job fairs on the internet. Because we live in NYC, and NYC is a giant city, you soon discover there is an NYC job fair you can go to.
You get dressed up again, print out too many copies of your resume again (we're seeing a trend here), and attend the job fair.
[anad2]
After you wait outside in a giant line for way too long, you finally get in the door to talk to a bunch of sleaze balls who have no intention of ever hiring you for anything you'd want to do.
One of the greasy sleazeballs acquires your phone number and proceeds to call you for the next several months to see if you'll hire him as a financial consultant.
You see right through his slimy, vampiric act, but you feel bad for every poor young person searching for a job who doesn't.
,5. Network
Network like crazy. Send Facebook messages to people from high school you haven't talked to in years to see if they know anyone who can help.
Go on five or six lunches with friends of grandparent's friends and meet people with career advice and vague, amorphous connections to the job you want to get.
[anad]
Try to keep yourself from going crazy, and try not to seem too desperate or needy to everyone you come into contact with.
Let's face it, though: some of the emails you send to old professors and bosses are desperate and needy, and you can hardly blame anyone when most of these go unanswered.
6. Interview
So, fine, you do interview for that position at Panera, but like the guy at the job fair, the guy who interviewed you for the position at Panera was a big bag of slime.
After four or five terrible interviews where it's clear that the corporation or hiring party in question just wants to take advantage of you.
You're at an emotional low where you're convinced the world isn't worth the effort and that you'll never find a job.
7. And then you finally get that call
Or that email. Or that LinkedIn message. LinkedIn should have been a step on this list on its own-- it's essential, and you need to have one. Like immediately.
But there was that one interview that actually went super well, or that one conversation with that one person who knew another person who was hiring.
All it takes is one person to say to their friends that they need someone they can trust for a position.
[anad2]
Once you get that job offer, it can feel a bit like Christmas morning; like everything in the world is going to be okay again.
Finally, you've been offered a decent-paying job that's somewhat in the field you studied with a salary that's high enough to survive. Congratulations.
You survived the harrowing process of finding a summer job in NYC.
Now you have to survive living in NYC. Good luck with that.
If you thought it couldn't get worse, check out 5 Struggles of Moving Apartments in NYC.