It’s a Lot More Cutthroat than I Thought
Honestly, when I first started looking for jobs in general, I felt that with enough hard work, I’d eventually find something.
Man, was I naive and just plain wrong. As a recent ex-student who was going to pursue medicine, I had never really given thought to finding jobs. When you’re following medicine, you see that the path is clear.
My path got murky, fast, after I realized I didn’t want to dive into medicine. I started looking for jobs in things I was more interested in, digital marketing, for example, and realized that every application I sent was just another piece of paper in a giant stack of papers for employers to sort through.
How in the world was I going to stand out?
When I narrowed my focus to the music industry (the process of which I’ll speak about in another post), I realized that getting anywhere was even harder.
The music industry runs on connections. Most fields do, but the music industry specifically does. I knew no one, had done nothing except for attending shows, and had no real experience to my name. Who in the world was going to give me a chance?
So I contacted record companies and sent out some mailings. I visited record companies in-person. I went out of my way to be noticed (and I was, surprisingly). At one point, I stuffed my resume through someone’s door. Honest. Other times, I showed up at companies’ locations only to find that they didn’t exist.
Because I wasn’t a student, I couldn’t get an internship anywhere. Being a student has so many perks that I didn’t take advantage of while I was in school. I should have used them more. But I didn’t and I can’t rewrite history, so…
I eventually found a loose internship working with a management company that handles a band I really like called The Score, helping to handle their digital accounts. But I’m still looking for what’s next and more experience in these two fields: music business and digital marketing.
The purpose of this post is not to say, “Hey, work hard and you’ll find what you’re looking for.” That’s true, to a certain extent.
The purpose is to say this: No matter where you go, if your heart is in it, you need to be ready to give everything to get it. You need to take stock of the resources you have and use them, and then go out of your comfort zone to network with people and companies. And you have to do this over and over and over again until you exhaust all your possibilities.
When you’re done with those possibilities, you have to take stock of what you still have and haven’t used and what you haven’t done yet. Then you sit down and write another plan of action for what you’re going to do next.
The job search is a literal part-time job at the very least. I can’t tell you how many hours per week I devoted to scouring the Internet.
And you know what? If, after everything, you can’t find what you’re looking for, you carve out your own damn space.
