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my english class final essay. a sad story of my last job hunting experience. --- Job Hunting By the spring of 2003, four years of university had finally ground to an end. Like a bird out of cage, I savored my fresh freedom with delight. I had many plans at the time. A trip around the world, for example, or teaching in a shabby village school in west China, or going to grandpa's countryside hometown for a long-waited-for vacation. Oh I had so much to do, the least of which was to find a job. Unfortunately, when father heard of my fabulous plans he disapproved all of them immediately. On my vigorous insistence he even threatened to cut off my income! OK, fine. Get a job. I can do that. So what do I want to do? I am a physics major, sure, but my chances of finding a good job as a physics student are not very promising. Look at the job advertisements. All the companies are looking for IT professionals, guys who specialize in computers and the Internet! Physics is no good. Now in my senior year, when I was fed up with the arcane formulas of quantum mechanics, I did fool around with computers and even managed to teach myself a bit of programming. So, can I find a job as an IT professional, I wonder --- a programmer, perhaps? I love programming for a job, even putting aside the handsome pay. The only problem is that my expertise in that area doesn't seem to make me feel exactly confident. I know I'm only an amateur. What am I to say in the resume? The question bogged me but just for a second. Bragging is the answer. Bragging, boasting, little exaggerations here and there: they're the lingua franca of the resume. It's quite harmless, and everybody is doing it. Nowadays the resume is just like the advertisements on TV. I wanted to be a programmer, so I wrote in my resume that I had a profound understanding of the art of programming and that I could write in a handful of computer languages etc, etc. Software companies, please look no further. There was actually another factor which encouraged me to take some liberty with the resume. Anybody who has used a piece of domestic software can tell that they're generally of poorer quality, in both user interface and functionality, than their foreign counterparts. It comes as no surprise because in China the software industry is still in its infancy. What is a little surprising is that, in spite of their inferior software products, most companies are demanding very sophisticated programming skills from prospective employees. For example, it's not uncommon to read in their recruiting ads that an applicant is required to be fluent in a dozen programming languages, while in practice one or two should be sufficient. The reason is simple: the job market is so filled with mediocre job seekers like me that the companies simply have to raise the requirements --- not for practical reasons, only to keep the number of applicants manageable. The truth is that I had put myself in an extremely fierce competition where being overly upright would prove to be too costly. This is basically the rationale for my “resume opportunism”, and it did give me some peace of mind. The same situation happens everywhere, not only in the software sector. With the surplus of graduate students in recent years, job hunters with bachelor's and even master's degrees are competing for jobs that don't even really require a collage diploma. This is of course a great waste of human resources. It has posed a big problem for the government to solve, and its pungent consequences fell on us new-graduates first. We have studied assiduously. Our parents have paid a lot of money for our tuition. Many students have to ask for a bank loan to buy their collage tickets because their parents couldn't afford it. And yet when we finally graduate, we find ourselves out of a job. OK, stop complaining. Equipped with a dozen beautifully typeset copies of the resume, I headed for a job market that was set up especially for graduating students of the year. Over a hundred companies, mostly IT, were present in the market. Every company occupied a little desk, next to a plastic placard announcing what the company did and what type of employees it was looking for. The rows of desks were overwhelmed by students. There were so many of us that in order to hand in my resume letter, I had to elbow in and out of swarms of job-hunters like myself. There were a great deal of toe stepping and head bumping. Everywhere you could see eager faces with beads of sweat on the foreheads and the waving of the resume letters. Everyone was fighting their little battle. In a job market like this, you would gain a deeper understanding of the word “competition”. By the time the job market was about to close, I had handed out the dozen of my resume letters, exhausted. So that was basically my job hunting adventure. It ended my dreamy years in the ivory tower of collage and forced me into the big wide world. They say that when looking for a job you must have confidence in yourself to let the companies know that you're the best. One has to be unbelievably egotistic to really think so after he's been through a real world job hunting experience, where your are only one of thousands upon thousands of hungry job seekers all believing they're the best. As a job seeker you're nothing. “I'm a thumbprint on the window of a skyscraper. I'm a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea with a million tons of raw sewage.” --- this line from the movie “sideways” comes closer to what my experience of job hunting had made me believe. Of course, life goes on. Two weeks after my trip to the job market, a software company called me for an interview. But that was another story.

job hunting experience(from smth)