Can only land shitty event roles, everything after graduation has been terrible
I'm a CS major who graduated a few weeks ago and everything has been a rapid downhill spiral. I put every single ounce of my energy into the job search starting last fall and into graduation. Hundreds of applications just to get autorejected. I had some hope though because some places told me I was just "too early", I thought I could graduate and actually have prospects but nope.
The only job I was able to get is a short-term contract where I have to stand all day and be a solicitor, being yelled at about numbers when nobody wants us random strangers approaching them and asking for something when they have things to do. My back starts getting ready to give out midway through the shift, I take more than the max dose of Aleve on the package and it does absolutely nothing. But if I sit down for a few seconds while we wait for new people to come in to ask, it's a problem. I'm constantly in pain and being treated like shit by the general public, like an annoyance at best or like a criminal at worst because solicitors naturally make people suspicious. No hate to people without degrees but nobody else I'm working with has a degree or hard technical skills. I spent 4 years grinding on this degree, building and deploying web apps outside of class, co-oping, resume workshopping, visiting the career studio, career fairs, learning Microsoft Stack and shit, all of it just for that??? A shitty, degrading job that doesn't require any of the skills and qualifications I worked for?
I have 3 days left in this contract and I'm throwing up thinking about finishing out the week. It is genuinely terrible. All of my coworkers hate being there as well it's just constant physical pain, rejection, dirty looks and nasty comments, and group complaining. I made a version of my resume tailored for entry IT roles and frantically sent out applications over the past month as well but that is also not converting. One company has ghosted me for 3.5 weeks after a final round interview, one has ghosted me 11 days after a phone screener, and I got a rejection from a company I had a phone screener with earlier today. So now I only have one real IT pipeline I got from a staffing agency and I'm only at the stage where the recruiter pushes my resume to the company that's not a guarantee that I'll get the role or even an interview a this point. I have gotten one concrete offer for when my current contract ends and it's another public facing event role with 8-10 hours of standing. The only improvement is its informational instead of us having to go up and bother people. But that doesn't even start until June so on Friday when my contract ends I have to file for unemployment.
I'm operating with very little family support, I'm independent, I have nowhere to go back to. I'm supposed to be spending this summer with my first real job, working on settling into a career, looking at rooms to rent on Sep 1 when my lease is up and having the room to have a little bit of selection instead of having to take the first sublet I can find that won't ask for paystubs.
I genuinely don't have anything to live for at this point. I can't land anything that's not degrading and a horrible fit. I can't use my degree at all, I can't even land entry-level IT positions. Every opportunity turns out to be a bust. I mean hell I had a final round SWE interview for a robotics company in Boston that I was so excited about, it would have changed my life and given me financial stability I've never had, and they rejected me 4 minutes before Fenway commencement and completely ruined the ceremony for me. I can't even celebrate my grad school acceptance because I have to hide it from employers to seem less complicated and nothing is guaranteed without income. Graduation wasn't exciting or full of opportunity at all, it's been nothing but a massive loss of support and downgrade in quality of life. And a lot of my friends think I'm the lucky one because "at least I found a job". Rising seniors need to be prepared because it is a massive cliff and the school does not prepare people for it at all. I mean their social media is all still talking about hopes, dreams, and opportunity while graduates are relegated to low-skill, degrading work, filing for unemployment, or being sent home. I put in all this work and I'll probably have to file for unemployment.