u/Sunquat_Slice

I graduated university last year, and since then I've had 5 temporary contracts in the span of a year. The current one is just awful and has made me reconsider my goals in life. I want a path forward that leads to meaningful full-time work, but it is also clear that job searching the usual way isn't going to yield the result I was looking for.

I have applied to the military, but just got an email that they've frozen hiring for officer and a number of different enlisted positions until next April (I'm not sure if this is Canada wide or just where I applied, and would appreciate if anyone has clarity on this, since I see that the CAF is still advertising on LinkedIn for officers in a number of different cities). I've been thinking about a Working Holiday Visa, but not sure how this works for someone who only knows English, and would appreciate if anyone could share their experience and weigh in on whether it's worth it. I've also heard that the AHS offers a paid HCA course if you are willing to commit to a certain amount of time working in rural Alberta, and was wondering if people have found that worth it.

More than anything, though, I was wondering if there are other non-traditional paths that people have had luck with that I haven't considered yet. I understand that I won't end up in my field and that's okay (and I took it out of this post because people were missing the point and recommending more companies to apply to for that), but I am still hoping I get the opportunity to do something that contributes to society or allows me to grow as a person.

Thank you.

I just started a new “job”. It is a summer internship, never mind the fact that I’ve been out of school for a while now. Things are tough out there, so people with master’s degrees have displaced me from entry level jobs and I have, in turn, displaced a high school or university student from this summer position.

I think things were ill-fated from the interview. I lied about having a car, and the non-profit lied about the job being an environmental sciences office position. I’ve applied for perhaps thousands of jobs in the last few months, so I wasn’t going to let the truth be an obstacle.

The job is actually to set up garbage bins of all flavours at events (compost, recycling, refundables, landfill) and yell at people throwing things out in the wrong place. Sometimes we have volunteers to guard the garbage bins instead, two per station. I am not sure where they find these people. After that, there is a period of hauling around the garbage in the hot sun, and then another period of sorting it, usually bare handed. We are only to use one set of gloves when they have them, and on more than one occasion I’ve seen the volunteers eating things with them still on after touching the dirty diapers on the sorting table. Once there was an event with bleachers, and I was instructed to crawl around down there on my hands and knees through the puddles of alcohol from drinks people chucked under there to clean it up. It occurred to me that if I was a sanitation worker for the summer, I’d be paid a lot more and likely have a union that would say no to some of this crap. It also occurred to me how much a team of this many people could accomplish towards environmentalism if they were doing…anything else, really.

There was another intern who started a little before me, but I think she also wasn’t told about the garbage sorting in the interview, because she’s taking a few days after a mental breakdown. It might also be that for the last week we’ve been up everyday at 4:30am. They have had other interns previously, and I wonder how many years it took to hone the craft of misrepresenting this particular job in the interview and offer letter.

I also found out that for some of the events I worked, they used a new trash hauling company that probably just dumped everything at the landfill anyways.

Who else is underemployed right now? Any good stories?

I graduated university last year with a biology degree. I had internships all through school and a very solid GPA, so I didn’t stress too much about what was coming afterwards — I worked with prions, agricultural pathogens, did bioinformatics for a while. That was hubris!

I’ve been bumping around between temporary jobs ever since. I worked in an ecology lab for 2 months. Did some more bioinformatics, for 4. With nothing else on the horizon, and also receiving rejections from all of the medical schools I’d applied to, I moved across the country to be with my boyfriend. He is a PhD student out here. I don’t speak the language, and none of the English language institutions are hiring (for people like me, anyways!). I tour guided Japanese students on language exchange trips for about a month, but otherwise I’ve just been holed up in my house, learning French. I‘m not one of those people who finds inherent joy in language learning, none of the English language volunteer organizations are returning my emails, I have no purpose here, and I am bummed out.

I am not sure what I should have done differently exactly, but I get the sense I have f***ed up? Maybe really badly? My mom always tells me that a gap of more than a month or so on a resume is a death knell, especially so if you’re just starting out. My parents have a small company and they always need people to file and answer the phones and move things around the warehouse. Maybe I should have stayed home and gone back to that. Maybe I should have stayed at the bioinformatics lab and taken a masters degree to kick the can down the road a few years. I did get one full-time, permanent job offer, bit it was across the country, didn‘t pay enough to afford the move, and wasn’t something I want to do with my life — but was that my only shot and I blew it? Perhaps it’s time for an after degree in nursing or to be a high school teacher — I don’t particularly want to do either of those things, but the world always needs more nurses and high school teachers, and it would mean I can follow my boyfriend where he goes. Should I have retaken the MCAT? My old boss said I have no direction in life and I should travel, but that seems expensive. I think I know what I want in life already (I’d be happy to be an orange breeder, or a tissue specialist, or an infectious disease doctor, or a virologist working with bacteriophages), but all of those goals are very difficult to attain and most of them would be very impractical for the other people in my life. I’ve been trying to work as a tissue specialist for years, even before I started university.

Anyways, help? Thank you, all.

Tl;dr: Learning a language and my family and friends don’t seem to believe that you can do that without Duolingo specifically. Hats off to the Duolingo marketing team.

I recently moved to a French speaking area, as someone with zero previous knowledge of French. Until I learn French, I am mostly unemployable here, so I’ve been putting my all into it for the last few months. I usually spend 4-8 hours a day rotating through a few activities from this list: watching French TV from different French-speaking regions, spending time on my 5000 most common French words flash card deck, memorizing verb conjugations from an online database, reading the news or chapter books written for small children, practicing translating passages back and forth with LLMs, or doing grammar drills from a book or website that seems trustworthy. I talk with French speakers whenever I can (although I think it might be time to bite the bullet and pay someone to chat with me specifically. Anyways, I ramble.)

I’m not saying this is the only way to do it. There’s a lot I could do better. But dear god why, why is it that any time I talk with the people I know back home and they ask me how it’s going and what I’m doing (and believe me, I don’t just mention this unprompted because I am vaguely ashamed that I’ve spent the last 5 months unemployed and holed up in my house doing nothing but French and still do not speak good French, and I already spend far too much of my life on a language I hate to want to give it any more time) their knee jerk response to hearing I’m doing all that is, “Have you tried Duolingo?” as though it is the missing link between my current pitiful attempts at French and fluency.

I smile, say no, and change the topic, because I am not an asshole and I know that they mean well (I think?). But there is a gross, mean part of me inside that wants to ask them why I’d be doing all this if you could get the same results playing language games for 15 minutes a day. I am impressed with Duolingo’s marketing — I honestly believe that a lot of regular people think that it is the best and only method to learn a language. Definitely a necessity, anyways. I wonder how long ago this shift happened — Duolingo has only been around for maybe a decade? Or is it just the specific people I know and I need to get out more? I don’t come from a place with good second language education, and definitely didn’t know anyone who learned another language as an adult growing up.

This is not to say that no one should use Duolingo and that it is never useful — different folks have different goals and I’m not one to shit on that. But it is interesting.

I still write cover letters for the jobs I actually care about, but for anything else I'm just blasting out resumes like there's no tomorrow. I've gotten mixed responses on this from people I know in real life —some of them still believe they're important, and others don't bother anymore because who's going to read one now when they're all just AI slop anyways?

Anyways, what are you guys doing as far as cover letters go? People who hire, are you still reading them?

ETA: From the responses I’ve received so far, it seems like there’s no clear consensus on this issue in Canada. For job seekers, there seems to be a fairly even split between the pro-cover letter and anti-cover letter crowd, with many people using them situationally. Canadians who hire seem generally in favour of the cover letter, especially the STEM/agriculture ones.

Things are a lot more straightforward on the global (American) side of things — no one is reading or writing cover letters. At least according to r/recruitinghell .

Of course, both these samples are incredibly tiny and very biased towards people with the strongest opinions on this topic. People lie on the internet for fun and for profit. Grains of salt and all that.

As some background, I graduated university last year with an honours degree in biology. Before university, I worked as a receptionist and then tech support, and during university, I always had some sort of research internship with a lab.

I've had 3 different temporary contract jobs since graduation, but nothing in the last few months. I thought the Canada Summer Jobs Program might be a big break for me, since the government is literally giving these companies money to employ young people (so the jobs must actually exist!), and the postings on Job Bank are required to include an email address (a direct line to God!). Perhaps one of these summer gigs might lead to something permanent?

I've made 300 applications, about half of which have full cover letters (albeit remixed from earlier ones I've written for similar jobs, with perhaps a personalized line or two based on a company website). All across Canada, some of them for biology, but also plenty for administrative assistant type stuff and anything else minimum wage that doesn't require a specific skill set. I have multiple resumes tailored to the level of work -- a full academic CV, a science resume, an unskilled work resume, and an English/French resume. The response rate so far is great -- I've gotten maybe 50 rejections so far, with about a quarter of them claiming they had no idea the jobs I'm applying to exist at all and they must have been automatically reposted from ones they filled in January (??).

Anyways, anyone else struggling with the Canada Summer Jobs Program?