At the end of March, Madeline Burdine and Ryan Ladd both had full-time jobs lined up for after their graduation from Mississippi State University. They graduated May 1 — Burdine with a bachelor’s degree in communications and Ladd with one in electrical engineering.
But neither of them has a post-grad job anymore. Their prospective employers had rescinded the offers by April 1 as cost-cutting measures due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. They are among many college graduates entering an uncertain job market in a harsh economic downturn, and while not all have had to change their plans, they have had to be aware of how the pandemic affects their chosen field and potential employers’ decisions.
“I didn’t expect that our nation could shut down like this in 2020, but it’s been very eye-opening, the things that can disappear just like that,” Burdine said.
Instead of looking for another job, Burdine enrolled in graduate school at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Ladd said his renewed job search for the past month has been “frustrating, to say the least,” especially since MSU’s virtual commencement has come and gone.
The job postings he sees on LinkedIn keep getting fewer and farther between, and many ask for a certain amount of experience in the professional engineering field, he said.
“It’s definitely been a challenging time,” Ladd said. “You kind of feel victimized by the circumstances.”
A range of experiences
Catrina Glaspie is searching for a teaching job, but if she doesn’t find one, she will still have her assistant teaching position at East Side Elementary School in West Point. She will graduate virtually Saturday from the Mississippi University for Women with an early childhood education degree.
She said there might be more job openings under normal circumstances — not the current circumstances where schools have been closed since mid-March with no certainty of when they might reopen.
“But we’re always going to need teachers, no matter what,” Glaspie said.
Kyla Skinner, who is also finishing an education degree at MUW, applied for a job in the Noxubee County School District and is waiting for board approval. Her teaching internship during her final semester meant she could not have a full-time job regardless of the pandemic, she said.
“I’m a 33-year-old single mom, and the struggle has been intense financially and mentally, so having that job offer on the table already has taken a lot of stress off my mind and (has) validated this experience,” Skinner said.
Starren Jones is pursuing a career working with young children, but the pandemic has set her back. She participated in MSU’s virtual commencement but won’t be officially done with her bachelor’s degree in human development and family science until August.
HDFS majors have to complete an internship in order to get their degrees, and Jones was supposed to complete hers this summer before it was canceled. As a result, she will start her master’s degree in social work in January rather than August as she initially planned.
She said she and other HDFS majors were “waiting every day for an email” about their internship options for the fall semester.
“I was going to intern at a child advocacy center, and I’d reached out to them, and then all communications stopped (in March),” she said.
Resources at universities
Lisa Gooden-Hunley and Towanda Williams said they have never seen this much uncertainty in the job market in the 15 years they have both worked in career advising for college students. Gooden-Hunley is one of the associate directors of MSU’s Career Center, and Williams is the career specialist at MUW’s Office of Career Services.
The Career Center received an “overwhelming response” from employers when asked if they were still interested in hiring MSU graduates and discussing opportunities with them, Gooden-Hunley said.
“While some companies have closed their doors and rescinded offers, not all companies have, and those companies are still looking for MSU students because our students have a great reputation,” she said.
The Career Center holds job fairs every spring semester, and Gooden-Hunley said she helped coordinate a virtual one in April with about 10 companies. The center also is still available to help students after they have graduated, she said.
MUW’s Office of Career Services helps students formulate their resumes and prepare for interviews, and those services are still available via video conference and email, Williams said. Like at MSU, the office has been in touch with businesses that are looking for MUW graduates, she said.
Iyonna Collins is about to graduate from MUW with an accounting degree, and she said the Office of Career Services was helpful when she was changing her post-grad plans in the past couple months.
“Getting professional advice helps because they’ve been there and they know how you’re feeling, the anxiety that you’re about to be a graduate, (and) there are so many decisions that you have to make,” Collins said.
Her original plan was to join the U.S. Air Force after graduation, but she changed her mind due to the pandemic and will now start her master’s degree in information technology at MSU in the fall.
Both career centers also help students with their graduate school applications, and Gooden-Hunley said interest in graduate school always increases during an economic downturn.
Burdine said she remembered receiving an email from MSU’s Career Center during the semester, but “at the time, I supposedly had a job,” she said.
In the meantime, she has been working as a freelance website designer and said she was recently “asked to make a big proposal for a national entity.”
Meanwhile, Ladd interviewed with a company in Tupelo on Monday and said he is hopeful about the possibility of a job offer.
“I don’t want to count my chickens before they’ve hatched, but that’s probably the most promising thing I’ve had yet,” he said.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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