By Ata-ul-Malik Khan

I went to graduate school in urban planning at the University of California-Irvine to escape the economic crisis, but it seems like anywhere I go, it’ll come and find me. So, a few months ago, I started feeling the pressure to get a part-time job or an internship that hopefully would turn into a job.
Why was I looking for a job in the first place? Well, urban planning is a field where work experience has always mattered a lot, so that was of course the initial reason. But once the economy tanked, I felt even more compelled to get that internship. I figured that come graduation, it would be a hyper competitive job market.
For the past few of months, Google became my magic 8-ball for finding the perfect part-time employment. Each query I typed into the search engine grew progressively more desperate than the last. I started off with “urban planning jobs Orange County” or “planning internships,” but it soon became “urban planning job market in 2010” and “best careers during a recession.”
And my mind started to wander too. Before I’d ignore anything online that wasn’t tagged as “development,” “planning,” or “public policy.” But given the times, I began to flirt with the idea of being a Sales Representative at Wet Seal. I thought I’d be great at it. And I even convinced myself that the world always could use another stock boy in the back warehouse of a Motherhood Maternity.
Making myself a desirable candidate for a job in my field became so important that I even stopped caring about the amount of money I would be earning. I’d work for free if I needed to. In this climate, networking and exposure are way more important than the immediate reward of money.
Some of my friends scoffed at my willingness to work for free, while colleagues remained optimistic about academia. They figured they could weather the economic storm in the safe harbor of a doctoral program. But after attending some lackluster job talks by these recently minted PhDs and hearing about the research woes of our professors, even my more bookish colleagues thought a career in Pizza Hut-delivery didn’t even sound half bad.
After a quarter without finding work, I had the fortune of landing two internships in my field. But my luck turned only after writing hundreds of cover letters and spending many hours peering into my computer monitor, desperate for an answer.
But one thing that meandering through the job market taught me is that necessity really is the mother of invention. I started to think in terms of how I could survive by literally capitalizing on stuff I’m doing anyway. I mean, yeah, staying up ‘til 3am watching Entourage on SideReel probably won’t help me any, but, for example, if I’m going to spend ten bucks on a movie, I’ll only do it to review it for the school paper. Or if I’m going pay rent every month no matter what, might as well get involved with the housing association. You never know where you’ll find a random connection that will lead you somewhere better.