Jobless Again

I am so frustrated right now!  I just wasted half an hour of my time filling out an online job application, only to get an email as soon as I was done filling it out saying that they did an automated review of my application and I did not meet the criteria they were looking for.  Seriously, WTF!

Anyway...

First off, I should probably give you all an update on my current situation, seeing as how I haven't posted anything meaningful on here in quite a while.  I'm taking a much-needed year off from grad school right now, and am planning to transfer somewhere else next fall.  There were a lot of things that just weren't going right for me at Clemson.  My classes completely kicked my ass, the adviser I wanted to work with told me he was too overbooked to work with me, there were pretty much no other opportunities to do research in combinatorial optimization (my area of interest), and overall I just felt like I didn't really fit in with the Math department at all.  I just needed a fresh start at another school.  I don't know where I'm going yet, but I've narrowed it down to five - Rutgers, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, UNC, and Georgia Tech - and I'm switching my major from Math to Operations Research, which is what I really want to study (since apparently Clemson had the only Math program with a concentration in OR). 

So in the meantime, I've been trying to find a job to earn a little extra living money til I go back to grad school, but so far, I haven't had much luck.  The problem is, most of the decent non-fast food jobs around here are in either Greenville or Easley or some other place that I can't get to by bus and/or bike.  The irony of the situation is, I stayed here in Clemson because I thought that the free public transportation system here (which we don't have back home in Pennsylvania) would provide easy access to a job, since I currently don't have a vehicle of my own.  But now that my dad got a new job this summer that comes with a company car, and my sister just moved out to LA last weekend, my parents now have three vehicles sitting in the driveway of a house in which only two people are living.  I may have dropped out of grad school, but I do know enough math to figure out that they have a car that they probably won't be using anytime soon.  Point being, if I had just moved back home, I could have access to a car, which would open up a lot more employment opportunities for me than I've been able to find in Clemson.  And despite my suggesting the possibility of my parents letting me take their extra vehicle off their hands, they have so far expressed minimal intention of letting me actually do so ("The car needs work," or "You live too far away to get it to you," or some other similar excuse).

You're probably saying, "Mike, why don't you just move out of Clemson, then?"  I've thought about it, but there's two big things preventing me from doing so.  Number one, I leased my apartment here for the entire school year, because at the time, I assumed I was still going to be in grad school at Clemson, so I'd have to go through the hassle of trying to find a subleaser.  More importantly, though, I now have a girlfriend - yes, you read me right - and I'm nowhere near ready to move away to move too far away from her. 

So here I am, hundreds of miles away from home, trying to find a job, but so far without success.  I'm not too worried about money, since I'm nowhere near broke just yet, but I don't know how long the money I have will last me.  It was for that reason that I had to make the difficult decision not to fly home last week to see my sister (whom I haven't seen since January) before she left for LA , since I have to save money for my visits to prospective grad schools.  I'm just tired of always having to worry about money at least in the back of my mind.  I'm sure something will come up soon, but I don't think I'll be completely happy til I'm back in school again and on my way toward getting a real job. 

Hopefully, now that I've got all that off my chest, I'll be able to go back to posting here on a more regular basis.  Thanks for listening, and til next time, stay frosty, y'all!

B-)