Escaping Exterminators: Adventures in job-searching as a 22-year-old recent college grad

The start of a series about all the jobs that have rejected me in the past seven months.

I walked across the stage at my college graduation on Saturday, May 11 at approximately 11:40 a.m. CST.

As I prepared to walk up the steps to shake the university president’s hand in my blue Nike Jordans and a tight black dress that I chose to wear exactly two hours and five minutes prior underneath my robe, I found my parents in the crowd next to me to do one last childish thing before entering the Real World. I shimmied my hand out from under the gigantic sleeve, stuck out my tongue so far it almost touched my chin, and dramatically pretended to lick the palm of my right hand from bottom to top, then held it out in front of me, ready to shake someone’s hand.

My parents laughed, as they were aware of my comical disdain for the university’s president. Once I had a 1-on-1 meeting with him in his office and he spent the whole time putting on his in-office fake green. He wears a three-piece suit all the time, even when attending football games when we are under heat advisory. He spends our tuition money on things like opening the biggest Starbucks in the state in our library. I used to regularly write about him in the satire section of the student newspaper. Anything from how his wife left him after he wore pajamas to bed instead of his three-piece suit or how he caused the university’s Golden Retriever mascot to run away because of his underarm stench. There was also that time when, after an armed woman entered our campus and we were put on lockdown, I wrote about how the president notified her via loudspeaker that she could target any student she wanted – especially the arts and sciences ones – as long as she left the computer science and engineering students alone. I wasn’t allowed to publish that one. While everyone knew these stories were false because they were in the satire column, I also had made up a sufficient amount of lies about him and silently spread them around campus as truths, such as the time in college he dislocated his shoulder dancing to Mama Mia’s “Dancing Queen”.

The couple sitting in front of my parents who were there to experience the joy of seeing their child walk the stage at college graduation and not to see me dramatically lick my hand looked on at me with disgust. It was obvious that they weren’t entirely sure whether I actually licked my hand or not. In actuality, my own father wasn’t sure if I actually licked my hand or not.

As we were eating lunch later in the day after changing he took a bite of gyro before turning to me and saying, “you didn’t actually lick your hand, right?”

Sitting there eating my gyro that Saturday afternoon in early May, I was under the impression that the hardest days of my life were finally over. No more staying up until 2 a.m. studying for a test a professor had to schedule earlier than planned because of their poor timing. No more being subjected to the “chicken” served in the single dining hall on campus. No more juggling three jobs, an internship, six courses, and a social life. I was 21 and thriving.

How could that girl be so wrong?

Graduating college was just the beginning of my long struggles as I realized that in this world of hand-lickers and hand-lick-receivers, there are far more people who act in a way that should warrant a nice warm, moist, handshake from me.

I have now been full-time job searching, while working a part-time job, for the past seven months without nailing down any full-time position. And while the process has not provided me with employment, it has provided me with lots of situations in which I’ve had to close my laptop, lean back in my chair, and say to myself, “What the fuck? Am I being pranked?”

I started my first Substack sophomore year to write about fashion while I was interning in finance over the summer and to write about my travels and photography abroad when I studied in Madrid the first semester of my junior year. I started with a niche but as I have spent a majority of the last seven months sedentary on my computer, I have lost that niche of caring about what I put on my body and traveling to cool, far away places. As I was staring off into the abyss one day after closing my laptop for the day at 6 p.m. I thought to myself, “What is it that I know about better than anyone else?”

And since I had already received two rejection emails that day, the first thing that popped into my mind was, “Getting rejected from jobs.” Which seems like a total downer, but is somewhat accurate. The thing that I am doing most in my life right now, the thing that I have the most content to write about, is job searching and the failures that come along with it.

I don’t have many friends to speak about the process with as most of them went to grad school instead of entering the job market. It has been hard not to have someone to commiserate with through the grueling process other than my father who says things like, “You just need to go into the building with a hard copy of your resume and shake their hand!” I am also coming to realize, months too late, that the best way to deal with an enervating process like job searching is to turn it into stories that other people can enjoy and maybe (hopefully not) relate to.

Since we are speaking about job searching, I thought it would be relevant to tell you all more about my qualifications. I have created a resume for Substack readers to get an understanding of my background and experience. There is a lot of information on there. Pardon my Renaissance Woman ways.

Now that we have been properly introduced, I feel as though we can continue.

I have put together a pop-up newsletter called “Escaping Exterminators”. If I am the doodlebug, then hiring managers are the exterminators. The series will be about my joys, struggles, and “what the fuck, am I being pranked?” moments from the past seven months of job searching. A real who’s who in the world of should-be hand-lick-receivers.

The pop-up newsletter will end when I get a job or when companies stop acting like they are on the cast of Impractical Jokers.

READ ESCAPING EXTERMINATORS::::

The "college forever" digital marketing group

Telling lies during job interviews

Yours truly,

Calihan