Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
You’ve probably heard: It’s rough out there for new college graduates. As one survey put it, “The class of 2025 faces an increasingly difficult labor market,” which is an understatement to anyone looking down the barrel of student loans and zero responses to your frenzied job applications. Another report found that the unemployment rate for recent graduates was 5.8 percent as of March, up from 4.6 percent a year earlier; moreover, the share of those same people in jobs that don’t require their degrees — commonly known as “underemployment” — rose to 41.2 percent, up from 40.6 percent the year before.
It’s not a rosy picture, and from the looks of the economy, it won’t improve anytime soon. And the last thing anyone in this situation needs is platitudes from hypersuccessful people over 40 (i.e., almost all commencement speakers) about following their dreams. Instead, we spoke to dozens of 20-somethings who also graduated without a job and, nevertheless, managed to avoid financial ruin and eventually find gainful employment in their field of choice — or close to it. Here’s what they said.
Maybe you double majored in art history and business and want to get a job at a major gallery. Or you studied social media and business and have your sights set on working for a big brand. Whatever your goals are — great! But for now, you need to figure out how to pay your bills and structure your time. “My first job out of college had nothing to do with my career aspirations, but it taught me how to be an adult,” says Sabrina, 26, who lives in Chicago and works for a performing-arts nonprofit. She graduated four years ago without any offers and felt like “a complete failure,” she says. “When I applied for roles, people wouldn’t even bother to send me a rejection — I felt like I was feeding my résumé into a black hole.”
Sabrina cobbled together babysitting gigs (“I literally wiped kids’ butts, but I got paid $25 an hour”) and then, through one of the families she worked for, finagled an introduction to someone at the nonprofit where she works now.
“Not only did nannying open doors for me, it taught me how to be a better candidate when an opportunity did eventually come up,” she says. “Looking back, I don’t know if I would have been a good employee if I’d been hired for a corporate role right out of college. Nannying taught me how to be reliable and pay rent and manage my own time and money, and that was really important, even though it felt like a dead end at the time.” Plus, it set her up with a good side hustle that comes in handy now that she has to pay student loans again — she still babysits on weekends.
Other jobs people mentioned doing the first year out of college: food delivery, dishwashing, house-sitting/pet-sitting, summer camp counseling, temp work, retail, waiting tables, bartending, and some combination of the above. “Do what you have to do, and don’t be too precious about it!” says one person who worked at Starbucks while they applied to medical school.
Yes, they can be demoralizing (my own internships involved opening mail, picking up dry cleaning, and organizing my boss’s closet — not in a chic way). They also, for the most part, pay so poorly that most people can’t swing them without some other income source (bartending, rich parents). But they get your foot in the door, and that’s priceless.
Tara, who went to what she describes as a “mid-level state school in Michigan,” was working at IHOP when she graduated and was “extremely concerned” that she’d wind up stuck in her college town. Then she landed an internship for a progressive advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. It paid $15 an hour — not enough to support herself — but she decided to wing it anyway. She moved to D.C., sublet a room for $800 a month, and supplemented her internship paychecks with pet-sitting and bartending. “When my internship ended at 5 or 6 p.m., I would go straight to check on three different cats. Still, to this day, I have thousands of pictures of random cats in my phone from that time,” she says. “Then I’d go to my bartending shift until 1 a.m., and start the cycle over the next morning at 8 a.m.”
It wasn’t a sustainable lifestyle, but that wasn’t the point. Tara just needed to prove herself until she could find something more stable. And it worked: Her internship helped her make connections and build a portfolio of work that she eventually leveraged into a full-time position at a think tank. “It took four months, but I was able to get a real job,” she says. “When I found out about some of the people I beat out for it, I laughed — other candidates had gone to Ivy League schools. But I got it because I was on the ground and people knew me. For that reason, the internship was totally worth it.”
If you can live with your parents or a family member for a little while to get on your feet (i.e., save up for a security deposit on your own rental), fine! Don’t wring your hands over it — about half of young adults do the same thing, and even more get some kind of financial help from their families (although they might not admit it). But if that’s not a possibility, get creative. This is not a time to spend money you don’t have (yet). In business parlance, you want to keep your overhead low.
Some advice I’ve heard from other recent grads who made it through their underemployed period financially intact: “Don’t get freaked out that other people seem to be able to afford stuff you can’t. They all have secret parental support.” And: “Lentils are extremely cheap, easy to cook, and will make your hair and skin look better than any expensive product.” Plus: “Work with temp agencies. Even if it’s not remotely related to the job you eventually want, it will get you corporate references.” Finally: “Don’t move in with a significant other just because you can’t afford to live by yourself. It’s a trap! Sublet from someone instead. Or share a bed with a platonic friend, which is even cheaper.” (For the record, I did that for a summer and it was actually quite nice. We’re still very close!)
Lana, a 27-year-old associate manager at an advertising agency, spent her first summer in New York after college house-sitting for a family that was out of town (i.e., at their second home), an arrangement she stumbled upon through friends of her friend’s parents. “It was a little weird — all their clothes were still in the closets and their stuff was in the bathroom, and I wasn’t supposed to touch any of it,” she says. “I’m pretty sure they had a camera in the living room to make sure I didn’t have guests over, which I was careful not to do.” But she stayed there for free in exchange for watering the plants and caring for their needy cat, who hated being alone. “It was a little bit of a golden cage, but it enabled me to look for work and save some money without the pressure of rent,” she says. (Plus, she put “property manager” on her résumé.)
“Everyone said that I didn’t need to move to an expensive city to get a job there — that everything was on Zoom these days — and maybe that’s true for people in some industries, but it wasn’t true for me,” says Asia, 25, who now works in fashion merchandising for a large retailer. She went to school in the Midwest and spent the first eight months after graduation living in her college town with a (now ex) boyfriend. She got a job working on the sales floor at the Gap and set a goal to save $5,000 to move to New York. When she did, she also managed to transfer to one of the store’s Manhattan locations, and she eventually parlayed her experience into a corporate role at another clothing brand.
“I would literally go on LinkedIn, find people with similar roles to what I wanted, and ask to meet them for coffee or hop on a call,” she says. “Lots of people ignored me, but some people said yes, too.” Eventually, one of them mentioned that an entry-level position was opening up at her company, and Asia got it. She has been there for almost a year now. “I wouldn’t say I’ve ‘made it,’ but I feel like I’m on my way,” she says.
Graduating from college without a job can feel like you’re failing the first test of adulthood. “I felt like it was already too late — like my window for starting the career I wanted was closing,” says Tara, who now works as a digital director for a major political organization. “I’m glad I had that sense of urgency, because it pushed me, but also, maybe I didn’t need to be quite that stressed out.”
Rachel, 27, felt as if she was wasting her education when she graduated jobless. “I was the first in my family to go to college, so it was really embarrassing,” she says. “My parents were like, Really?” She finished school the summer of 2020, in the thick of the pandemic, and no one was hiring. So she moved in with her aunt in Queens, did SAT tutoring online, and reached out to “anyone with a pulse” in the publishing industry, where she wanted to work. Eventually, it was her tutoring job that opened the right door — a parent of one of the kids she worked with introduced her to a book publisher, who gave her an assistant job. Now she’s an associate editor. “It may not be my dream job, but I’m really happy to have a job that pays my bills, and I love the people I work with,” she says. “It’s easy to feel like you’re ‘behind’ everyone else in your 20s, especially when you see other people you went to school with and they’re achieving these big career milestones and getting married and taking fancy vacations. But from what I can tell, that never stops happening, so I should probably just get used to it.”
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