We often hear from new college grads that they’re not sure what kind of jobs are relevant to their college major. The beauty of many entry-level jobs is that your college major doesn’t matter much at all. There are a ton of jobs out there that will let you start fresh; but what if you feel committed to trying to put your education to good use? A few months ago we added tags to all of our posts to make it easier for you to navigate the hundreds of entry-level employers whom we’ve featured. In this post we’re going to link those tags to specific college majors.
Our list of college majors comes directly from the 2004-2005 U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Higher Education General Information Survey. We’ve also included the number of graduates for each major to give you an idea of what kind of competition you’re facing. The tags pages that we’ve linked to our based our opinions of which employers match up best with each educational background.
1,439,264 undergraduate received Bachelors degrees during the 2004-2005 school year. Below you will find the distribution of new graduates in each major and the types of jobs that we think might appeal to them. This is a work in progress, so please leave comments and suggestion on anything that may be miscategorized or left out.
Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Conservation (23,002 new grads)
Architecture (9,237 new grads)
Area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies (7,569 new grads)
Biological and biomedical sciences (64,611 new grads)
Business (311,574 new grads)
Communication, journalism, and related programs (72,715 new grads)
Communications technologies (2,523 new grads)
Computer and information sciences (54,111 new grads)
Education (105,451 new grads)
Engineering (64,906 new grads)
Engineering technologies (14,837 new grads)
English language and literature/letters (54,379 new grads)
Family and consumer sciences/human sciences (20,074 new grads)
Foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics (18,386 new grads)
Health professions and related clinical sciences (80,685 new grads)
Legal professions and studies (3,161 new grads)
Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities (43,751 new grads)
Library science (76 new grads)
Mathematics and statistics (14,351 new grads)
Military technologies (40 new grads)
Multi/interdisciplinary studies (30,243 new grads)
Parks, recreation, leisure and fitness studies (22,888 new grads)
Philosophy and religious studies (11,584 new grads)
Physical sciences and science technologies (18,905 new grads)
Precision production (64 new grads)
Psychology (85,614 new grads)
Public administration and social services (21,769 new grads)
Security and protective services (30,723 new grads)
Social sciences and history (156,892 new grads)
Theology and religious vocations (9,284 new grads)
Transportation and materials moving (4,904 new grads)
Visual and performing arts (80,955 new grads)
Have any input? Leave a comment.
This book review is a guest post by Makafui Fiavi. She is a Junior Policy Analysis and Global Health major at Cornell University. One day, she would like to work in the area of healthcare delivery for an international organization such as the World Health Organization, World Vision, or CARE. In her spare time she enjoys hanging out with friends, reading, and learning how to play the guitar. If you would like to guest post for One Day, One Job or One Day, One Internship by writing a book review, employer profile, or blog post, please e-mail info@onedayonejob.com.
If you’re browsing the library or bookstore shelves this summer for career advice, you should definitely check out How to Get Any Job with Any Major by Donald Asher. I was personally drawn to the book sub-title, Career Launch and Re-launch for Everyone Under 30 (or how to avoid living in your parents’ basement). For someone who believed for a long time that the choice of a major in college defines or delimits the types of jobs you have in the real world, I was curious to see what insight the author had to offer.
Referred to on his website as “America’s Job Search Guru”, Donald Asher is a nationally-known speaker who has given lectures and workshops at major universities across the nation. Along with being a career consultant, Donald Asher is a contributing writer to many publications including, Managing Your Career magazine, the Wall Street’s online career site, monstertrak.com and wetfeet.com. He has also written several other books on higher education and careers, such as Who Gets Promoted, Who Doesn’t and Why and From College to Career: Who Gets Promoted.
The first chapter lays out the purpose of the book by explaining the difference between career development and getting a job, the latter being the end-product of the former.
Divided into 3 parts, How to Get Any Job with Any Major takes the reader through the journey of (re)-affirming career interests and values, matching those interests to real-life opportunities (volunteering, networking, internships, etc), and finally getting the job to match those interests.
Reading the book, you feel as if the Donald Asher was talking directly to you. To make it a fun read, the writing is broken up with quotes from famous and ordinary people, case studies on different situations, as well as cartoons. All the advice is both detailed and practical. In my favorite chapter on “Networking”, the author made a list of 49 types of people that are part of your networrking circle, including “every funeral director known by anyone you know” and “every bartender at every club you shouldn’t be hanging out in anyway”.
The highlight of the book is the assignments at the end of the book. Donald Asher urges readers to start a career journal, in which they should complete the assignments.
How to Get Any Job with Any Major is a great read for both college students and college graduates. However, if you’re simply looking career advice, feel free to bypass the first 2 parts and go straight to the 3rd part. The assignments seem a bit too extensive (some involve outside research), but they will give you a nice opportunity for introspection. My advice? Do as few or as many of the assignments as you want, but you should realize that some of the later chapters build on the assignments from earlier chapters.
Go ahead and pick it up. I think it’s worth reading!
Neither Amazon nor Better World currently has Don Asher’s book in stock. Your best bet is to buy it used through Amazon’s Resellers
If you just want to give the book a quick skim, you might be able to get by with this extensive free preview on Google Books.
You’re coaxed to login multiple times every day by the steady stream of e-mails. People have written on your wall, sent you private messages, commented on your pictures, tagged you in notes. Facebook is as addictive as a pack of cigarettes to a nicotine hungry smoker. You add a variety of information about yourself ranging from how you are feeling to where you are working. You probably have at least three bumper stickers (I have about 12). When you take a good picture, or something cool happens in real life, you probably think about how long it will be until you can upload it to Facebook. Your profile is you. People can have a favorable or unpleasant impression of you before they meet you in person based solely on your Facebook profile. You must keep it fresh. You cannot and will not be a lame bucket of blandness. Your page needs to show who you are (or who you want to be). Your Internet social status depends on it. This is your life. Continue reading about Résumé Your Facebook Addiction…
Welcome to our second One Day, One Job Book Review. Our first review was of Alison Doyle’s Internet Your Way to a New Job, and today we’re going to discuss Lindsey Pollak’s Getting from College to Career: 90 Things to Do Before You Join the Real World. The book may sound like a checklist (it even has boxes that you can check off as you complete the tasks), but it’s actually a great read. Lindsey’s insights are exceptional, and the tips are some of the best I’ve come across. Continue reading about Book Review: Getting from College to Career…
It’s been a while since my last entry on One Day, One Job, but I thought that it was worth revisiting a topic that I wrote about back in February - Using the Internet to Become the Candidate of Choice. Executive bios and news releases are great research tools, but the Investor Relations pages on the websites of publicly traded companies provide a wealth of information about how a company is doing and what direction they are planning to take over the next year. Admittedly, the information found in investor relations is not as easy to digest as what you might see on a Recent News page, but clever deductions from Investor Relations information can pay dividends in an interview, pun intended. Continue reading about Using Investor Relations Info in Your Job Search…
We keep hearing from readers that one of the hardest parts about a post-college job search is finding jobs specific to a given location. They know where they want to live, and, damn it, they’re going to live there no matter what it takes. Do you share that mindset? Maybe you’re dead set on living the New York City life after graduation, or you love windsurfing in the summer and snowboarding in the winter and have to be near somewhere like Hood River, OR to stay sane. Maybe you’ve decided to live with your parents to save money, or you have a significant other who is going to graduate school in a new city. There are a wide range of reasons that new college grads have for deciding on a location before they find a job, but the job search tactics and techniques for finding a locations specific job are the same regardless of the reasons. Continue reading about Localize Your Job Search: 8 Simple Tips…
We keeps saying that we’re going to put together a “One Day, One Job Book Store” with our recommendations for job search related reading, but we keep putting it off for other projects. Well, our hand was forced when we came across Alison Doyle’s new book, Internet Your Way to a New Job. It’s a great resource for any job searcher, but it is especially helpful for new grads who have never been through the process before. This is our first book review, but it certainly won’t be the last. As we build the One Day, One Job Book Store, these reviews will be integrated into it. Continue reading about Book Review: Internet Your Way to a New Job…
You just hung up the phone. You’re sweating. Your mouth is dry. Your heart is racing. You just had your first ever phone interview. It was for an internship with a company that you’re really excited about. You don’t know what to do with your nervous energy, so you start surfing the web looking for information about the company and your interviewer. It’s like checking the answers immediately after an exam. You need affirmation that you didn’t completely blow it. You Google your interviewer’s name. You find his blog. You start reading. You see a link to his Twitter account. You click through. You see a reference to your just completed interview. Continue reading about Turning the Tables: Digging Dirt on Employers…
You’re watching tv with your roommates. They all have laptops, but you’re that kid who thought it was a good idea to bring a desktop to college. They are instant messaging (each other about how you never do your dishes), Youtubing, Facebooking, and Googling, all while watching tv. They’re reading online episode guides to get caught up with the series that you’re watching. When a company has a great commercial with a web address, they’ll probably type it in. What’s on tv has become a driving force in online activity. This might sound like a marketer’s wet dream, but Google Trends shows just how much what is on tv drives online search.
With that said, we thought it would be fun to see how college students can get job search ideas from watching tv. Now, leaving a permanent impression of your butt on the couch cushion while you eat Cheesy Poofs is not a legitimate job search tactic. However, if you’re going to watch the boob tube anyways, you might as well make the most of it. Here are tips on how to find jobs while watching the tv. Continue reading about The Couch Potato’s Guide to Job Search…
For most new job seekers, the candidate selection process is incredibly opaque. Although some companies offer feedback on interviews, this is usually a half-hearted collection of vague generalities. Comments such as “the applicant pool was very large,” don’t tell you anything, and positive feedback such as “you were very friendly,” tell you something that you knew already. To be quite frank, these comments simply sugarcoat the fact that you were not the candidate of choice. This doesn’t mean that you couldn’t do the job - chances are you wouldn’t have been interviewed if that was the case - but it does mean that you failed to demonstrate to your interviewers why you were the best option. Continue reading about Becoming the Candidate of Choice: A Web-based Approach…
This post was written by Rob Dusel. He is a graduate of Cornell University (B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations) and the University of Cambridge (MPhil in Land Economy). Rob currently works for an international real estate investment fund and will be an occasional contributor to One Day, One Job.
So far at One Day, One Job, Willy has provided some great advice about how to use the Internet in your job search, but sometimes the perfect job just isn’t to be found online. In fact, for a huge number of new college graduates, this turns out to be the case. One Day, One Job showcases some of the best and most interesting entry-level jobs that can be found on the web today, but quite often the cutting edge, niche firms that job seekers dream about simply don’t have the time or staff to monitor an online job posting. Without a dedicated employee to sift through resumes and answer questions, companies often end up hiring on a “we need someone today” basis. Unless you put yourself out there by cold calling, you simply won’t have a chance at getting hired in one of these situations. Continue reading about Don’t Get Stuck in the Web: Cold Calling in the Internet Age…
A reader e-mailed us a few weeks ago - she’s a senior at Columbia University, and she’s job searching. She’s had the usual frustrations with finding helpful information on companies’ career sites; however, her situations is exacerbated by the fact that she is an international student. Many students from abroad are treated like second class citizens (does that make sense, since they’re not US citizens?) in the job recruitment process solely because of their need for sponsorship to obtain a visa (did we get the terminology right?). Continue reading about Online Job Search Tips for International Students…
Despite the fact that many college kids say that they live in a bubble, they still deal with an information overload on a daily basis. Today you might read 7 Facebook messages, 23 e-mails, 142 IMs, 14 text messages, 97 pages of assigned reading, 3 course announcements, 12 web pages, 8 blog posts, and 6 articles in your campus daily. Shoot, you might do that before noon. It’s easy to deal with the information when it’s delivered to you. E-mail makes your computer ding. Facebook sends you e-mails. You have a ringtone for text messages. IMs make an icon on your screen bounce. Your campus daily is delivered in front of your favorite coffee shop every morning. It’s when you have to seek out information that it becomes far more difficult to manage. Continue reading about Why Every College Job Searcher Needs RSS…
Have you read our article How to Use Google to Find a Job? If not, you should give it a look. For those who have already read it, you’ll be interested to know that we just updated the article with some new information. Google has added a date modifier that you can tack on to the end of your search URLs to limit your searches to results from a certain time period. So give it a look - it’s about half way down the page.
When we, at One Day One Job, scour the Internet for the best entry-level career opportunities for new college graduates, we use a variety of techniques to find fresh jobs to write about every day. We’ve already told you How to Use Google to Find a Job, now we are revealing our second secret to online job search.
Everybody loves lists (that’s why this article is in list format). Many magazines use annual lists to broaden their readership. People who wouldn’t normally read a magazine will grab an issue to see who made the list this year. Look at U.S. News and World Report - it’s far better known for its annual college rankings than its actual mission of delivering the news. These lists don’t provide the in-depth information that you find in most magazine articles, but they do provide a broad overview of a subject and a plethora of ideas for job seekers. Continue reading about 9 Magazine Lists That Will Help You Find a Job…
Whether you’re a first-time job seeker or a seasoned veteran, searching for a job on the Internet can be a daunting task. At One Day, One Job we do our best to find truly great entry-level career opportunities and pass on information about them to you. Since we only write about one company’s jobs each day, there are thousands upon thousands of jobs that we pass over. Just because we don’t mention a company on One Day, One Job doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth your interest. Continue reading about How to Use Google to Find a Job…
Not quite ready for an entry-level job? There are still tons of internships available! Every day you'll find a new company that is still hiring interns at One Day, One Internship.
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