Life After Graduating with a Bachelor's in Visual and Performing Arts Brings a Bittersweet Return to Writing

When I graduated college, I was full of hope that I was educated enough to do something and be somebody. What I did with that hope was stuff it. I graduated with a BA in the Visual and Performing Arts, having puttered around various types of art media technology studies during my time in school. The graduation came after almost ten years of school, and it was enough undergraduate work for anyone.

Despite the obvious growth potential of my BA in tinkering with artsy stuff, jobs have been scarce. The economy has been wretched, and with a new degree and little experience under my belt, I don't have much coming in the way of job options. So, like many others, I turned to online writing.

There is a period of desperation when you look through the jobs and you see nothing. There are months of confusion, wondering why there aren't any jobs out there, and why you are not getting called back for the job interviews you went on. Then you realize it isn't you. It's sheer inundation in the job market. For every position available, there are hundreds of qualified applicants in most urban areas. I watched the news in Las Vegas as prospective employees showed up in droves to get jobs at Las Vegas City Center. Thousands of hopeful for a few hundred jobs. The situation was bleak.

So I work at home. I write articles like this one and scan listings for jobs that might fit the field I studied, which was, at least for the last few years, decidedly not writing.

Writing has called for me several times in my life, and in the desperation of joblessness and an empty wallet, it came calling again.

Journalism sucked in high school, and it sucked in community college, and with the world as my witness, it will suck again. Having quit journalistic writing after a confounding and abruptly short stint as editor in chief of a weekly college paper with no other staff but one photographer and 18 units of ballbusting classes on my plate, I vowed to never write again. Oh, but here I am.

Across the board, all I could find that was hiring were writing jobs, but I lacked the credentials, location and experience to get anything beyond an internship. Flustered and bored from lack of work, I dug. I found scam work at home sites and essay writing companies. As I dug deeper, I found better companies to write for.

I still hold my degree as evidence of my dreams and the work I did (and money I spent) to get there. I do not regret anything I did to get my degree, but I do wish that it could get me a job worth writing about.