Backblogging: What I've done so far

I went to my career center at PSU a couple of years ago and met Cheryl Hollatz-Wisely. I've seen her whenever I've been in the market for a job and she's helped me with my resume and recently with job hunting. I need to go back through the job-hunting materials she gave me and to make another appointment with her. First, I'm going to finish my cover letter.

I saw an internship for the Berry Botanic Garden here in Portland. I'd love it but my transcript has an F in it. I had an incomplete and finishing the class seemed harder than starting over so when I re-registered my I turned to an F. In the end, an A will turn my F to a C on my transcript but right now its very unfortunate given the incredible competition I'm sure this has.

While applying for the BBG job, I had to design a cover letter. Mine is pretty lame. I found hotjobs at Yahoo and they had a cover letter format so I turned it into a template. I will be rewriting my cover letter using the proper formatting, then taking it to Cheryl for advice.

While I'm looking for a job I'm volunteering once every weekend (or every other) pulling English Ivy and planting trees with Ernie, my fiance. I'm meeting people who have great attitudes and some who are new to volunteer work like me. I'm also meeting a science majors and graduates but mostly I'm meeting plants. I could spend more time networking but I don't know how yet. I'm intent on learning though.

I signed up for Careerbuilder, Monster, and Jobdango. I like Careerbuilder best so far. I've applied for 4 or 5 jobs now. I don't know what the specific work is for one of them and the others are not botany but they are research, lab or science-related. I tried to stay out of fields I know I am NOT interested in like Medical. I see medical billing specialist a lot in my emailed jobs but the important thing is that my resume is out there.

I signed up for emails from greendrinks and some other "green" networking kinds of things Cheryl showed me. So far they haven't been for me but I enjoy scanning them.

I programmed my old Nokia 6800 for craigslist science jobs and check it daily. It resulted in my finding a job to apply for that day. Now I only will look at current day listings because I've applied for everything I qualified for.

I have a challenge to find a job this week because classes begin 3/30. I'd like to be able to rearrange my schedule as needed for the right job so I'm hitting the internet pretty hard.

There is more but this blog entry is too long already. I will break it up.