Lightbulb Over Head Blog

The following is the transcript of an interview I conducted with Amy McKenna, a young woman with B.A.’s in Ecology and Marine Biology and a Master’s Degree in Astrobiology. Mrs. McKenna currently resides in Florida and although she has stellar qualifications in her chosen field, she has felt the unfortunate grind of the current job market. In this interview we discuss her own experiences, challenges, and hopes as well as her advice to those trying to jump similar hurdles.

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So, Amy. What did you major in during your collegiate years and what did you expect to do when you got out of college?

When I started college I was a marine biology major and I had no clue what I wanted to do. As I took classes, I added in an ecology major. I figured I could work for the Environmental Protection Agency or find work on a boat, which would be really awesome.

When I went to Australia as a part of my ecology major, we briefly touched on stromatolites, which are a model for how life began on earth. Australia is one of the three places in the world that they exist and I ended up doing a report on stromatolites in Shark Bay.

I had also gone to astronomy conferences with my dad that hosted speakers who were talking about searching for life on other planets. One man was trying to find out how to best grow plants on the International Space Station. I began to learn more about Astrobiology in my Marine Biology course because a lot of the marine systems are used as a model for how life began which is one of the questions that Astrobiology tries to answer. I spoke with my professors about guest speakers that we had in that field and began writing to them to learn about their research. I contacted people working up at Kennedy Space Center figuring that I could go to school for Astrobiology and work for them. It was completely unexpected because I had originally wanted to get my Master’s Degree at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

So, I ended up beginning my PhD at the University of Florida, but then I downgraded to a Master’s.

Right now I have no clue what I want to do. It all depends on where I can find work, honestly. I’d take anything.

When did you complete your graduate program?

In August of ‘08

How long were you jobless after graduation?

I still consider myself jobless, so I’ve been jobless for just over a year.

But you are employed, yes? You’re just filling in the gaps, monetarily speaking?

I don’t consider what I’m doing right now a real career because it’s not in my area of interest.

What are you doing right now?

Thankfully, I found part time work at a horse farm here in Florida, ten minutes from home. So what I’m doing right now is shoveling horse shit.

Ha! How did you find that job? Craigslist?

I read a blog called “Fugly Horse of the Day” and the person who writes the blog is aware of the “economic times” and made a post looking for people who needed someone to work on their farm or people looking for farm work. She wanted to help forge connections through her site. Someone responded to her post with a website to find horse jobs called yardandgroom.com. I thought, well shit. It can’t hurt to look.

Little did you know “shit” would be playing a large part in your future.

Haha! Right! So I popped on the site and created and account and a profile and started searching for jobs. Lo and behold, there were a couple in the area. The one I really liked I couldn’t take because it was a live-in job. It wasn’t paid, but you were given room and board, plus board and feed for your horse, and you were able to take lessons from a former Olympic rider. In return you had to clean stalls and groom horses. But of course, my husband wasn’t to keen on me living away from home for a non-paying job. The job I ended up taking was with a family who owns two farms in Coco and Ocala (which is like the Horse Capital of Florida). I pretty much just take care of their horses for them.

I was jobless, myself, for about four months and it took quite an emotional toll. I found myself questioning all sorts of things. What did you feel was letting you down? Your education is certainly extensive but things weren’t clicking. In your most hopeless moments, what were your worries and frustrations?

Probably the biggest thing was, “Am I saying something wrong in my job applications?” and “Am I not employing the right strategies in my job search?” I was looking for jobs within the government and going through their employment sites because the best job security and benefits are with the government right now. Once you get a job with them, it’s really hard not to get a job afterward. They have the most openings for my field.

It’s hard to say…. It isn’t a confidence booster when you don’t hear back from jobs or you get that automated email saying you didn’t rate high enough for consideration.

The thing that I find amazing is how many highly qualified people are sitting behind reception desks or taking “jobs a monkey could do.” When I first got back to New York, I took a job doing work as a doorman/concierge at a luxury apartment building. It’s not exactly an ideal job for a graduate of NYU, but I needed to pay my rent and it was the best job I could find at the time. Recently I was brainstorming a character for a project with a friend and he described the character we were working on as someone who went from “God to Doorman, the lowest of the low.” It struck me, suddenly, that I’d had that job, and because of that, I had such a different perception of it than my friend did. I certainly didn’t think of myself of “the lowest of the low.”

You made an important point earlier when you said that you don’t think of what you’re doing as a job because its not in the career field that you want. It’s not a job. It’s just what you’re doing right now. That means your mind is open to continuing to strive when so many people are just settling for what they can get.

As some people have said, “You have an effing Master’s degree and you’re shoveling dung for money!?” I look at it more as keeping myself on a schedule. Without a job, I have an awful tendency to stay up later and later and sleep in later and later. That’s not good at all. It keeps me active because it’s pretty hard physical labor, plus… I’m being paid to get in shape. But really, it’s also important because when I do get that elusive interview, I can say, “Well, I’ve picked up part time work.”

Which is important to show you’re active and you have a hunger to do something with your life.

I’m also starting to volunteer at a local zoo.

Such a good point. People need to find something to pay their bills, but it’s important that you pursue your goals and sometimes that means putting in extra hours as well as seeking out volunteer opportunities and internships that can help build your resumé. At the gym where I’m working my “day job,” we needed more yoga teachers but we knew we couldn’t afford to pay them. We put up an ad on craigslist just to see if we could find anyone at all and we ended up with over 20 people, each ready to commit to a job that wouldn’t pay them any money at all. Yet, they all had interest because it would help them build their resumés.

I believe it. I’ve heard of a lot of people doing similar things. There’s a community on livejournal.com called “Team Unemployed.” It’s just a forum for support and commiseration. People offer tips and they often include: get involved, volunteer, do something! That way you can say what you’ve been doing with your time when you get the chance.

The same thing goes on a creative level. It’s actually part of the reason I began this blog. You have to tend that flame inside of yourself and keep it burning both for the sake of your career and your interviews, but also for yourself. You have to feed that hunger. I know a lot of people, myself included, have felt or are feeling like they have lost their way.

I would say that, for sure. I worry, because it’s been such a long time since I’ve done anything pertaining to my field, that I’ll get into a situation where a prospective employer asks me a technical question, I’ll flub it just because I’m not current with the knowledge. That’s a huge worry for me.

You just have to find ways to keep yourself going, keep yourself involved, and keep yourself on a schedule. I think people who are just getting out of school now have to take heart in the fact that, yes, things are harder than they have been in the past. For many people, there aren’t jobs waiting for them the way they used to.

I would say that really depends on the field and moreover, who you know.

That’s true. I have a friend who went to The United States Naval Academy and from my understanding, she hasn’t felt the pressures of our economy at all simply because her program feeds into a four year commitment/job.

It’s certainly tough.

At the same time, I know you have a passion for horses, and while you may not have a passion for cleaning up after them, working with them has to keep you positive.

It helps knowing that I’m accessing a knowledge base every day that I’m well versed in, yes.

So what’s on the horizon for you, Amy?

I went up to visit my family in Connecticut. My mom is an organizer for The Fresh Air Fund, which is a volunteer organization that takes inner city kids out of their environment in New York City and sends them out to stay with families within a days drive of the city for two weeks to get a taste of a different lifestyle. I went to an event with my mom and everyone was asking me what I was doing, which of course, I hated. Then they asked me what my degrees are and what I wanted to do.

As we talked, I found out that one woman’s husband works as a Senior Geologist for an environmental consulting firm and he is very dissatisfied with his current employees. Apparently he wants someone he can trust to do their job. She told me a horror story about how he had sent someone out to inspect for asbestos. The guy had checked the first floor and because he couldn’t see an easy way to the second floor, he simply reported to her husband that there was no asbestos in the building. Her husband went back to check and found out that there absolutely was asbestos on the second floor of the building. Apparently, he also had two employees who refused to go out an collect dirt samples because it “looked like it might rain,” to which I responded, “I’ve gone out riding horses during a hurricane! I could do that job.” It sounded like a job that was right up my alley and would use my degrees. Maybe grunt work is a little bit beneath a Master’s Degree, but you have to start somewhere. The woman offered to take my resumé to her husband and a few days later my mother got a call from the Geologist saying he was amazed that I didn’t have a job yet and that I met every requirement he was looking for. He said if he had a job opening he would hire me on the spot.

The company is owned by an international umbrella based in the Finland, but they do environmental consulting for the U.S. government and private corporations. They also do buyer communications and my skill set is perfect for that. Currently I have the promise that this Geologist is pushing my resumé through the system and that if they get this contract that they have a bid on, he’ll push to hire me.

That would be amazing!

It’s a waiting game now, but if I get this job, it will really prove my theory that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

Networking is absolutely crucial. Sometimes you have to do that audacious thing and just contact the people you admire in whatever field you’re pursuing and ask for advice or assistance.

Exactly. That’s how I met the professor that gave me a job as a lab assistant during my time at the University of Florida.

All it took was one question.

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Special thanks to my fantastic interviewee, Amy McKenna. During this interview, the following job listing or unemployment support sites were mentioned:

http://community.livejournal.com/team_unemployed

usajobs.gov

yardandgroom.com

Amy also mentioned that sites like Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com were pretty much useless.

Mrs. McKenna can be contacted for further information at amye (dot) mckenna (at) gmail (dot) com

Is civilization too civil?

Sometimes I wonder if everything we do in our modern world makes us intrinsically less human, distilling passion and instincts into gray suits and briefcases. Are most of the populous really living to the full potential of our race? Where is the action, the desperation of true love, and the intricate sword play in our every day lives?

In ancient Rome, people walked around armed with swords. There was always a potential threat. A word could get you killed if it landed on the wrong ears. Sex was for anyone who had but a need or a whim for release and everyone was doing it openly with everybody else. If the husband didn’t like being cuckolded, he could simply go out and kill the man his wife was sleeping with. No one would begrudge him this satisfaction.

Today, we have the right to bear arms in this country, but the majority of people that I associate with on a daily basis don’t. Some even openly reject that right, supporting many gun control laws that would keep guns out of the hands of most American citizens.

One observation I’ve made is that the interpretation of the right to bear arms has been distorted. It was originally intended to describe the right to form a militia in order to defend our rights. Now people see the right to bear arms as the right to protect themselves with hand-weapons as opposed to the right to defend the belief system upon which our country was founded. People want to be able to carry concealed weapons or keep guns locked in their cars while they’re at work, or even keep rifles in their homes as if they lived in the Old West.

I am aware that my view on gun control is based mostly on my urban upbringing. If New Yorkers were allowed legally to carry concealed weapons, I think all hell would break loose. Even without a law allowing us to carry lethal weapons, there is sometimes a persistent sense of compression in the city, like at any moment something might pop. Objects could be set in motion that could change our circumstances or our lives at any moment. I feel it often when it’s late at night and I’m taking the subway home with only one or two other occupants in my car. I’ve also felt it as a scuffle between a few men catches my eye from across a crowded street. That sense of compression stays in tact because people do whatever they can, for the most part, to keep themselves cool and contained, with a few exceptions.

Most of the time, when we get angry, it festers with no outlet, eating us alive from the inside out. Rather than attack others, we attack ourselves and blame ourselves for not being able to keep things together. Sure, sometimes we’ll talk things out behind closed doors, but very rarely is there the possible threat of one of us killing another.

Be assured that I am talking from the perspective of a young, private school educated, urban woman. I know that crimes of passion happen every day, but they certainly aren’t happening in my every day life or within the circle of people I normally associate with. I’m also not suggesting that we should all be barbarians and begin killing each other every five seconds and gnawing on turkey legs in our spare time.

The word “barbarian” perplexes me. What does it really mean? The vision of Ancient Rome I described earlier certainly had some barbaric elements, but there was a general movement towards an organized government, which, by definition, is not barbarism.

Then again, I think what I admire most about interpretations and historical accounts of ancient Rome are the more impulsive, passionate qualities of the culture. That is what I mean when I say I wonder if we are “distilling” humanity in our modern culture. I think a lot of people have lost touch with what it means to live in a high stakes environment, to feel the life coursing through their veins or to act on their needs with conviction on a daily basis.

I began thinking about all of this a few weeks ago when a friend of mine from Florida mentioned that people there are allowed to shoot trespassers who come onto their property on sight.

“Holy shit!” I exclaimed incredulously, always the articulate blogger. “But you can’t kill them, can you?”

He just laughed at me and shrugged. “Sometimes when you shoot ‘em, you kill ‘em.”

So even though I often wonder where the passion has gone while I’m making my commute to and from work amidst the milling herd, wondering when we all got slipped our daily dose of “soma,” I am also horrified at the opposite end of the spectrum. It just shocks me that in some parts of the country, entering someone’s property is enough to warrant violence without warning and murder without much punishment. There’s just something about that idea that doesn’t sit comfortably in the pit of my stomach.

It gives me this image of an orange farmer screaming, “This. is. FLORIDAAAAA!” while brandishing an AK-47.

When I was a kid, I used to play with flashlight lightsabers and go to the movies with my friends. From what I hear of rural childhoods, “blowin’ shit up” is a regular after-school activity. YouTube is overflowing with videos of kids from throughout the center of this country blowing up whatever they can find in front of a camera. I even stumbled across one video where a few teenagers were wading into the Mississippi River to find tube worm mound colonies, a staple of that particular ecosystem, and setting them on the ground, followed by shooting them to kingdom come with rifles. The had no clue that they were probably destroying the ecology of that part of the riverbed and were more interested in seeing the strange gooey blobs get blown to smithereens. I also got the impression that they wouldn’t have cared much if they did know about their possible eco-footprint.

This sort of dispassionate violence is what frightens me. A majority of our youth is disconnected from the fact that guns are not toys. They are absolutely lethal. The NRA famously insists that “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” However, I’m going to have to jump on the band wagon with British comedian and actor Eddie Izzard here and say, “Yes, but the guns certainly help.”

I remember holding a water gun and pointing at my Dad when I was a little girl.

“Bang, bang, Daddy!” I shouted, holding the gun at his face, point blank.

He moved the gun away from his face with the palm of his and looked at me very seriously. “Never point a gun at someone unless you mean to kill them.”

Sure, it was just a water gun, but my father made certain that I knew what that toy represented. He said his father had imparted the same wisdom to him.

Dispassionate people own lethal weapons in states like Texas and Florida and they can use them without much cause or repercussion. I’m perplexed and torn. On the one hand, I think it is our right to protect ourselves and our families and that people, given the proper licencing, should be able to own guns, though I realize it’s still hard to control how many guns get into unqualified hands. Plus, the dramatic part of me wants my life to be an epic and adventurous tale worthy of the Odyssey. On the other hand, I don’t think we should be teaching our children that guns are a worthwhile “pass-time.” Hunting for food when food needs to be hunted is one thing. Blowing up bear bottles and Indiana Jones action figures for no reason is another. Plus, in terms of our humanity, I don’t think we need the danger of weapons or our lives constantly hanging in the balance to spur us into living a fulfilling life.

Violence isn’t the answer, but I think dispassion is an epidemic.

How do you cure dispassion? How do you light the proverbial fire under humanity’s ass?

When Prometheus stole fire from the Zeus on Mount Olympus and brought it to the mortals below, he took a risk. He wagered his life to bring warmth and knowledge to his fellow man. His story isn’t famous today because of violence, but because of his daring and his contribution to mankind. There is also the bit about how he was punished by having his liver be eaten out by vultures only to grow back every day for all of eternity, but that’s beside the point.

Maybe, what we all need to spice up our lives is a little calculated risk taking. Set your sights on something and go for it. Don’t let opportunities pass you by. Listen to that little voice in your head when it tells you to do something. Listening to your instincts is what keeps you from being a sheep in the middle of a herd.

Perhaps that’s the cure. Only time will tell.