tankdilla's Journal: under/unemployment

I'm calling this under/unemployment because I do have a job, but it's not what I should be doing. The job I have came mainly from skills I picked up outside of school, tinkering with computers and learning on my own, but it doesn't involve hardly anything I've learned from busting my ass the past 4 years as an aspiring programmer. Still it's a job, and hopefully it'll lead to something else. The pay is crap, my mind is going to mush from the boredom the job brings, and i'm nowhere near satisfied with it, so I consider myself under/unemployed, as a mixture of being underemployed and umemployed from what I should be doing.

I'm of the fresh out of college bunch, and it is really hard to get even a callback now. Books such as "What Color is your Parachute?" give a lot of helpful advice, as well as the Career Center on campus. But no one really has a definite answer on dealing with this bleek job market. So I decided to expand my skill set by learning some new languages, which ended up in a callback or 2, but that's as far as it went (yrs. of experience was the factor). Then I decide to come up with some programs to write, to keep my programming skills fresh and to pad my resume. Same deal as before, a callback or 2, but that's as far as it went. Oh yeah, I tried using the network too (asking people to lookout for jobs), but even that has failed to produce, although there were a few close ones. So I'm wondering, what else is there left to do? As of now, i'm just going through a repeat of everything, and hopefully I can start to use this degree for more than wall decoration. Although it is fun and nice to be able to write programs that actually do stuff, it's time to use this skill for making a profit.