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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 4050271" data-attributes="member: 14159">Thanks all for your suggestions and input.  I've got so much to say in response, here we go. . .Thanks, it's good to know that other people go through this madness.."Unfocused"?  Maybe the legal profession works differently in Canada, but in the US a Juris Doctor to practice law requires a Bachelor's Degree first, and all the undergraduate level law-type classes at the university I attended were under the heading of the Political Science department.  I've had classes in Moot Court & Legal Research, Constitutional Law, Civil Liberties, Judicial Process, and Legal Philosophy.  The majority of attorneys I've met had their undergraduate work in either Political Science, History, English, or other "liberal arts" type fields, often ones only tangentially related to the practice of law at best (some law schools actually prefer that, the idea that a student is Tabula Rasa with regards to learning Law when they arrive, others like students that aren't totally clueless).  The degree requirements of the History and PoliSci program had a lot of overlap so it was easy to meet both requirements at once and by luck of class scheduling I could graduate with History before Political Science.  Oh, and I don't mention the programming on my resume normally, I was using it as an example that I do have a lot of general computer skills for things like applying to IT Help Desk-type positions (which want people with CS degrees to essentially sit around and provide basic tech support that any decently computer-literate person can perform).  I don't see anything with my degrees or my career intentions as "bad planning", since it's not like I could just directly apply to Law School out of High School, and much of my college education was directly built around taking pre-law type classes.Well, they honestly did, twice.  The first time was someone calling me back a day or two after I applied, confused, asking if I forgot to mention a key job on my resume or something since the job required one year of experience as a Legal Secretary and my internship being essentially a Legal Secretary had lasted about three months.  I noted that I had a Bachelor's Degree with extensive coursework related to the field of work, had at least several months of related job experience, a typing speed far above what they were asking for, and otherwise met or exceeded all their requirements.  They told me that requirement was inflexible and I should never have applied to it and they hung up on me.  The second time was me getting a callback only a few minutes after applying online for a job, only to have a worker at a local temp agency actually gripe at me for wasting her time reading my resume since I didn't have the two years of experience as a Legal Secretary it required.  I pointed out all my other qualifications, and she actually cut me off rudely and told me that they are called requirements for a reason and to not bother applying to any jobs with that agency if I was going to have an attitude that they would make any special exceptions to job requirements for me.  My father has been working for the power company for over twenty years, but on the other end of the state and most of his contacts are more in the construction end of the company.  While I'm no wimp, it's safe to say that my INT score is my highest ability score, not STR and I know working that kind of job would not be a good fit for me at all.  My fiancee works as support staff at a drug & alcohol rehab center, and they are hiring and need people badly, but it's a women's only residential treatment center so they only hire women for the vast majority of their positions for obvious reasons.  My mother hasn't worked since she found out she was pregnant with me, and that was well over 20 years ago.  I don't have much contact with my extended family, if at all.  I've got a few friends with decent jobs, but they tend to be places that require specific degrees (like a CS degree, or an Engineering degree, or a Master in Library Science degree, or a hard-sciences degree, or an education degree and a teaching certificate).  One of my best friends is working as a seamstress because she can't find any jobs that use her education and experience (a decade of experience in human resources and another decade of experience of being a University-level instructor, a BA in Sociology & Psychology with a minor in Computer Science, MA in Sociology, and was "all but dissertation" towards her PhD in Sociology when she had to drop out of college because of family obligations), so she's in a similar boat of having extreme trouble finding work commiserate with her education and experience.I'm looking into that actually.  I left out a lot of details from my post (it was way-long as was), but I've spoken to recruiters from several services and been seeing what kind of military options were available.  Based on sky-high aptitude test scores, interviewing me, and the fact I have a degree, the Naval recruiter I spoke with is starting me on the application process for Officer Candidate School, but the application process will take at least six months he said, so I need a job for at least a half-year until then, and if I'm declined for that I'll look at other service options but one way or the other I need something at least for the short to mid-term.  I'm not counting on it, but I'm hopeful.  As a nice side benefit, this would also take care of paying for law school.Catch 22, I'm overqualified for every job out there I can apply for, and unqualified for all the jobs I want.  I can't find any jobs I'm actually at the proper level of qualification for.Yup, insurance sales with insurance companies you've never heard of before and their website looks more interested in recruiting salesmen than selling policies, and with what looks like more salesmen than clients.  Or investment sales where right there in the recruiting pitch it sounds like they're telling you (in veiled, polite, make-a-sense-motive-check to see it terms) to trick elderly folks out of their retirements.Actually, I tried that at one point.  Right after I was hired on for the temp job at the warehouse last fall, a couple of days later I got a callback from an online application at a grocery store chain around here offering a job.  I turned it down because I had just gotten a job elsewhere.  I'm seriously considering reapplying, as I know a lot of people have worked at grocery stores, I just wonder if lightning will strike twice with actually getting a job offer.  I need "a job" to at least have something to pay the bills in the short term while I work on something a little more substantial, the whole "waiting until a job just right for your education and career goals" thing has been a total wash for me and lead to me spending most of a year unemployed and living off my parents (much to my chagrin).Oh, I'd been warned of that, unofficially, many times over.  I know that a liberal arts/humanities degree has very limited direct usefulness outside academia.  I never had any delusions that a history degree would mean I could get work as a historian or anything like that.  However, I'd also been told many times over that there were lots of careers out there where they don't care what your degree is in, just that you have a Bachelor's Degree.Yeah, it's pretty hard to get a library job without an MLS degree.  A friend of my fiancee has a job as an assistant at a local library a few counties over, but he admits it's very hard for somebody to get any job in a library nowadays without a specialized degree.  Another friend of mine is a law librarian for a big firm here in town (a JD and an MLS), but I've already tried and he can't get me a job there, they don't hire anybody for any clerical work with less than 3 years of related experience as a hard rule.Yeah, I get the distinct feeling that many of those electronic applications go absolutely nowhere.  The worst case of that I ever saw was about 5 years ago, when I was applying at a department store in town.  Remember, this takes place in 2003.  I find the office of the department store and ask to apply for a job.  The office itself was dirty, smelly and grimy like it had been heavily smoked in for decades but never cleaned, it was covered in dot-matrix printer-paper banners that were faded and tattered.  The calendar on the wall was from the year before, and memos on the desks refered to events that happened months ago.  I was directed over to a glitchy Packard Bell (!) computer running Windows 3.1 and Netscape 1.0 (in other words, the computer was almost a decade old!), running on a dial-up connection to some company server on an unencrypted connection it was asking for all sorts of personal information like my SSN.  As I was trying to ask if they had paper applications so I didn't have to send my SSN over an unsecure connection (and trying to explain why this was bad was an exercise in futility, the secretary was about as computer literate as a typical D&D character, she was still using a typewriter for all office correspondence!), the computer blue-screened on me out of nowhere and wouldn't boot up again, and the secretary said it might be a few weeks before corporate sent someone to repair it and they didn't have any non-electronic applications.  In retrospect, I should probably be grateful I didn't have to work there, if that's how that company worked.Which makes absolutely no sense. . ."Yes, I was willing to default on my credit cards, have my car repossessed, and get evicted and be homeless because I had no job and no money because I was 'focused on my goals' by turning down jobs that could have paid the bills but weren't in line with my ideal career direction, and those jobs were not available so I took no employment rather than look unfocused".  If I heard that line from some HR drone as a reason for turning me down for a job, I'd have to restrain the urge to do something unpleasant.There's a difference, a paralegal is a step up from legal secretary, and generally requires a specialized associates degree or postbaccalaureate certificate in Paralegal Studies (every single Paralegal job posting I've seen requires that, or several years of experience as a paralegal.  There is one school in this state that offers that program, but that would be at least 10,000 dollars more and over a year more of classes for something I'd only use for a few years before going for a Juris Doctor degree that completely supplants it but doesn't transfer towards JD requirements at all (so not very practical for my long-term plans).To everybody suggesting I move, that's not really that practical.  Long and somewhat personal story and lots of complicated reasons, mostly involving family obligations, but the only ways I'll really be able to move are to go to law school or the military.  I'm living in a city of 300,000, it really shouldn't be that hard to get a job somewhere in my own city.To general suggestions of joining a church for networking, that's also not very practical.  Trying to keep things non-religious for ENWorld purposes, but I'm wiccan and I'm not going to join a church I don't believe in just for social/economic purposes.  (Call it a real-life alignment conflict, I can't bring myself to profess membership in a religion I don't really believe just for the possibility of making some money, feels all wrong to me).The good news is that in the long term, I have high hopes for joining the military and using benefits from that to cover my legal education, but I still need a job in the here and now to pay the bills.</blockquote>

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