A look at 2013 summer employment

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Since summer is in full swing, college-aged kids are feeling the pressure to find jobs and internships that will fulfill college credits or put a little bit of change in their pockets for the upcoming year.

Lisa Schlosberg, a 2010 Baldwin Senior High School graduate, is feeling the pressure.

“Especially with the current job market and economy,” she said. “We’re being told by schools, parents, teachers, etc. to enter as soon as we can into the ‘real world.’ We all need to be thinking about how to one-up everyone else out there and the best thing to have is experience.”

Schlosberg is spending her summer in Michigan blogging for Quicken Loans, a job she found through a friend. “I applied because I heard about it through a friend who worked there and I wanted to have some sort of writing internship,” she said.

Rockville Centre resident Carly Beyar is also looking outside of the New York area for a summer internship. The Fairfield University senior took a job as a social media intern at Fuseideas, an advertising and creative agency located in Boston.

“The reason I chose to work for Fuseideas in Boston was because I wanted to experience life outside of Long Island,” Beyar said. “I joined a new gym, a summer league soccer team, made new friends and colleagues, and I also became closer with my sister [by living with her] and her friends. Not to mention, I made excellent networking connections with my boss and the CEO of the company.”

Like Schloseberg, Beyar found her job through connections. Unfortunately, others had a more difficult time and experienced the grueling job search process.

Jamie Rieff, another Rockville Centre resident, faced this reality.

“The job search was not as easy as I thought,” Rieff said. “Applications became very extensive with many letters of recommendations and transcripts. I became less hopeful after hearing about the strict credentials many internships required. Also with everyone else at school looking for internships it does get very competitive.”

But Rieff said that all of the hard work had paid off once she was accepted into the New York University Langone Medical Center Health Careers Opportunity Program where she is a clinical nutrition intern.

BHS graduate Derek Matthews echoed Rieff. “The search process was disheartening and long, but very fulfilling when I finally got another job,” he said.

Matthews, a computer technology repair major at Nassau Community College, believes that the economy created a hard job search and led him to his eventual job at Nordstrom’s espresso bar in the Roosevelt Field Mall.

“I think that for businesses, the perceived easiest saving measure is to cut labor costs since other things like utilities and rent are more fixed, and move existing employees to part-time status to revoke their health benefits,” Matthews said. “Also, since many people with higher-level education and experience are settling for jobs out of their field, it makes it even harder for young people and those with less education to get jobs that were once considered ‘safe’ for them.”

Matthews applied to more than 100 jobs all over the area in search of a job to pay for school and eventually his own apartment.

But Matthews and Rieff are both hopeful that they will find jobs in their fields once they are finished with school. Both stated that their fields, healthcare and computer service, had a host of jobs for those just graduated.

While Beyar agreed that there is pressure to find work during the summer, she doesn’t think that should discourage students from trying to find the right summer job or internship.

“I chose this path because it is something that I am passionate about,” she said. “If you love something, never stop doing it.”