 Hey y'all what's up? Welcome back to my channel. My name is Sinali and today I'm going to be filming a video all about just like post-grad job hunting that whole situation. So currently I am actually self-employed. I am a freelance videographer and photographer and then I do my influencer stuff on the sides. So just to summarize really quickly that should tell you how my job hunt went. Did not go well. But before that I want to give a quick background just for my new viewers. I'm from Roswell, Georgia. It's a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. So usually I'll just say Atlanta. But technically I wasn't raised right in Atlanta. But I was born in Jacksonville, Florida. So I had Florida Prepaid College Fund, which is a program that my parents opted into when I was born. So pretty much they like put in their money over time. And I guess Florida gives some money. So I had all that money and in-state tuition when I was out of high school. So I was kind of like forced into going into a Florida school. But it was honestly the best decision of my life. I loved being in Florida. I loved getting out of Georgia. And I really didn't think I would because I was I would say I was like an introvert. I was very dependent on my parents. Like I would just like cling to my mom's hip. I never wanted to like leave home. And I wanted to like be around the same people from high school just because I never I didn't ever experience anything different. I just wanted to like grow up with these people, I guess. And I'm very, very thankful that I was kind of forced out of the state because not everyone has that opportunity. But I really became independent at UCF. I was very involved in my sorority. My sorority was like my life. I was PR for two years and just was really heavily involved with like photography and videography for my sorority. I did like the recruitment videos, bid day videos, all that. I'll have them actually linked down below if you guys want to check them out. I have like a whole separate YouTube of my videography. So go check it out. Give me some views. Then I got connected with my university. I started working with my university to produce student lifestyle based content for their Instagram and their YouTube. And they later hired me on as an intern. My last semester, I also worked with a startup called Zup. If you guys go to UCF, you might know it as party tutor, but they actually rebranded right when I got hired on. I did basically content creation for them. So I started job hunting my last semester of college. I wasn't really taking it seriously just because I didn't know where I was going to end up. I thought I was going to move back to Georgia. But this whole time in college, I was actually in a long distance relationship with my boyfriend Ryan. And he went to UGA, so that was in Georgia. And so I was just kind of like going to go wherever he went. Just because I was over long distance and I knew I like wanted to like live with him after college if possible. The original plan was to actually stay at home and save money, not have to pay rent. But he actually applied to a job at Oracle. And when he first told me that there were like different location options, I don't even know if Atlanta was an option. It was Austin and Santa Monica was like our two top. They also have a Boston location, I think a Virginia location and like a couple more, I'm pretty sure. But anyways, Santa Monica and Austin were like the ones that we would most likely move to. Unfortunately, Santa Monica was way out of our price range. It was just like not realistic, especially being two college grads, moving all the way from like the East Coast to the West Coast. I think it was just like a little too much. So we decided to move to Austin. So I was super excited to start looking for jobs here instead of Atlanta. I will say I was kind of being a little picky. I did want to work for a brand that I at least knew of or had some sort of connection with. And I know that's stupid, especially because I'm like a fresh college grad and like that's not realistic, I guess. But I also didn't want to do social media for like an insurance company because I like just wouldn't have any connection with that. And I feel like I would find it very hard to excel in that and grow. So I started applying to jobs here in Austin through LinkedIn, through Monster indeed. I think that was all, but I feel like there were more. So I pretty much just put my resumes all over those sites so that maybe a recruiter would reach out to me if a good position came my way. So this is when I realized companies like don't reply back or they're just not very responsive. And for some reason, I did not know this happens. Like I thought a company would be like professional and reply back or like keep you updated. I just like didn't know obviously this is like my first real time applying to jobs. So how would I have know really? But yeah, jobs like just don't reply. Like they don't even tell you if like people got hired in the position. They can literally keep you hanging for like months. And it was very discouraging. Like I would rather have gotten like rejections than people just like keeping me on the line for that long and just like not knowing at all. So of course, I got my first couple of rejections, which like shout out to those companies for even replying. I really appreciate you guys, even though you guys rejected me. I started to feel like that there weren't positions that I felt like I would excel in that didn't need like seven or 10 years of experience. I really did think that I had so much experience, especially fresh out of college. And during the early days of my job hunting, I would talk to my friends about it and just other peers and they'd be like, Sonali, you shouldn't even worry because you're going to find a job like that. And it's not going to be hard. You have so much experience. And now looking back on it, I wish they never would have said that because I kind of felt a little bit cocky going into it. And I just thought the process would be more simple than it was because I had all this experience. It just sucks because all my past positions and roles and anything I ever got hired to do in the past were all word of mouth referrals. And it's people knowing me, it's people knowing how I work, it's people knowing my personality and how they can get along with me. And while I was job hunting, I realized that it's hard to meet someone over a piece of dang paper, like a resume. It's just so hard to know who a person is. Like you can read all this experience, but at the end of the day, are they a hard worker? Are they a good listener? Can they learn fast? I feel like you need to meet someone to really know if all those skills are there. So at this point, I wasn't even getting any interviews. And that was just like so and that was the most discouraging part because I feel like I could really show myself better and show my skills better if I could just talk to the person at the company. I ended up interviewing with one company and I went through like three to four rounds. And then of course, I didn't get the job. So that kind of sucks because I honestly thought I had it in the bag. And then another company, oh my God, this is this is some tea. They reach out to me like literally months after I submitted my application. I'm pretty sure like two-ish months after. So they called me. We talked a little bit. The person sounded really cool. And like I thought I got along with them. He sounded super nice. So that company, I had like a phone like not even like an interview, it was just like a kind of quick chat. And then they gave me some test work to do. So it was like a social media job. So they wanted to see like what I could do, which I totally understand. Like, of course, like you want to see my writing samples and like my graphic samples and stuff like that. I totally understand. But they gave me like two days of work and they wanted, I think they gave me like a Friday afternoon and they wanted it to be done on Monday. So I was working over the weekend. And it took so long because it would be like three sections, I think. And for each section, it was like create two Instagram posts, two Instagram stories, two Facebook posts, two LinkedIn posts. And it was just like a lot of work, especially because it's not like I had like my own photos that I could just like insert. So I was making like graphics most of the time and like motion graphics because obviously I wanted to put my best foot forward. So I definitely took a lot of time on that. And then they pretty much like ghosted me after that. They didn't really say much. I asked for an update and they basically said like, Oh, can you like submit it through a LinkedIn link or something like that? And I did. And then they literally ghosted me. I think I replied to that email like four times after that and they didn't respond at all. Like I said, I totally understand you want to see how I work and like what my work looks like. But like the fact that they ghosted me after doing all that free work was like so just not cool. If I ever become a CEO or like work at a company, HR, like anything like that, when it comes to the hiring process, I promise everyone the world I'm going to respond and give updates. And I know it probably does get like overwhelming for HR. Like I don't I don't know what goes on. But still, it's just like I did all of that work for nothing pretty much. It would have been nice to have like feedback or anything like that. But no, nothing. So that was super discouraging. Right when I got to Austin, I tried to network a bunch. I actually went to this one happy hour and a company that was hiring was their meeting potential employees. So I went to meet them and I thought I hit it off really well. And I gave them my resume hard copy then emailed them and all that stuff. And again, like didn't really like say anything. I will say I haven't really been applying to as many as like normal people would apply to after graduation. But I am kind of being picky with my job search because I know what I can grow in. I know what I can do. I know my skill set and I don't want to do something so totally random like sales or something. While I was job hunting, I wanted to do, you know, photography on the side, obviously, because I was doing that at my college town. And I loved it. And I also did videography. So my mentality with my side gig was like my work's good enough. Why am I not getting paid? I was reaching out to like brands here in Austin. I was reaching out to restaurants, maybe for like food photography and stuff because I have some experience in that. And no one was like replying to the DNs or like emails or anything. I just didn't understand like why I wasn't getting gigs, I guess. That mentality changed about like three months in. I think in September, I started doing free photo shoots. I would reach out to girls on UT's campus who were in sororities because I wanted to kind of like get into Greek life photography and graduation portraits because that's what majority of my portraits were at UCF were graduation photos. So I wanted to try to get in that as early as possible. So I reached out to some girls. Literally majority of them did not answer. And I'm like, who doesn't want free photos? I don't know. I would take it. But the girls that did answer were super great, super nice. And I pretty much did it for exposure. So they would like tag me in their photos and captions so that if people, you know, needed a graduation photographer or like anything else, they would like see my name, hopefully. I actually didn't know this at all. But one of the girls was actually the president of her sorority. So she got me hired for two sorority gigs after that, which was amazing. I was like, oh my god, this actually works. So that definitely gave me like a boost of encouragement like, oh, maybe I can build my clientele here. But it definitely was hard starting from square one because I was getting hired so much my last semester of senior year because I pretty much built my name up for four years in the same location. And especially because I was in Greek life, and Greek life was definitely small at UCF, you know, my name could get around a little bit faster and easier. So while I was offering some free shoots, I decided to dip my toe in the wedding industry. And I literally always told myself I would never get into it just because it seems like so stressful. And I didn't want to be the one to mess up someone's wedding photos because that's like a once in a lifetime thing. So I was always really scared of it. But I did my first wedding and it really wasn't that bad at all. So I've been second shooting almost every Saturday. It is wedding season right now. So it has been pretty busy. It's definitely going to slow down, I bet. But second shooters, if you guys don't know, second shooters are just there to like kind of get a different perspective or like get photos at like the cocktail hour while the main photographer is going to take portraits of the bride and groom. So it's kind of just like a backup. And I'm not there for the full day most of the time. But there has been two times where I was there the full day, you definitely don't make as much as the main photographer, I will say that. But it's definitely good money when you don't have a stable income and a job. And plus you get to build up your own portfolio. So then hopefully in the next coming years, I can book my own weddings as a main photographer. I've been really liking shooting weddings. I think that the only con is that it is on a Saturday. So I can't really go out on Friday because I don't want to risk being hungover the next morning. And I can't really do much on Saturday because I get home late and sometimes they're like 45 minutes away in like a hill country of Texas. But other than that, weddings have been really fun. In college, I actually did videography more than photography. For right now, photography has definitely been my main source of income. But as you guys know, I do YouTube and I'm an Instagram influencer and moving to Austin was probably like my best move because there are so many cool brands here that I didn't even know of. Glossier just popped up and they reached out to me. So many brands are just looking at Austin influencers wanting to partner. Some of those brands are even made here in Austin. So it's really cool because they have so many events. I even followed like a lot of Orlando bloggers and there were never Orlando blogger events. So I definitely feel very blessed in that way because let's say I did have the money to go to Santa Monica. I feel like being an influencer there would just add to the thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of influencers there. Like everyone in LA and Santa Monica in that area just wants to be an influencer wants to be famous or wants to be on YouTube. So I definitely be at like the bottom tier of everyone just because I have been doing it for a really long time. I started in 2013, but some people definitely get luckier than others. So I would definitely be like at the bottom of the total poll. So I feel like brands wouldn't even know who I was if I was just around all these influencers that have so many more followers than me if that makes sense. So I feel like I can really stand out here in Austin and like do my thing. I've been rambling. So I want to wrap up this video. So currently I am still applying to jobs. If I see one on Indeed, I get emails like every day from Indeed on LinkedIn and Glassdoor. Oh, that was another one Glassdoor. My resume is all over all those websites. So there has been a couple of recruiters that reach out to me. But again, nothing came out of it unfortunately. Do I wish I had a nine to five job? Of course, because I really just wish I had a stable income, but I'm a hustler. I'm a grinder and I've been working really hard even though I may not seem like it. I will say I'm getting pretty used to not having a job. But I think everything works out for a reason. And if you guys are job hunting, if you guys are getting those rejection letters, just know that something better is out there for you. And I believe this 100%. And I feel like it was just the universe telling me like to pursue photography and videography and like the influencer stuff, because things have been definitely picking up, especially in the holiday season with both the influencer stuff and the photography stuff. If the right job comes along, I will definitely take it because there's so much more that I can learn and should learn in like an actual job and just not working for myself. Another thing I wanted to quickly address is like the money situation. I pretty much saved up a ton of money because I was literally working like four jobs my last semester. So I saved up so much money for the move to Texas. It honestly lasted a while, but unfortunately my savings is depleted because of rent, but I am making my rent and then some. So I'm really proud of myself. I really did think I would get like a nine to five job and there's still that possibility. I think that just right now it may not be in the cards for me, but if you guys do live in Austin or know any connections in Austin, please let me know. I'm always looking to network and just meet other people in this kind of like industry that I am in. So that is pretty much my postgrad job hunt story. I felt the need to update you guys because I do vlog and I feel like some of you guys might be thinking like how the frick does she make money because I know I'm super nosy and I want to know. So I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Comment down below if you guys are kind of going through the same thing, or if you had the same experience, comment some good vibes and positive messages for other people to look at and I'll see y'all in my next video. Bye.