The most important thing to have after you graduate

Well, I’ve been a State employee now for two months and two days and things couldn’t be better!

It really is nice to finally have launched into my career. I thing that the most important thing I did to get this job, besides earning my degree, was to work an internship. As an intern, getting that initial experience to put on your resume is so extremely important. Look at it from an employer’s point of view, who would you hire?:

• A graduate who has 7 years experience at a grocery store and no professional experience in the area of study?
• A graduate who has 1 or more years experience in the area of study?

The hardest thing about being an intern is that they pay little, if anything, and a lot of students at commuter schools, like Sacramento State, are usually paying their own way through college and have a hard time affording everything as it is. I was extremely lucky in that I had Christi to help with the mortgage while I was working as an intern at the Department of Motor Vehicles(DMV) (I guess she was also lucky that I was able to cover a lot for her when she was doing her internship almost three years ago .

We were both able to benefit from our sacrifices for each other. Christi has been at her job career for over two years, and now I’m starting to get the hang of my career.

So if there are any college students reading this my advice to you is to get some experience in your field of study before you graduate, things will move much quicker for you after you graduate!

CompUSA’s going out of business sale

This is somewhat old news but CompUSA has decided to close down nearly half of its stores, including all of its stores in the Sacramento region.

Currently the stores in my area are having a ‘going out of business’ sale so I figured it would be a good time to go and pillage what I can from them since everything in the store is at least 25% off. I picked up a few things since now I can afford to spend a little more than when I was a stressing out as a poor student. I picked up a copy of Windows Vista – Ultimate (Upgrade) for 30% off, a nice Plantronics head set for 25% off, some DVD movies, and a motorized Memorex CD repair kit.

However now I realize why CompUSA is going out of business. Even with 25% off, most of the merchandise they are trying to liquidate can be found online cheaper (including shipping and tax).

I wasn’t too happy when I saw my new headset and CD repair kit being sold online cheaper than what I got mine for.

The exception was for Windows Vista, 30% off is pretty good for a retail copy of the OS. I figured I’d buy it since it will be around for a while and I’d probably upgrade to it eventually out of curiosity. I was, however, quite happy with Windows XP x64(I was running the 64-bit version). It has been a stable and reliable system for several years.

I went back to CompUSA yesterday and they now have Windows Vista at 40% off, but everything else worth buying is still not worth the discount. I asked one of the associates what their last day was and he didn’t know. I assume that it will close when they can sell everything off, so once things stop selling at 25% off they’ll drop the price even more. I’ll probably stop by weekly to see how things pan out.