So you’ve just graduated college. Congratulations! Hopefully you managed to do it without too much debt, and were wise enough to choose a major with decent career prospects and not something useless like feminist studies or journalism. If you correctly chose something with a future (such as programming) then it’s still a bit of a depressing time at the moment, obviously. For the last couple of years, you’ve likely seen your peers graduate and usually walk right into a good paying job. Now suddenly leads are a lot more scarce, and you’re fighting for jobs with a bunch of recently laid-off folks with a few years experience.
That’s the bad news.
The good news, is that this too shall pass. I ought to know, because this was my experience in 2001. After seeing my peers graduate right into awesome programming jobs, I walked right into the middle of the .com bubble collapse and found myself competing against every programmer who’d actually been working for the past couple of years. Eventually, I landed my first job as a temp at Nintendo of America. The rest is (LinkedIn) history.
The point is, while things definitely suck right now, they will eventually get better. While you may not have the easy path straight out of college that your peers a year or two ahead of you did (and will again a few years down the road) this can be a great opportunity to build a more varied career. At the very least, the perseverance that you’ll need to land your first couple of jobs and get your foot in the door will serve you well for the rest of your life. When the next crisis comes around (like the crash of 2008), you’ll be a lot better prepared.