Planes, Trains, and Running Shoes

"So, for someone who is accustomed to documenting every inane detail of her life online, the past few weeks 6 months have been really difficult."

Katie posted this on her blog a few weeks ago and when she wrote that, I couldn't have agreed with her more. The last 6 months of 2012 have been entirely different from the first 6 months of 2012 and I've kept very, very quiet about it.

In May, I graduated with my Master's.


2 days later, I moved out of my New York City apartment. To my mom's house in New Jersey.

I had already been job hunting for 2 months and after a few interviews and no offers on the table, I started to get a bit well, desperate.

Fast forward to September...I had been out of school for 3 months and living at home in New Jersey with no job and no car. I was miserable. I had a Master's degree, good work experience, great references and I had sent out nearly 200 job applications, most of which didn't even yield a "Thank you for your application." I took at least a dozen (no exaggeration)  trips to DC to volunteer at conferences, meet people, network and try to find a job and after so many promising leads and so many disappointments, I started to lose hope.

To say the job market, and my prospects, were bleak is an understatement.

I so desperately wanted to move to DC, but the prospects were minimal so I expanded my job search...to the whole country.

Desperate for an income, I applied to a retail job and started in September. Crazy hours and being exhausted after work left me with minimal time to devote to the job search...which is a full time job in itself.

In early November, I started looking at jobs again. My first day back on the "job," I came across a posting that seemed perfect for me...as so many had before. I applied to it, along with 5 other jobs, and walked away having a pretty good feeling about this one, but taking that feeling with a grain of salt.

The next day, I got called for an interview. That was three weeks ago. As one interview led to another and I went through the whole process, I wanted to tell everyone about my excitement about this possibility that I increasingly felt better about the more I got to talking to the various people within the organization...but I kept quiet for fear of jinxing anything.

But today, after keeping quiet about virtually so many things in my life over the past 6 months, I can finally start to open up again because on Friday night, I was offered a job...


...in Washington, DC.