I’ve never been much of an optimistic person.

When I lost my full-time job, I was just focusing on paying off my loans and maintaining a personal life. But since then, both have suffered.

I know things are going to get better — it’s just a matter of time I guess.

But my plans are the same as they were before all this happened, because I don’t have much choice or see an alternative. As for what they were before, I didn’t really stop to ponder where I would be in ten years. I really didn’t have a plan at all. I just wanted to get a job and be independent, and assumed that’s what my college degree would get me.

Now it’s looking like a job and financial independence are going to be a big uphill struggle all on their own.

Hopefully I’ll have my loans paid off by the time I’m 40, but, as of right now, that’s the most realistic time frame I can put down.

I don’t get how anyone in this type of situation can seem positive.

Good jobs just aren’t available and it seems like I’ll be paying off my loans until the day I die at this rate. It seems that unless I’m a happy, outgoing person, I can’t get a job working retail. But how can I be?

I’m thousands of dollars in debt applying for a job that pays $8 an hour.

If this economic situation hadn’t happened, I would probably be making three times that by now! It just makes me feel very useless and very lied to. That after college I would be part of the working class, helping society run. Now I’m just a drain on my family and the very society that I wanted to be a working part of!

It hurts my very moral fiber doing this but I don’t feel like I have any options. It doesn’t seem like anyone has an use for a college graduate with three years experience in IT, outside of siting in a chair reading a script in customer support, which I really suck at.

Growing up, it sounded like if I went to college, then doors would just be opened for me left and right. I would have many different jobs to pick from and I would never have to worry about money.

Now, with a mountain of debt and with job offers for $12 an hour, which is the pay rate I would expect if I didn’t have a degree in my field, I don’t expect much. I served jury duty a while back and one of the employees down there made a joke about, “Well, does anyone really want a government job right now? Ha ha, no pension.”

I just sat there stewing, thinking “Pension? How about medical benefits? How about putting food on my table?”

I think no one is hiring anyone in my age bracket because they feel, “You’re young, you’ll get a job somewhere else.” But in actuality, EVERYONE is thinking that. No one is hiring young people because they don’t want to train them to do the jobs anymore.

They want someone with ten years experience and then when they can’t find it, they just pay the people they have overtime, rather than finding someone and dealing with the fact that they’ll take a little while to get up to speed.

Entitled, hardly.

Oh, students loans. They sound okay when you’re signing the document. You never think you’ll be out of work for more than six months, because who wouldn’t want to hire a college graduate?

If I could tell my younger self that I would go over nine months without a job, I would have thought twice about signing that paperwork. I have four separate loans, one of which is federal.

It would be nice if I could consolidate them all together into one giant loan so I could somehow manage it better, but what bank would be willing to take three private loans and one federal loan together, without some huge interest rate or payment plan worse then what I have now?

Per month, they are more than rent and food! How can someone be expected to pay that much when they are not working? There should be a clause in all students loans that states: “If you are not fully employed, you only have to pay interest, indefinitely.”

I’ve used up all the deferments I can possibly use on these things and every month they want more and more.

Filing for bankruptcy isn’t going to help, as the loans are not covered. When I’m watching TV, I see ads for these services, which are always talking about, “if you’re underwater with credit card debt or the IRS or can’t get a car loan.” Me, I’m completely on my own, plain and simple.

College. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Do I regret going? Not at all. Would I do it differently? Absolutely.

Apparently, having a degree from a tech school doesn’t really mean anything in my field. And it is pretty obvious that I would’ve gotten the same amount of respect from all the people I’m interviewing with if I had gotten a liberal arts degree and a few standard certifications, instead of dropping all the money for the colleges I attended.

I would probably have half the debt I do now — which would be only $40,000 — and therefore half the worry.

I never imagined that, with an advanced degree, I would be turned down by so many people to perform jobs I am overqualified for.

My degree basically wasn’t worth what I paid for it.

I understand all those home owners who are upside down on their mortgages. The only difference is that they have the national spotlight on them. People like me have nothing.

Most of them paid fourteen dollars an hour, which is a problem when you have student loans. It appears that no one wants to hire someone without seven years experience in a very specific skill set — email administration, database administration, directory administration. I couldn’t even get a job doing a roll out of new desktops, because I had never done it before. In actuality, you don’t need any special skills to do that job AT ALL. If you know how to troubleshoot a computer, you can certainly install it at a desk and explain to the person what’s different about this computer versus the last one.

Then you run into the person who thinks it’s odd that you’ve had so many jobs. Their heads apparently have been in the ground for the last four years! They do not seem to understand that the job market is like the Hunger Games out there.

I’ve lost interview opportunities because I didn’t call the recruiter back in a few hours. As though I’m supposed to be sitting by the phone from 7 AM to 7 PM ready to interview at a moment’s notice. When I talk to full-time employees at the few jobs that I get in my actual job field — temp jobs — they’re very glad I’m there, as they tell me they are working fifty hours a week and haven’t had a raise in years.

According to the job salary sites that tell me what I should be making in these temp positions, I’m underpaid. And if those same sites consider my degree, my certifications and my four-plus years of experience, I’m VASTLY underpaid.

When I was in grade school, it was beaten into my head: You have to go to college to make something of yourself. So I went to college, changed majors, and eventually got out after five years with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.

I got a decent paying job and worked for about 18 months until BAM, I became a statistic. Then I was out of a job, living on unemployment without medical benefits — which is kind of big as I’m a diabetic — and over $60,000 in student debt.

Nothing but silence when I apply for jobs that I’m either qualified or overqualified for. If I get anything back, it’s just a form letter saying they’ve received it.

So I’ve spent the last three years going from temp job to temp job, just making ends meet, scraping by on any kind of free medication I can get my hands on for my condition and being turned down by government programs because “I’m not bad enough.”