If you are an international student studying in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia or any other country, this may not be an exciting time for you. For any international student graduating in 2020 or 2021, one thing is sure that the job opportunities will be very limited. You may have to struggle a lot to find a job, even if you are a graduate from a top engineering or business school, and irrespective of the college major. So, what should you do as an international student during these trying and uncertain times?
None of us know how long this coronavirus epidemic will last and when will the recovery start, how strong the recovery will be and how easy it will be for the upcoming graduating class of 2020 or class of 2021 to find a job. Thousands of companies, small and large, have already furloughed tens of millions of employees and have stopped hiring for the next few months. Recessions always present a tough time for job seekers, especially for international students.
My Experiences of Going Through Two Recessions as Recent Foreign Graduate
I was a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin (aka UT Austin) when the recession of 1992 happened. A few years later, I was a fresh MBA graduate from Harvard, working for a software startup in 2000 when the dot come bubble hit silicon valley, followed by the crisis of 9/11.
During both these recessions, I saw the first-hand number of friends, especially international students in the USA, struggling to find jobs. However, most of them, if not all, survived and even have thrived over the last 20-25 years in the US.
So, what did many of these students do to survive the recession and bounce back to success once the crisis subsided and the companies started hiring workers again?
Read about three things International students can start thinking about now.
