Taking the Plunge

For Kit Lewis, a 2002 University of Houston graduate, what kept her in school was the hope that she might have a job she loved one day, a job suited to her bubbly, outgoing personality. The 25-year-old Houston native was a kinesiology major who loved analyzing Hakeem Olajuwon's Dream Shake in her biomechanics class. When an aptitude test told her she had the perfect personality for sales, she became determined to find a job in pharmaceutical or medical supply sales.

"I had a brown suit and a black suit -- the first interview suit and the second interview suit," she laughs. "I wore my hair back, not too much perfume, I had my mother look me over." Not the type to get nervous, the gregarious Kit remained confident through each of the roughly 15 interviews she went out on. She got no offers.

Determined to start out independent, and also at the urging of her grandmother, who had paid for her schooling, Kit decided to take any job she could find. A $12-an-hour file clerk job at Burr Wolff, a tax company, eventually turned into a full-time job. After a promotion to a salaried position, she now makes in the mid-$20,000s.

While she's grateful to have the job and does her best at it, she admits, "it goes completely against my personality type. It's paper- and pencil-pushing; I'm sitting in a cube for eight hours a day." With a sales job, she could be out and moving, always on the go and meeting people.

"I feel like now it's killing my spirit," she says.

It's also killing her wallet. Kit budgets her salary very carefully, but she has about $14,000 in student loans that she is determined to pay off on her own. Her mother has urged her to move back in with her to save money, but Kit says it's important to her to make it by herself, although she acknowledges raiding her mother's refrigerator occasionally to cut back on food costs. She also took a second job at Crate and Barrel for three months over the holidays to pay for new furniture, which meant leaving her day job at 5:30 to work from 6 p.m. to sometimes as late as 11 p.m. at her second one.

"I never realized how difficult it is to have two jobs, and I'm single," she says. "I work with one woman who's 34 with two kids working three jobs. I have a new respect for people with more than one job."

But Kit admits what bothers her the most is not her money problems but the emotional stress of a job she never thought she'd have to take for this long.

"There were times when I pulled into the parking garage and just started crying," she says. She would pull herself out of her depression by reminding herself that there were people who were completely unemployed and without any resources at all. And by admitting to herself that she was going to have to be a grown-up eventually.

"I'm realizing so many things," she says. "It's true when they say, 'Stay a kid for as long as you can.' At home, going to football games and parties, when my biggest problem was what was I going to wear the next day…but you can't go home."

That's what Rob Gaddi and Saad Mahmoud keep reminding themselves. Anything is worth not going home. For Saad, that means sleeping at friends' houses because the garage apartment he's working on doesn't have a functioning AC unit yet. For Rob, that means taking on an extra research job at Rice and volunteer bartending at the Rice pub so he can be eligible for 50-cent beers.

"The beer is cheap, and it's somewhere that's not staring at the walls," he says.

Both grads cook at home to save money on food, although Saad jokes rice is cheap but it's the cost of the soy sauce that gets him. Rob prefers spaghetti. And although he would love to live closer to work, Rob wisely chose an apartment near U.S. 59 South and Buffalo Speedway. That was one of his many money-saving decisions.

"I rebelled against the cable man," says Rob. Then he admits, "But I splurged. I got the expensive rabbit ears."

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While Rob spent his senior year agonizing over finding a job, his fellow Rice classmate Maryann Bylander didn't send out one résumé, proving that not every recent college graduate is worrying about how to make ends meet or how to find that perfect job.

"I didn't look for a job at all," says Maryann nonchalantly. "The fact that jobs are so hard to come by and I don't know what I really want to do had something to do with it."