When every internship she applied to needed experience she didn’t have yet, one Gen Z grad took matters into her own hands and used a creative method to land a job.
Gone are the days when you can walk into a job just weeks after throwing your graduation cap into the air. In today’s overcrowded working world, entry-level jobs often require two to three years of experience. Internships were poised to be a solution to this conundrum, but as one American University student soon found out while trying to bag work experience, nowadays it’s hard to even land a role fetching coffee for corporate executives.
“I was a first-gen college kid utterly perplexed by the internship paradox. I needed experience to land an internship, but I couldn’t get experience without one,” Ayala Ossowski, 26, told Fortune.
But after hearing crickets from over 100 applications, she decided to resort to unusual networking methods.
The Gen Zer was already working 20 hours a week at a pizza shop in suburban Washington, D.C., or as she puts it, “one of the wealthiest, most influential neighborhoods in the world.”
