Job-Search Difficulties

It should come as no surprise that, given the current economy, I can't find a job. What's scarier is that, as far as I can see, there *are* no chemically-related openings. At all. Never mind being qualified for them - there aren't any. The job-search engine literally comes up empty search after search. It's unnerving.

Many students, more intelligent than I, had the foresight to compete for the USRA (seriously, the competition sounded pretty fierce this term even just within a department). I wasn't. So now I am going to try knocking at professors' doors, expecting to be laughed off. Sigh.

I honestly don't mind working for free (I have a small entrance scholarship to tide me over), but still, I need a job. Except that's not exactly the right frame of mind to be approaching professors in, is it?

(Random tangent: a certain very famous computational chemistry program is taking more than four freaking hours to optimize my molecule. Admittedly I was using Hartree-Fock, but it was a small basis set. Grr. At least it wasn't a copper-containing molecule, I guess...)