Marketing Yourself After College

There may be a few of you who find yourselves three months away from graduating, and staring into the jaws of a bear market. Are you scrambling to lock down an interview? Falling over yourself to complete career checklists to no avail? And all the while wondering: Does this mean I need to go to grad school?

There is no rulebook for success these days. Surviving this job market requires brash confidence and pure cunning. You should be marketing yourself. The problem with your checklist is that your competition -- the thousands of others graduating from schools across the country -- is using the same exact list. You've all obtained the same credentials, fulfilled the same requirements, given your GPAs a two-year makeover (or not), and gathered a healthy list of extracurriculars. But you're all just a blur in a faceless recruitment system.