Pots of gold and rainbows, and me red balloons!

So, tomorrow is April 1st, and jobless college seniors everywhere will whimper quietly as the dawn of a new month reminds us all of the unstoppable gallop toward graduation. A lot of you probably never imagined you'd be dreading graduation day so much, but sometime between now and our freshman year, the world collapsed, and suddenly it seems we're left in the dusty fallout of four years of hard work, inflated dreams, and accumulating student loan debt with no hope in sight.

I'm sorry, is this outlook too dreary for you? You can tell me if it is, but I get the sense from all of my friends' increasingly anxious Twitter updates that I'm not the only once facing nightly quarterlife crisis anxiety attacks. It seems unfathomable to me that after I've tried to do everything right during college and taken all the advice of people who told me to volunteer, get good grades, get involved with campus media and organizations, and immerse myself in new situations, that I'm still just another unremarkable faceless wanderer in the way overcrowded jobseeker purgatory.

Then something occurred to me, and hey you, yeah, the one weeping at the computer screen, I want this to occur to you too. Let's not get depressed. Lend me your ear, sugar plum.

So am I the only one who feels like every time someone (granted, these are mostly stories from journalists, so make of that what you will) tells me how they found a job, it always involves some freak occurrence/unexpected twist of fate? I can't count how many people have described finding a job in a way similar to this: "Well, I was walking down the street, feeling bad for myself because I couldn't find a job as a reporter at any New England newspaper. I decided to stop at a farmer's market, and got to talking with a local farmer who was selling a kind of fruit I'd never heard of. He told me it was the only thing unicorns would eat. Unicorns? I thought this guy was crazy, but then out of the corner of my eye, a real, live unicorn emerged out of a shady thicket and beckoned to me. In a leap of faith, I got on its back and it flew me to a Chuck E Cheese, where the owner happened by with a free pizza for me and my new unicorn friend, and mentioned that years ago, he'd interned at the Hartford Courant. His old supervisor works for The Providence Journal now and is incidentally looking for a new health beat reporter. And you won't believe this, but at that very second the editor from the Providence Journal walked into Chuck E Cheese with his daughter. It was her sixth birthday. We had an impromptu, and obviously informal, interview in the ball pit, and I was hired on the spot. No clips, resume, networking, or cover letter required!"

Have you heard tales like this? Any speaker to ever come into one of my reporting or writing classes seems to relate some type of "I slipped on a banana peel, and the man who helped me up is my boss now" sort of story. It's not exactly helpful advice for people involved in old-school, rigorous job searches, but there is information to be gleaned from these tales. Here's my advice. Don't feel bad about yourselves just yet. Let's look for four-leaf clovers, throw spilled salt over our left shoulders, and make even more eye contact with strangers than usual. Make wishes on gingersnaps, keep your eyes peeled for leprechauns, and spend sleepless nights looking for shooting stars.

This is how you find a job.