Daniel Dunham has just finished his 15th job interview.

Sitting at a table in the Career Services Center at the University of Washington in Seattle, Dunham wears a suit and a tie and the vaguely shaken expression that comes from spending the last hour selling yourself to company representatives.

Other students, resumes in hand, wait to talk with the same company, aerospace giant Lockheed Martin.

"I've had more interviews since September than I've had in my entire life," said Dunham, a computer-engineering major. "Microsoft, Amazon, National Instruments, Tektronix. I was born and raised in Seattle, but I'm not going to be able to find a job here."

Things have changed since Dunham first entered the UW Computer Science & Engineering Department several years ago. No longer are upperclassmen fighting off recruiters, multiple job offers and huge signing bonuses.

The recession is playing itself out in the recruiting sessions and job fairs on college campuses across the country. And nowhere is it more visible than in Washington state, with a 7.5 percent unemployment rate and a hard-hit tech industry.

Laid-off technical workers are flooding the market. Companies once begging for booth space at campus career fairs are now hesitant to commit, said Carol Forte, career and employment specialist at Bellevue Community College.

This year, BCC's annual job fair has been changed into an "internship fair."

According to a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, hiring of new college grads in 2001-02 will be 20 percent lower than the previous year. College hiring in the West has been chopped by 45 percent, more than any other region.

In metropolitan Seattle, the January jobless rate jumped to 7.1 percent from 5.8 percent in December.

Wake-up call

For the Class of 2002, it is a rude awakening. Where once college grads may have been the most marketable of all people, now they are watching their dream employers run out of jobs faster than Wile E. Coyote runs out of cliff.

Many companies have already filled out their summer internship rosters. Rumors of hiring freezes rocket around campus.

Dunham, 26, says he has gone out of his way to find a job in the tight job market.

He has revamped his resume, created his own Web page and networked. He interviews with companies he wouldn't have considered a year ago, and is prepared to move to the East Coast, where some research organizations are still hiring.

He attends every career fair he knows of and keeps his resume handy in case he finds out about one at the last minute.

At one such event in November, a company representative could do nothing more for Dunham than console him about the job market.

"They showed up to the career fair," Dunham said, "but they weren't hiring."

With the outlook so seemingly grim, many students are taking refuge in graduate school, doubling the number of applications received by the UW graduate computer-science program this year and driving MBA applications up 25 percent.

"Be cool, stay in school," said UW senior Mike Quinn.

After two internships with IBM, Quinn, a computer-engineering major from Sequim, is a "campus ambassador" for the company, which recently held an information meeting on campus. The room was crowded with students, all waiting in line to get their resumes examined by a panel of IBM representatives wearing turtlenecks and polo shirts with the company logo.

But the turnout was small considering the increasingly competitive job market.

Pessimism breeds apathy

"In the past, there have been more students," said Quinn, who hopes to land a permanent job with IBM. "It seems counterintuitive. But they're apathetic. They think, `Oh, there's nothing available. If I don't get a job, I'll just go to grad school.' "

Last year, 550 people applied for the 25 to 35 slots in the UW graduate program in computer science and engineering. This year, 1,100 students and laid-off workers are vying for the same number, said Lindsay Michimoto, academic adviser with the department.

During the height of the tech bubble, companies stockpiled talent, and the department was concerned there wouldn't be enough students to fill those places.

"It just got twice as hard to get in," said Michimoto. "But it's amazing, people are very hopeful. They think they're going to be one of the chosen."

Mariam Sarikhan, 21, UW junior and psychology major from Kent, Wash., already has seen a good friend and computer-science major lose several job offers after hiring freezes were announced. The friend now works in construction.

Sarikhan is applying to 15 grad schools and studying for entrance exams; she wants a doctorate in psychology, which takes at least five years.

"It seems pretty frightening to be in the job market right now," she said. "It doesn't feel exactly good looking forward to all those years of schooling, but it definitely feels a lot safer."

BCC's Forte says part of the problem is people have unrealistic expectations. Tech workers come into the community college's career center with no degree, having made six-figure incomes and been unemployed for six months, looking for the same type of work and the same salary.

"You try and be gentle," said Forte.

But not all of the hiring news for college grads is so bad, says Brian Krueger, president of Collegegrad.com, the Web's top entry-level job site for college students.

"We have found the floor, and things are going up," said Krueger, who has spent the last 20 years studying college-employment trends as a human-resources director. "I've seen the depths of the early `80s and early `90s; they think it's bad, but it's not as bad as it has been."

Krueger said there are pockets of strength to be found in the defense industry and government.

Companies such as Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as well as the military, Immigration and Naturalization Service and Internal Revenue Service are all in the top 30 entry-level employers.

Think small and medium

Small and mid-size companies are hiring more college grads than the big companies.

Krueger advises students to get some perspective and redouble their efforts. "There's no real security for anyone going into any field," he said. "You end up making your own security."

No one needs to tell that to Cristophe Bisciglia of Seattle, a UW computer-science major. At the IBM meeting, Bisciglia, 21, chatted with company reps and hopefuls, delivering rapid-fire, witty anecdotes about his recent six-hour interview with Microsoft recruiters, their questions about cricket and discrete mathematics, the hints that they're hiring only people they don't want other companies to get their hands on.

Bisciglia gives off the confidence that tacitly says he's one of those people.

In his free time, he works for a consulting company, making $65 per hour. But he hasn't received a paycheck in six months, because there's no work.

Lately he has been working his way down the food chain to his "fallbacks."

Still, he focuses on the positives. His interview was scheduled just two days after he first handed a Microsoft rep his resume.

"I'm pretty stoked about that," said Bisciglia. "But I still haven't heard back, so my stokage level is going down."

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(c) 2002, The Seattle Times.

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