Tracy Lee schlepped down a busy New Jersey highway under the blazing summer sun Thursday afternoon, lugging a bag of groceries back to her friend's house where she is staying until she can save enough money for her own place.
Like thousands of other young Americans, Lee is finding it impossible to find full-time employment in a cutthroat climate where inexperience is no match for seasoned veterans who are putting off retirement longer (mostly out of necessity).
Welcome to the job market: there is none.
"I'm an upbeat person but it's hard to stay positive everyday," Lee told Xinhua during a phone interview.
The 23-year-old graduated from the University of Massachusetts (UMass) in Amherst, a prestigious American institution, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism and communications in June -- three months before the economic recession hit. Timing is everything.
Since graduating, Lee has applied to hundreds of jobs, approached staffing agencies, and contacted UMass alumni. But time and time again, Lee hears the same story: In a stagnated economy, no one is willing to take a chance on a job seeker who is straight out of college.
"I am in a post-grad, weird limbo area," she said, adding that most people she speaks with recommend that she get an unpaid internship to begin with, which A: she already did at the United Nations for three months; B: is almost impossible as most internships require school enrollment; and C: is economically unfeasible.
Meanwhile, to support herself, Lee is working as a hostess at a Parsippany, New Jersey restaurant -- a job she undoubtedly is overqualified for, and a reality becoming all too familiar to America's youth.
In the first quarter of 2009, only 50 percent college graduates had jobs that matched their education, according to the Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies.
In February, the U.S. Federal stimulus bill addressed general unemployment among America's youth by earmarking 1.2 billion U.S. dollars to help find jobs for those aged 14-24.
That appears to have had some affect in New York State, where unemployment edged down from 8.7 percent in June to 8.6 percent in July, according to statistics released on Thursday by the New York State Department of Labor.
"There was a much larger-than-normal increase in government- funded summer youth hiring this year," Peter A. Neenan, Ph.D., the director of New York State's Division of Research and Statistics said in a statement. "In past years, public funds typically provided for about 25,000 summer youth jobs."
"This year with the addition of federal stimulus funds, a total of approximately 60,000 youth were placed in jobs this summer," he said.
However, the stimulus funds have had little effect boosting employment in New York City, even if just for the short term.
NYC's unemployment rate rocketed from 5.1 percent in May 2008 to 9.6 percent in July 2009, surpassing the national unemployment rate for the first time since the recession began and the highest level since June 1997, according to State figures.
Eli, who declined to give his last name, told Xinhua during a phone interview that he has been unemployed for almost a year. The 29-year-old, who lives in the trendy Flatiron District of Manhattan, said that from January to April he cut costs left and right, from eating home-made lunches to only drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon -- a refreshingly low-budget beer.
After being laid off from a global advertising agency last October, Eli began his hunt for full-time employment. But when he realized that companies could not offer him the salary or benefits he thought he was worth, he turned to freelancing -- rewarding, when he gets paid.
Eli described several innovative projects but the real winner is his documentary about kickball culture called, "Kick Me: A Documentary Film about Big Kids and Big Red, Rubbers Balls."
He says he has the full support of the World Adult Kickball Association, or WAKA, and is now their official documentary film maker.
Surprisingly, unemployment for Eli has had an opposite effect on potential employers.
"They seem to be more excited about the work I'm doing now than the day-to-day work I did at the agency a year ago," he said.
And apparently, all the hard work has paid off. Eli was recently offered a high-level position working for a multinational packaged goods company. But it's not in the United Sates.
The job is in Hong Kong, a region that has felt the economic recession, but as Eli said, as more of "a hiccup" rather than a major crisis.
"I can ride out the economic wave there until things get more stable," he sad. "There's definitely more opportunity there than I would have gotten in the U.S."
Meanwhile, for those digging in their New York City heels, the ride is getting uncomfortably bumpy.
Emily Zdyrko, 26, who lives with her parents in Morningside Heights -- a neighborhood in the north of Manhattan - has been tirelessly searching for a job teaching high school English.
Zdyrko had the unfortunate luck of graduating from Columbia University's Teachers College with a Masters degree in May, the exact month the city put a hiring freeze on hundreds of newbie teachers who were recruited to the city by organizations such as Teach for America and the Teaching Fellows program.
"It has been such a tough year that nothing has turned up yet," Zdyrko told Xinhua. "It's really frustrating."
Zdyrko said that a lot of her classmates have abandoned the search altogether by moving upstate or to New Jersey, something she has also considered but is reluctant to follow through with.
"I don't really have a plan," she said. "I'm just hoping something turns up before the first day of school."