seriously this is ridiculous people stupider than me can get them. why can't I? I'm seriously depressed and give up, because apparently I'm not human enough to work a job. There is something wrong with me, but no one will admit it to my face. why doesn't someone take me out back and shoot me between the eyes. I don't know whats wrong with me.
prpl, I just found out that I may be in the same position as you in two weeks because apparently there may not be enough TA positions over this summer. Don't take rejection for a position as a reflection on you personally. Some of it is random, a lot of it is just matching the right person for the job, some of it is just hiring policy (like my old company does not hire short term, nor will they give contract work to former employees within a certain time period), but
most of it is just who applied first to the position that was open.
The most likely explanation for why you didn't get a job is that someone got there first. It seems like you are going after leads that a lot of people already know about. That puts you a step behind on average.
My plan is to go to all the departments in my university to look for positions. I am also looking at a campus canvasing job (you know the people who try to get people to sign up for Save the Children and so on. I like Save the Children, and childhood poverty is one of the biggest problems in the world right now, so I think I'll try to canvas for that.) I can also see if there are research positions open, but these are generally not advertised. I have to ask around.
Generate leads, follow them up, and try to get to an opening before anyone else does. We ALL have to hustle in this economy.
Or if you have the guts and it fits with your long term plans, start your own thing.
I am looking into setting up a high value tutoring service: Full tutoring for High School students preparing for college engineering or science programs, or undergraduates struggling in such programs...math, physics, chemistry, computer science, statistics, electrical engineering, even some material science/chemical engineering, bioinfomatics, and biochemistry. I would charge steep rates ($50/$60 hour). Online tutoring possible, group discounts possible. I don't think there are many people who can tutor people to write a stochastic differential equation solver in C/C++ for applications in chemistry and physics, program a BLAST like tool for sequence analysis in Perl, or to program the time evolution of a quantum mechanical system in Fortran/Octave/MATLAB/Mathematica (yes. Any of them. MATLAB and Octave are essentially the same).
So the supply is low. I need to find out where the demand is.