They have worked four years, often longer, juggling jobs and classes, cramming for finals, studying abroad working internships — all with the hope of finding a career foothold despite the worst job market since the Great Depression.

More than 11,000 members of the Class of 2010 from Oregon’s seven public universities capped their hard work with commencement ceremonies this week and last.

Now, they move on either to graduate school or to join more than 212,000 other Oregonians looking for work, including untold thousands of last year’s graduates still searching for jobs.

Many from the Class of 2009 are living with their parents and working part-time retail jobs they could have landed without a degree. Others are taking more college classes to put off paying back student loans, which average more than $20,000. Many say they’ve lost self-confidence. Still, none of the 18 students from the Classes of 2009 and 2010 interviewed by The Oregonian expressed regret about going to college.

Job prospects for the Class of 2010, which number about 18,000 students in Oregon when you include those who graduated last fall and winter, are slightly brighter because of a recent increase in employers hiring college graduates, said Edwin W. Koc, research director for the

What’s more, recruiters will focus on the Class of 2010, he said.

“If you come out of the Class of 2009, you are going to be treated as someone who has been in the job market for a year,” he said. Employers want to see some experience, he said.

After a yearlong search, Jackie Mroz, 22, of Oregon City, is about to get some experience, but at a cost.

She put everything she had into her studies at the

, graduating in 2009 with degrees in international studies and sociology and a double minor in nonprofit administration and African studies. She studied abroad in Senegal, took challenging courses, earned a 3.8 grade point average and raced through college in three years.

“It has gotten me pretty much nowhere,” she said.

When she graduated, Mroz figured she would quickly land a job with an international nonprofit. After two months, she took on a catering job as she broadened her search. Still living with her parents in Oregon City, she sent out more than 70 carefully prepared job applications and resumes.

“I never got a single interview, except for the catering company,” she said.

By March, she had added three more catering jobs.

“I have gone through weeks when I completely doubted myself,” she said. “What am I doing wrong? It is a question I ask everyday. ....After a year of getting basically no response, you start giving up.”

Mroz recently drove cross-country for a 3-month unpaid internship that she started last week with a nonprofit agency in Baltimore. The agency helps refugee immigrants settle in the United States. After that internship ends, she will pay her way to Kenya for a community development internship through the San Francisco-based Foundation for Sustainable Development.

If those experiences don’t lead to jobs, Mroz said, she’ll consider graduate school.

Of course some graduates are landing jobs, particularly those with specific technical skills such as John Yeier, 24, who graduated from the Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls on Saturday. He’s the sole member of his class with a degree in embedded engineering , which integrates computer software and hardware in cell phones, cars and other machines. He will work on small plane navigation system software for Garmin AT in Salem.

OIT Class of 2009 graduates also have been unusually successful because they study for technical jobs such as nursing, medical imaging, mechanical engineering and dental hygiene. A survey of the class, with 58 percent responding, found that 71 percent have found jobs related to their degrees and another 21 percent are working.

A recent national survey of more than 13,000 graduates in the Class of 2010 shows that about one in four who applied for jobs will have one waiting for them after they graduate. That’s up from one in five students who landed jobs last year, but far below the one in two graduates who found work in 2007.

The

job bank lists 14,373 job openings, but they are most prevalent in low-paying occupations that don’t require college degrees such as retail sales, trucking and housekeeping.

Audra Armen-Van Horn, 23, Portland, worked for Victoria’s Secret while earning her psychology degree from the University of Oregon. Now, a year after graduating in 2009 and applying for more than 100 jobs, she’s still working part time for the store while hoping to get a job with the American Cancer Society.

“I have a bachelor’s degree, and I’m making $8.50 an hour,” she said. “It is pretty depressing. .¤.¤. But it is a job. I’m happy I have a job.”

Malcolm Staudinger, 22, a 2009 graduate in environmental science from

lives at home with his parents in Vancouver, Wash., and is now looking to Montana and Alaska for a job related to geographic information systems.

“I apply probably for half a dozen jobs a week and have gotten maybe three or four interviews in the past year,” he said. “It is tough because it makes you doubt yourself. You feel like you have these great skills and worked hard and you are constantly getting passed over again and again and again.”

This year the college majors delivering the best job prospects are accounting, business administration, computer science, engineering and mathematics, said Koc of the Association of Colleges and Employers. The major with the dimmest prospects -teaching. “This is the worst I’ve seen for education majors,” he said.

Mindy Lary, 27, Beaverton, can testify to that. She graduated in 2009 with a Master of Art in elementary school teaching from the

and has been substitute teaching since.

“I applied for 75 teaching jobs, anything within an hour’s drive of the Portland area, and I didn’t even get an interview,” she said.

Some recent graduates are trying to create their own jobs. Lisa Anderson, 23, a 2009 journalism graduate from the University of Oregon and receptionist for a Portland law firm, has joined five other journalism graduates in starting a men’s clothing magazine and website.

“We printed our first issue in March,” she said. “It is definitely a labor of love.”

Linda Williams Favero, assistant director of the

in Portland, said the job market for college graduates is improving. She helps students and recent graduates polish their job hunting in a 6-session, 3-week seminar. By the time participants finish her class, half have a job or prospects for one, she said.

One day last month, Favero advised nine recent graduates taking her seminar to treat their job search as though it were a full-time job. Tap social networks for job contacts, she advised, and organize information interviews with potential employers, prepare a 30-second elevator job pitch, polish your resume and keep positive.

Matt Petryni, 24, a 2009 UO graduate, said the seminar has helped him regain hope after a discouraging year of rejections from the world of urban planning where he hopes to work. He’s heartened by seeing other graduates land jobs, he said.

“So it is not impossible,” he said. “That is good to hear right now.”

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