In the spring of my 3L year, I had not yet secured a legal job, my lease was about to expire, my graduate assistantship was ending, and my boyfriend made it clear he was sticking around just long enough to make sure I would be OK before we ended things.

I viewed getting a job as the sole factor that would dictate where I lived and what came next. My backup plan, if I could not secure employment, consisted of convincing my older sister to let me live with her and her husband and babysit for my nephews in exchange for room, board, and meals … and the plan was not landing well with my sister.

My backup-backup plan of moving in with my parents – approximately nine years after moving out of their house and living on my own – was not landing well with me. From the time that I was an eighth-grade math teacher with Teach for America, where part of our “benefits” package included eligibility for SNAP, I also felt driven to secure a living wage that could address my student loans, and work somewhere I felt personally meaningful.

Anxious and Defeated

I have always been someone with backup plans for my backup plans, so as I tracked my 70-plus job applications on an Excel spreadsheet, I was also preparing for the realistic possibility that I could be settling in for an unknown duration of unemployment.

I felt anxious and defeated. How could I – a law school graduate with a master’s in education looking to work at a nonprofit – be facing so much struggle to get an entry-level job?

To be fair, I had turned down two job prospects, including one that required a move to a town with a population of 300 and one working for an insurance company, and stopped one nonprofit interview after learning I could expect to make about the same as my Teach-for-America salary.

I worried that my expectations of a full-time job with a living wage, in a sector I was excited to work in, and in a somewhat desirable-to-me location were somehow still too high, and my decision to continue my job search instead of accepting one of my two offers was too hasty.

You Are Not Alone in Struggling

It can be easy to create the narrative that we are alone in our struggles. I do not recall my graduating class facing the same struggle to find employment, although undoubtedly some were. However, I can vividly recall when a former classmate, who easily secured a job out of law school, shared her struggle to get her second job, telling me, “I’ve never been turned down like this before.”

Were we not all tracking seventy-plus job applications on an Excel spreadsheet around graduation?

It can also be easy to create the narrative that our situation is due to a lack of effort or personal failings. I struggled with the self-defeating thoughts that if I had networked better, gotten better grades, or applied to jobs earlier I would be in a better situation.

While parts of that may be true, I also know that my effort was consistently high and a reflection of the best I was capable of producing at that time – of course, including some minor exceptions, specifically my lackluster performance in property and trust and estates. To this day I take extreme pride in how I made my way through law school with four jobs, including a graduate assistantship that paid for two of my three years, adjusted in light of my failure to land a job, and built a fulfilling career path.

I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to name this work ethic, hustle, and backup plan building, but it is now obvious it was a form of job search resilience.

Road Map for Resilience

While I may have lacked the vocabulary to name my experience at the time, I did not lack the skills to maintain resilience in my job search.

I adopted a mindset of (1) stick-with-it-ness, (2) rejection as redirection, and (3) focused on accomplishing my long-term goal of satisfying work at the expense of an immediate monetary reward. Regardless of your progress in your job search journey so far, I find these three steps to be useful to set one’s mindset and expectations.

Stick-with-it-ness

While I maintain the opinion that applying to 70 jobs out of law school is ridiculous, I am also of the opinion that you gotta do, what you gotta do.

Stick-with-it-ness is necessary in the job search. Beyond applying online to jobs and following up with emails to reassure interviewers I was still engaged, I was also looking for personal connections to the hiring committees on LinkedIn, revising my cover letter for each position, reaching out to alumni for informational interviews, staying in touch with the career center, getting my resume critiqued, and getting secondary reviews of my cover letters.

Unfortunately, sometimes this is not enough. I remember after sharing my difficulties getting a job with my parents, my dad suggested I walk into a law firm and give them my resume. He was not open to the feedback that this would not be very welcome or a good use of my time.

He then reviewed my resume and found I had misspelled “February” – a spelling that still often escapes me – and insisted that this one misspelling, which had evaded me and my numerous reviewers up to that point, was the sole reason I could not land a job. I fixed that misspelling, and yet the job offers still did not come rolling in.

I would like to say that I didn’t let these setbacks get me down, or that others’ comments on the reasons for my lack of success did not bother me, but that would be dishonest. Of course, it bothered me that I was unable to land a job. Of course, not knowing where I should live was stressful. Of course, the simultaneous end of a caring romantic relationship added fuel to the fire.

And yet, I kept showing up. I was denied, or my application completely ignored, from an astounding number of jobs. And yet, I kept applying and leveraging my network.

Rejection as Redirection

Beyond my commitment to applying to jobs, I also realistically evaluated my circumstances, and what that meant about revising my goals.

The University of Wisconsin System was seeking a law intern, and while I had spectacularly failed my interview for the same position the year before, the job required me to maintain my student status, and it paid $14/hour, I hoped that this role may help me get my foot in the door with legal jobs, and specifically roles in legal education administration.

A colleague in my graduate assistantship spoke highly of her time in the role, and the way she was able to leverage the work into an education law position while also pursuing a Ph.D. in education. Pursuing a Ph.D. in education after law school would be a tough sell for many, but it was a natural fit for my skillset as a former teacher with a master’s in education. Plus, I now had a co-worker who could mentor me in how to apply and succeed in a Ph.D. program.

Failing to secure a job after my extensive search meant that staying in school a little while longer and opening a new career path via a J.D./Ph.D. combination felt like the appropriate redirection I needed.

Of course, I was concerned that a Ph.D. would just lead me into more debt while delaying my job search, but since I had few job options, this seemed like a good opportunity if I could get the pieces to fall into place.

Satisfying Work at the Expense of an Immediate Monetary Reward

With hard work and a little luck, I was able to land the U.W. System legal intern position, and was accepted into UW-Madison’s Educational Leadership Ph.D. program.

While the legal internship failed my original goal of earning a living wage in the legal profession, I felt I had internal clarity that this position was more aligned with my long-term goals than the two jobs I had turned down previously. Plus, it had the added perk of allowing me to remain in Madison, somewhere I felt certain I wanted to continue living.

While I believe that my resilience allows me to make the best of any situation, this short-term monetary trade-off for the long-term effect of getting my foot in the door of higher education administration has paid dividends in launching my legal career, which eventually led to my current position as the Chief Legal Officer for Regis University.

It’s About Mindset

The job search is tough, so adjusting your mindset is necessary to get through it. Investing in and intentionally building your resilience through actions like sticking with the job search process, evaluating and reassessing in light of failures, and valuing long-term goals over short-term monetary rewards can give you the mindset boost you need to make it through.

This article was originally published on the State Bar of Wisconsin’s Law Student Blog, Just the Facts. The State Bar offers a variety of resources to help law students connect with the legal profession, including finding mentors and clerkships. Find out more on Wisbar.org.