Job Hunt - II

I hope this information will be useful to someone else who follows this path some day...

When hunting for a teaching gig, it's useful to establish a limit for yourself on how far/long you're willing to commute and then look for jobs only within that area. I've set an upper limit of 1 hour for a 1-way commute. I hope like hell I don't have to commute 2 hours per day, but if that's what it takes initially, so be it.

Over the last two months I've applied to somewhere between 2 and 3 dozen positions for physics teachers at high schools within my search radius. I have received exactly zero return calls. I don't think my return on investment in job application was this low even when I was a fresh-out. Is it time to panic yet?

Maybe not. I talked to a local HS teacher who went through the same program I'm starting in June. He said that he went through exactly the same cycle I'm in now, and it wasn't until he had his certificate at the end of the program (which is also the end of the summer!) that he got calls back from the schools to which he had applied. He said, "you just have to keep applying and have faith that as soon as you have your certification, the floodgates will open and you'll be a hot commodity."

Comforting words in the context of my job hunt results, but I'm not exactly a "faith" kind of guy when it comes to employment. I've never left a job without already having a another one. From here, this feels like the most ridiculously risky thing I've ever done.