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May 17 was a big day for Jefferson Kuesar. After five years of engineering studies, he received his undergraduate degree from Purdue University in Indiana.

Now Jefferson, 23, like many Indonesians with US degrees, is looking for a job in the United States.

“I have applied to about 25 to 30 companies,” he said. “So far, I haven’t had a single interview.”

He has explored a variety of avenues for job leads, including the university’s career center and online job-search Web sites.

“Especially in my field [industrial engineering], there are not that many job postings,” he said.

The tight job market is by no means restricted to the US economy nor to international students. A Bloomberg report dated May 4 stated that the US economy had lost more than 5.1 million jobs since December 2007 and that the unemployment rate was expected to reach 8.9 percent by the end of May, the country’s worst jobless level in 25 years.

Fresh graduates not only face competition from each other, according to John Challenger, chief executive of global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, but from young workers with two or three years experience and retirees and former stay-at-home moms seeking to re-enter the job market.

These are sobering statistics for any job seeker, but international students face the added difficulties of visa eligibility and sponsorship policies.

Joceline Tahardi graduated in May from the Kogod School of Business at American University in Washington, DC. She interned at Ernst & Young and UBS while on summer breaks in Indonesia, where her family lives in South Jakarta, and had dreamed of working on Wall Street.

But the collapse of investment bank behemoths Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the drastic downsizing of similar companies has caused her to reassess her options, and she has applied for more than 20 accounting and finance positions with smaller companies.

Time is not on her side, however.

She explained that in order for international students to stay in the United States after graduation, they have to obtain within a 60-day grace period an Optional Practical Training visa, which allows them to work for one year after the completion of their studies. “After my OPT commences in July, I have 90 days’ grace period to stay in the country without a job,” Tahardi said.

“If I can’t find anything, then I will be kicked out.”

She said most companies want to hire staff for more than just one year, which requires the employer to sponsor an H-1B visa, allowing them to temporarily employ foreign workers.

Tahardi has had three job interviews, including a phone interview with the nonprofit Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. The first questions she was asked in that interview were, “What is your nationality?” and “Do you need sponsorship?”

On hearing her responses, she said, the interview was cut short with the interviewer saying she would have to check with the human resources department. The company never called back and when Tahardi sent a follow-up e-mail, she was informed, “Unfortunately, we cannot proceed with your application.”

“There are a lot of opportunities here,” she said. “But they’re only hiring American citizens.”

Melisa Kristianto, 21, is a graduating student from Boston University in Massachusetts. She said that finding a job is especially tough for international students because the US government has encouraged businesses to provide jobs for Americans citizens first.

“The job postings in my school career center are mostly for those who are American citizens,” she said. “Nowadays, there are only a few jobs available for international students.”

Christine Collins, associate director of Purdue University’s Office of International Students and Scholars, verified in an e-mail interview that this was true.

“There are more US citizens available for work,” she wrote, “therefore employers do not need to hire non-citizens. All things being equal, the employer must hire a citizen before they hire a non-citizen.”

Collins also said that some of the US government’s stimulus money stipulated that American citizens had to be prioritized for jobs.

Which leaves Indonesia’s recent US graduates having to apply creative solutions to the problem of how best to stay in the United States.

Kristianto is considering internships and has applied for a number of them. Thus far she has received one offer, which she turned down. “It was with a small consulting company and was a home office,” she said, adding that the unpaid internship would have required her to work about 20 hours per week.

“I just didn’t think it would be constructive to me, so I rejected it,” said the Jakarta native.

Tahardi is no longer leaning toward a Wall Street position after a field trip in her last semester as an undergraduate student, in which executives were gloomy about immediate prospects.

“[The executives] said that most of the companies were not hiring — if not firing people,” she said. “The attitude was ‘It’s like you can go bankrupt anytime.’ You can lose your job as soon as tomorrow. That’s how volatile the nature of the job [sector] is.”

But she remained optimistic that she would find a job in the United States within her 90-day time limit.

“I think I can still explore more,” she said. “There are many good companies out there that I’ve never even heard of, and the career center in my school is very helpful. For now, I still have hope.

“Ask me again in three months’ time, maybe then I will be frustrated.”

And Purdue engineering graduate Kuesar said he was considering further study earlier than he had originally planned.

“I’ve always planned on doing an MBA degree,” he said. “But I wanted to do it after two or three years’ work experience — that way I could go to a good school. But since it’s difficult to get a job, I have to keep my option open to do an MBA [from] this coming January.”

He’s reluctant to return to Jakarta without competitive work experience in the United States.

“The perception is that when you work in the United States, you learn the best way of doing a job,” he said. “The working system is developed better, so you can really learn. In Indonesia, which is still a developing country, the system is not as well-structured.

“In the long run, I want to build a career in Indonesia,” he said. “I want to apply knowledge gained from both a US education and a US work experience.”

For the Lucky Ones, Timing Was Everything

Gary Khoeng

After graduating from the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University in Washington, DC in 2007, Gary Khoeng began working as an analyst for Citigroup in New York. He said he had wanted to gain work experience abroad before eventually returning to work in Jakarta.

The 25-year-old said he was fortunate to have graduated at a time when the job market was flourishing, as the class of 2009 had little hope of getting US jobs in the current financial climate.

“Due to banks receiving Troubled Asset Relief Program funds from the government, US banks are now limited and to some extent prohibited from sponsoring work visas for foreigners,” he said.

He said such difficulties were not limited to the financial industry alone. “I have heard countless personal accounts where fresh graduates were no longer able to apply for a job,” he said, “because the job description stated that employers were not sponsoring work visas anymore.

“Overall, however, the job market has been tough this past couple of years and it really doesn’t make much difference whether you graduated in ’07, ’08 or ’09.

“Because if you get fired, you will have a very hard time finding another job.”

Tantra Budiman

Another one of the lucky few to get a job in a time of crisis is Tantra Budiman, who graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in New England, Massachusetts, in May 2008.

During that year, he said, international students in the United States were already feeling the effects of the economic crisis, as evidenced by many companies declaring bankruptcy or having to downsize.

He started applying for jobs in 2007 and utilized several methods to access companies, including the Internet, his university career center and his network of friends.

“I applied for roughly 600 to 800 positions,” he said. “Out of those hundreds of jobs, I only got a total of five interviews.”

He was rejected at his first four interviews, but was then hired by a small engineering company with 150 staff members.

After talking to the company’s human resources manager, Tantra found that his acceptance by the company was a matter of fortunate coincidence. The HR manager told him that the main reason she selected him was because he was from Indonesia, and she had just been reading Pramoedya Aanan Toer’s “Buru Quartet.”