Help, please!
I graduated college in May, and spent the summer working at an internship and taking classes at Georgetown University. Part of the program at GU included having a mentor. While my mentor was overall pretty useless, she did put me in contact with someone who works at a company for which I want to work pretty badly. Through a combination of her taking way too long to give the guy my resume and information, and my misunderstanding the process, I was not able to interview at the company before my internship ended and I ran out of money. I talked to the contact once before my internship ended, and he kind of explained the company ethos and told me he’d keep my resume and give it to the relevant person when a job came open.

So…my internship ended and I started getting anxious for a job. I sent out dozens of resumes, and heard nothing. Finally, I got a call for a job that is not a field I’m particularly interested in. I interviewed and got the job, and I’ve now worked there for a week.

I bet you can see where this is going. Yesterday I got an email from the dream job company, saying that they had two positions open and would I like to interview for one? I wrote back and was able to schedule an interview for a time that wouldn’t require me to lie to my current job, or miss any time.

So now, the conflict. First, I’m a concerned that the dream job will really look negatively at my changing jobs after only two weeks. I need to find a way to reassure them that I’ve never done this before (I haven’t) and if I get this job, I plan on staying there. When I talked to the contact at the job, he said they understood that it was somewhat of a “starter job” and that they have a pretty high turnover as people use their experience and contacts to find another job.

The other problem is how on earth do I quit the job I have now? I know there’s no way to come out of this looking pretty, but I’d like to minimize the damage as much as I can, considering that I really like the people with whom I work. If I’m offered this job, I’ll take it. The job I’m in right now is not what I want to do, at this point I’m rewriting press releases for their website, which is incredibly dull and tedious. Truth be told, I took the job knowing I’d be looking for something else, but I didn’t expect something else to contact me a week later.

This is on top of that fact that I don’t actually know how to quit a real job. I’ve quit retail jobs before, but that usually just consisted of telling my manager that I was giving my notice. I’ve never written a letter of resignation or anything.

I’ve talked to a couple people, and they’ve told me to use varying levels of honesty, from telling the interviewer that I ran out of money and had to take the first thing that came along, even though this job I’m interviewing for is my dream job to simply telling him that I’m currently working in a field that I don’t find challenging and would like to work in the field his publication covers. Do you guys have any other advice? Have any of you been in this situation before?

Thanks so much for any advice you can give me.

Crossposted to my personal LJ and a couple of journalism comms