Kristin Martin
By traveling the country one job at a time and having a different job each week, Daniel Seddiqui is “living the map.”
Seddiqui is a 26-year-old California native who graduated from the University of Southern California with an economics degree, but no life direction as far as a permanent career goes. Although he hasn’t found his niche in the career field yet, Seddiqui is determined to find it by traveling from state to state and getting a new job in each one over the course of 50 weeks.
“I’m not really doing this for myself, it’s kind of to help other college grads, high school grads, and even adults who are stuck in a rut and they don’t like their job,” he said. “Job hunting is, for me, probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life.”
So far, Seddiqui has worked in Utah, Colorado, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. He already has been a cartographer, rodeo announcer, corn husker, park ranger, real estate agent, worked at a Mormon church and more.
Seddiqui will be in Florida during Week 33 on his schedule, and said he might even stop in Pensacola on his way to Orlando, where he will be an amusement park supervisor.
Cartography, map making, is a career Seddiqui said he would consider taking up permanently. He said each day on the job was different, and he liked that.
“Since I used to stare at maps when I was a little kid all day long, I think (cartography) would be the most interesting so far,” he said.
Mike Zimney is a Geographic Information System analyst for Ulteig, an engineering company in Fargo, North Dakota, and worked closely with Seddiqui during Seddiqui’s time as a cartographer. Zimney said everyone was very fascinated by Seddiqui’s project and wanted to know more about him and why and how he is doing it.
“There is no way that I would be adventurous enough to do what he was doing. Daniel was only on his fourth week when he worked for us, so the only thing I would have changed was to have him here toward the end of his trip so I could have listened to all the different stories and his on-the-job experiences,” Zimney said. “It was a lot of fun hosting Daniel for a week.”
Seddiqui has even wrestled a steer during his job hunting — something he had never imagined himself doing.
“Thousands of people were watching me wrestle a steer, with grabbing the horns and tackling it down, and I had to lay in all this manure,” he said. “(The cowboys) just threw me out there thinking I knew what to do. They said, ‘Yeah, just jump on his neck and bring his neck back.’”
In each state, Seddiqui has experienced something new. Whether it be wrestling a steer or flying in a small airplane, he said all the first-time experiences have opened his eyes to the world and made him realize there is much to see and do.
Before beginning his gutsy adventure, Seddiqui studied economics in college because his father and brother are both businessmen. He said he followed the same route as they did, even though economics wasn’t his passion. Being an active person and a lover of the outdoors, he said a job in economics wasn’t active enough for him. Economics was also too solitary, Seddiqui said, and he prefers working in groups.
“I chose the wrong major from the beginning,” he said, explaining that his real desire was to be a screenwriter. “I did econ because I guess it was a backup plan.”
Having no connections or internships during his college years, Seddiqui said it was nearly impossible to pursue screenwriting. His parents had pulled him away from his dream of being a screenwriter, saying it wouldn’t get him anywhere and it wouldn’t be a suitable career for him. That led Seddiqui to undertake a more stable career path in economics. However, after graduating college, he failed upwards of 40 economics-related job interviews.
“Either they read through me that I wasn’t interested in the job or the competition was so tough,” he said. “I just never got my break.”
Seddiqui then started volunteering at different places. He sent about 18,000 e-mails to college coaches, and that led him to Chicago as a volunteer cross country coach for Northwestern University.
After Northwestern, he went back home to California and undertook accounting just to make some money. Seddiqui didn’t enjoy that.
So, he went to the University of Virginia to try coaching again. That led him to the University of Georgia where he was planning to be a track and field coach, but that didn’t work out. He then worked in marketing at Home Depot.
On spring break, he went to Florida. Seddiqui was talking to a man on the train, and that man offered Seddiqui a job.
“I get a job offer, and when I really seek them through interviews, I don’t get them,” Seddiqui said, recalling that moment, saying that was when he decided he should travel more to get jobs. “It kind of led me to the idea of having a different job in each state and kind of comparing the lifestyle.”
Seddiqui then began sending e-mails and making phone calls to set up jobs around the country. It took him eight months of working16 hours a day to set up the 50 jobs. He applied for jobs that were relevant to each state. For instance, Disney World came to his mind when he thought of Florida. Several job options, like that one, automatically popped into his head, but some he had to research to find.
Since Seddiqui failed 40 previous job interviews that were pertinent to his degree, one might wonder how he managed to set up 50 jobs all over the country.
“I think it’s because my project is really unique, and, once again, they’re only hiring me for a week,” he said. “They see the potential in this project to get publicity. The job that I worked for in Minnesota — they were covered on CNN with me, so they definitely took advantage.”
Seddiqui did say he has been rejected several times, and some people don’t see the potential in what he’s doing.
“I would say persistence is the key. If you get rejected, that doesn’t mean that someone else won’t take you,” he said.
A week might not seem like an adequate amount of time to become familiar with a particular career, but Seddiqui said it is. He is intensively trained during the first day on the job, and spends the rest of the week getting to know his employers and co-workers.
“I am fully aware of what it takes to be in that career and what it entails, because I am working the full shift. I am hanging out with the employees the whole day and after the work day. All we do is talk about their industry and their lifestyle and how they got involved in that career themselves,” Seddiqui said. “A week is definitely sufficient enough for me to understand what it’s like.”
Even though Seddiqui goes on a different road trip each week, he hasn’t stayed in a hotel yet. He said everyone has been really friendly, and several families have hosted him.
“I have not known one person before I left California,” he said. “Now I know thousands of people, and they’ve all been really courteous in helping me.”
Seddiqui said he would like to fly everyone he has met out for a reunion if he makes enough money from the book he is planning to write about his job-hunting adventure.
In his book, Seddiqui will portray what it’s like to work at the different jobs, how each became relevant to the state, what the cultures of the surrounding cities are like and what kind of lifestyles people in each area live.
According to Zimney, Seddiqui learned a notable thing about North Dakota.
“Daniel didn’t know a lot about North Dakota, but he did know that the eastern valley is very flat. It was funny on the first morning he was here, he asked if it was true that it is so flat here that you can see the curvature of the earth — you can’t,” Zimney said. “We took him up in a plane at the end of the week so that he could see a bit of the country side, some of our project locations and the lack of topography, and to show him that even in a plane you can’t see the curvature of the earth.”
To follow Seddiqui on his journey and see pictures and video from each of his stops, visit livingthemap.com.