My First Professional Offseason: Finding a Job

My name is AJ Pettersen. I will be blogging for twinsdaily.com throughout the summer. I grew up in Minnetonka, MN, have been a Twins fan my entire life and am honored to be a part of this organization. That being said, I hope my insight into the life of minor league baseball is both interesting and engaging.

While the lives of minor leaguers may be significantly different from others, after the season ends we look for jobs just like anyone else. The only difference is our availability. Finding a job that pays decently, has flexible hours and doesn’t require your presence 6 months out of the year is nearly impossible. Many players have to get creative when they search for offseason employment.

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My Job Search

When I returned home from instructional league in mid-October, I knew I would be moving half of my belongings to Emily’s (my fiancée) place in Rochester and half of them at my parents place in Minnetonka. Emily got a job out of college in Rochester and we decided it would be best if I lived there while she worked and we would return to the cities whenever she had 3 or 4 days off from work in a row.

This meant my job had to be even more flexible than I had originally thought. I brainstormed ideas and couldn’t come up with much beyond working online.

MTurk

The first site I stumbled upon was Amazon Mechanical Turk. This is a site where workers complete “hits” and get paid for their work. I researched the best strategies for making money on the site and quickly found myself completing hits, such as organizing kitchen photos into categories like “stainless steel” and “open concept.” I timed myself and found I was making about…$3.50 an hour. I thought, “I either need to get a lot of quicker with my categorizing or watch HGTV to brush up keywords.” Neither of those thoughts made a difference, so I tried something new. I began filling out surveys and writing essays. My hourly wage was rising to about $7 or $8 an hour, but it was becoming more difficult to find the work I wanted to do. There was one employer consistently giving out the best rates to write essays. I searched his name in google and came up with his email, leading to my first real freelance writing client.

Freelance Writing

I began writing essays and was making upwards of $20-$30 an hour, with a steady stream of work coming in each day. This nature of these essays was more busy work than I wanted, so I contacted other online writers to see if they had any work for me. One woman responded and wanted me to apply for a weekly blog post on moneyning.com. The host of the site liked my writing and I have been writing for him for the past 3 months.

From $3.50 to around $30 an hour I make now, my search for employment has been anything but normal. Freelance writing has been a blessing for the flexibility it allows me.