Magnificent News: 21-year-old flies 600 miles a week to avoid paying NY metro rent

Monday, June 19, 2023

CNBC Make It Work helps you get ahead in your career.
By Ashton Jackson

21-year-old flies 600 miles a week to avoid paying NY metro rent

Sophia Celentano's work commute is nothing short of complex.

Her 3:30 a.m. alarm reminds her that she has less than an hour to start driving to Charleston International Airport in South Carolina — otherwise, she'll miss her flight to her once-a-week office job.

Since early June, she has commuted by plane to her summer internship at Ogilvy Health in Parsippany, New Jersey, from her parent's house in Charleston. Celentano didn't want to fight for affordable housing in and around New York City. And her job only requires her to be in the office once, sometimes twice, per week.

For Celentano, commuting four-plus hours by plane every week for the summer was a much easier pill to swallow than paying New York City metro rent for three months on an intern's salary.

"I didn't think twice about it," Celentano, a rising senior at the University of Virginia, tells CNBC Make It.

The average apartment rent in Parsippany is about $1,730 per month for a studio, and closer to $3,500 in New York, according to data from Apartments.com and Renthop. That doesn't include utilities, groceries, gas or other costs she would need to cover.

All in all, Celentano estimates she would spend a minimum of $4,250 to live and work near Ogilvy Health's office between June and August – if she were lucky enough to find an apartment for less than $1,000 per month – and a maximum of $7,000.

In contrast, she says her super-commute only costs her about $225 per week, allowing her to save at least an estimated $2,000 this summer.

3 resume mistakes that could land your application in an A.I. hiring filter 'black hole'

Nowadays, the first person to look at a job candidate's application isn't a person at all.

Three out of every four resumes aren't seen by human eyes, and 83% of all employers, including 99% of Fortune 500 companies, use automation to filter job applicants, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Algorithms that create ease for employers can have a downside for applicants. Some experts refer to the situation as a "resume black hole," a void where certain CVs are automatically filtered out before they make it to a real person's desk.

Here are the three common mistakes experts say job seekers are making that hide them in the artificial intelligence land of lost resumes.

1. Getting too creative. Experimenting with your resume design could work for a human application reader, but for AI, nonstandard formats are just confusing. Job seekers should avoid using pictures, hyperlinks and custom fonts, and instead opt for a clear, consistent format.

2. Thinking AI are people too. AI does not always understand subtext in the way that a real person might. To optimize your chances of beating the bot, choose the most important listed job requirements and use those exact terms in your own resume.

3. Forgetting about humans. AI readers may increasingly become the first to see your resume, but they are not the most important. Job seekers would be wise to construct resumes to satisfy first a machine and then a hiring manager.

31-year-old's dog-grooming business brings in $1.3 million a year

Gabriel Feitosa, 31, has a passion for turning animals into art. His dog grooming salon in San Diego brought in $1.3 million in revenue last year.

Mark Cuban: What my younger self got right—and why so many people still get it wrong

If you want to start a new side hustle or business, you'll probably need some money to get it off the ground. But don't seek out an investor, says billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban.

Instead, make sure your idea can be profitable from Day One, and use the proceeds to grow your venture, Cuban, 64, told the "Bio Eats World″ life science podcast last week. "I was always geared towards profitability, not geared towards just getting my next [fund]raise,"

For many entrepreneurs, raising money can feel like a requirement. Sixty percent of Americans say they've come up with a great idea for a business — but 92% of them haven't followed through, mostly due to a lack of funding, a 2021 Zapier report found.

When Cuban has raised money, it was out of "necessity," he said, adding, "I've always tried to teach entrepreneurs that raising money or borrowing money is not an accomplishment. It's an obligation."

Cuban, an investor on ABC's "Shark Tank," launched his first tech company, a computer systems startup called MicroSolutions, using his own money. In 1990 at age 32, he sold the business for $6 million.