Amy Guest wakes up about 9:30 a.m. She doesn’t rush. Her laundry will be waiting, as will her Netflix queue. After 17 years of schooling, she finally has time to enjoy something like movies.

“Netflix has become an addiction for me,” says Guest, of New Haven. “I never really had time to relax, and now that I have all this time to myself, I found Netflix.”

In the afternoon, she will head to work, where she is a manager at a Starbucks on Lima Road.

In the between hours, she will look for a graduate school, study for the GREs, search for an apartment so she can move out of her parents’ home and figure out how she can save the world.

Guest graduated from the University of Saint Francis in May, armed with bachelor’s degrees in history and political science. She did not have a job waiting for her. She didn’t expect to. She knows she’s not done with schooling, but she’s not sure which route will come next.

She’s one of countless liberal arts grads who are finding themselves in a job market that isn’t exactly friendly to those with liberal arts degrees. It’s in contrast to a study by ManpowerGroup, a Milwaukee-based job-placement organization, which found that a third of world employers can’t find qualified talent and that Rutgers University found more than 30 percent of recent college grads were unable to find a job within half a year of leaving school.

It might seem to be a discrepancy – if employers need employees, shouldn’t graduates find jobs? – but the problem is the specialty. The economy needs scientists and engineers, a rep from ManpowerGroup told Time magazine last month, and folks with liberal arts backgrounds are in abundance.

One of the biggest reasons more people aren’t majoring in those fields with abundant jobs is that the math and sciences are hard.

Sandy Shearer, guidance coordinator at South Side High School, says the pure difficulty of the subject matter scares some students away from these topics of study, even if they do represent the fields that are currently hiring. As such, the simple quest for a better grade-point average or an improved class rank can keep these more difficult classes off students’ schedules.

“I think we all tend to overlook the fact that family influence has a huge role to play in students’ decision-making,” she says. “When you talk with parents, they want the safe choices for their children. They want to minimize the risk-taking, and they want them to have the highest grades possible, and the difficulty level of the higher-level math and science courses are a huge factor.”

If students do end up taking these classes, they need support and encouragement – especially from their families.

“Parents will say, ‘I don’t want them to get a low grade because it hurts their GPA.’ Yes, GPA and class rank matters,” Shearer says, “but foundation matters, too, and that’s a fine line to walk sometimes.”

When Krista Fultz started as a freshman at Saint Francis, she studied to be a physician’s assistant. Her mother is in medicine, her father is an engineer, and the medical path made sense for her.

The problem? It didn’t evoke any passion. She liked it OK, but there was a fundamental issue.

“It kind of terrified me to think this is the only thing I could do for the rest of my life,” says Fultz, 22, of Fort Wayne.

Her current plan is to study overseas this fall to receive her master’s from Kingston University, which is based in London. Fultz is currently saving up money from her three jobs – nanny, Dupont Hospital valet and Saint Francis planetarium employee – and living at home. Aside from the money she can save up this summer, the rest will come from loans.

“I kind of have to sell a leg to be able to go,” she says.

Shearer has been a guidance counselor for 26 years, and she says today’s student is different in some ways from those she helped two decades ago. Today, there is an emphasis on being competitive in the job market, and that pressure didn’t exist 20 years ago.

“I see more and more students who are terrified of the loans that they think they will have to assume to make it through four or more years of college, and that has a huge impact on some of their choices as well,” Shearer says. So more students are choosing fields in which they feel they will succeed.

“The cost of college education is changing that whole formula,” she says.

For grads like Fultz and Guest, it’s not “I can’t monetarily afford to fail,” but “I want to save the world!” When Fultz is studying in London, she will be earning her master’s in human rights and genocide studies. Her dream job would be a position with the United Nations on the International Court, which looks to end human rights violations around the world.

Guest, meanwhile, has similar interests. She refers to herself as a peace-loving hippie on more than one occasion. She wants to see world peace, but not in the way Miss America generically talks about it. She’d like to have an active role in ending, for example, the genocide going on in Darfur.

“Seeing all the human rights infractions all over the world today, it astonishes me,” Guest says. “I want to know why, not as the United States but as humans, why we’re not doing more to stop it.”

And Guest just didn’t think she could achieve that with a degree in chemical engineering.

jyouhana@jg.net