Online jobs for a college student

December 19, 2008 11:08 AM

What kind of jobs can a college student do online?

A friend of mine recently found out the company she was going to be working at over winter break isn't going to be able to hire her back, so I'm trying to help her find a job. I think some sort of online job would be ideal, since she doesn't have a car and isn't too close to any retail stores.

Any suggestions on what she might do? I suggested maybe doing some sort of freelance blog writing (she's a pretty good writer), but she wasn't too fond of that idea. She found a bunch of sites online for "data entry" jobs, but they all seem very scam-y, and I doubt it would be possible to make decent money that way.

So, any suggestions on other things she might do? Thanks!

posted by deansfurniture5 to computers & internet (8 answers total)

I do a bit of freelancing by culling the writing gigs on craigslist. Some are scam-ey, but a lot of them are legitimate. It takes a lot of weeding though; I have mine set up on an RSS reader so I can scroll through quickly and separate the wheat from the chaff. It would be nearly impossible to do it 40 hours a week though.
posted by craven_morhead at 11:37 AM on December 19, 2008

I know some people are able to do medical transcription from home. I don't know if there is any formal medical education involved though.
posted by Brettus at 11:41 AM on December 19, 2008

"Data entry" is often code for "comment spam".
posted by onshi at 11:56 AM on December 19, 2008 [1 favorite]

If it were possible to work online for limited amounts of time and earn any real amount of money, competition for those jobs would be insane. She might be able to pick up a little money (see craven's post), but I have a feeling that she would spend more time learning to find legitimate jobs than she would working.

Perhaps the most well recognized online work organizer, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, starts out with pay in the single cent range for a task, and by the time she earned higher paying qualifications, she'd be back in school.
posted by Benjy at 1:38 PM on December 19, 2008

online poker.


you're probably a few years late actually, but it's not dead yet.
posted by cmyr at 4:11 PM on December 19, 2008

I've set some people up with Mechanical Turk (a retired lady, a bedridden fellow, an unemployed guy), and as Benjy says, it's easy but tough to make much. Five or six hundred dollars a month is the best any of them did, and yeah the first few weeks were always bad because you need to build up qualifications first. It also fluctuates wildly, with some days full of paying, doable stuff and others full of three cent crap.

It's an interesting system, business-flow-wise, but way too much noise to signal.
posted by rokusan at 4:39 PM on December 19, 2008

I work for a Fortune 1000 company that makes software you've probably heard of. We employ over 100 people doing sales and tech support from home. They send you to training, give you a computer and a phone, and send you back home to take calls. Communication with your team is done by instant message, and meetings are done in Adobe Connect. You even get reimbursed for your phone and internet bills.

Our hiring is cyclical and we won't have external positions open until next fall, but there are other companies like us. Point being, don't assume that freelance or stuff on Craigslist are your friend's only options for working from home. Look at conventional employers, too.
posted by [user was fined for this post] at 7:22 PM on December 19, 2008 [1 favorite]

ChaCha People send random questions via SMS to your web browser and you get 10 cents for answering each question.
posted by saxamo at 7:33 PM on December 19, 2008