If this is a city of aspiration, Queens College is a focal point of the American dream.

Forty-four percent of the school's 12,000 undergraduates are first-generation college students, and the same percentage were born outside the United States. Inside the Student Union, 162 flags from around the world hang in dense and colorful rows from the ceiling.

On Thursday, another round of graduates officially rolled out of Queens College into the job market, ready, like most newly minted seniors, to conquer the world.

But the reception has been less than hospitable. The increasingly unfriendly job market has forced many recent graduates to put their ambition on hold; even the most focused and energetic are struggling mightily. Graduate schools have swelled like refugee camps. Jobs in social services and sales have started to look appealing, even to the unsociable and unsalesmanlike.

According to the New York City comptroller, the city has lost 236,200 jobs since December 2000, two-thirds of those since Sept. 11, 2001. The effects of the terrorist attacks, combined with sharp downturns in the financial services, telecommunications and media industries - all significant engines of the city's economy - have made New York one of the hardest places in the country to find a job right now. In April, the city's unemployment rate was 8.3 percent, significantly above the state rate of 6.1 percent, and the national average of 6.0 percent.

Young job seekers have been especially hard hit. "People 25 to 45 have lower unemployment rates than people under 25," said James P. Brown, who analyzes the city's economy for the state's Department of Labor. "If you are looking to break into a market, it is much tougher in a downturn. Employers are less flexible because they can get people with great credentials more easily in a downturn."

At Queens College, the Office of Career Development brims with good intentions: six bins of graduate school bulletins, 19 binders of job listings, listings of more than 400 internships and a thick stack of phone books.

To Tesfaye Asfaw, director of the school's Office of Career Development and Internships, all that paper now seems obsolete. Scouring online job listings and help-wanted ads just doesn't cut it anymore, he said.

"The notion of a liberal arts education is being challenged right now,'' Mr. Asfaw added. "Fewer and fewer students are finding employment right after graduation.''

In 1998, an estimated 54 percent of graduating seniors at Queens College reported that they had secured employment at the time of graduation, while in 2002, only about 44 percent did. A year to 18 months after graduation, about 87 percent of students who graduated between September 1996 and June 1997 had jobs, versus 83 percent of students who graduated four years later, according to surveys by the college. Median salaries fell to $32,500 from $34,000.

As these portraits of three 2002 graduates of Queens College show, people are still finding jobs; it just takes longer and requires more compromises. But many hard-working new graduates, still damp with optimism, energy and a sense of entitlement, don't want to compromise, and their lackluster reception from the world has called into question some of their deepest assumptions about themselves and their world.

Jobless or not, the newest generation of workers still seem to count themselves eligible for the American Dream. And for many graduates who entered college when the Nasdaq was barreling toward 5,000, the gap between what they thought America was and what it has turned out to be has been exceedingly painful. The American Dream, in which hard work pays off and success grows out of self-sufficiency, can be punishing as well as liberating.

A Dream Job, Just Out of Reach

On a clear day in Rego Park, the Manhattan skyline is etched like an icon above Queens Boulevard. Out here, where Yana Khaimova lives, you can get a haircut for $5 and a shave for $6. Boxy brick apartment buildings give way, on her block, to rows of stone and brick single-family homes that look as if they were transplanted from a small village in Europe.

Ms. Khaimova, a slight 22-year-old with brown curls, graduated last December with a bachelor of arts in psychology and a 3.6 grade-point average. She held a part-time job throughout college and did an internship in the human resources department of a hospital in Queens.

But these days she spends a lot of time at home. "Since I'm unemployed, I'm cooking all day long," she said. The house where she lives with her parents and 20-year-old brother is spotless.

Her family moved to Queens from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, when she was 10. America seemed like a great country. "I like that there is a lot of opportunity, workwise," she said. "You could be anyone you want to be here. There are no restrictions."

She has modest dreams. Her father is a tailor at Bergdorf Goodman, her mother manages a dry cleaners in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and her brother is studying to be a barber. Ms. Khaimova wants to be a human resources manager.

"I like to work in a business atmosphere," she said. "I like to dress up. I like to do paperwork. I like the neat atmosphere. That's why I like human resources. You come 9 to 5. You have your own office, your own desk. You have your own little world."

On the door to her bedroom, she has hung a cartoon drawing of herself as a businesswoman, complete with cellphone, briefcase and satisfied smirk. A stuffed bulldog from an old boyfriend keeps watch over job search central, an immaculate fake wood desk with a computer in the corner.

Before graduating, Ms. Khaimova thought finding a job would be easy. "I am a bright person, right out of college," she said. "You've got to be crazy not to hire me. Then I'm like, O.K., I was mistaken."

Since starting her job search last October, she estimates she has sent out 200 résumés - all to local companies and institutions - and gone on 20 interviews. At one interview, she felt that the questioner seemed to lose interest when she mentioned graduate school. Another interview, for her dream job as a benefits associate at a major New York hospital, was so short that she got the sense that it ended almost before it had begun. After that, she gave up the job search.

"Is it me or is it them?" she wondered aloud. "I don't know. I think I do everything the right way. Maybe there is no right way."

The right way, she has been told, is: Sit straight. Be very positive. Smile often. In a conversation over tea, halvah, and dried fruit at the family's dining room table, Ms. Khaimova sat straight. She was very positive, and she smiled often.

Ms. Khaimova is a proud practitioner of small formalities: the handshake, the pouring of the tea, the thank you, and the thank you again.

She has been offered two telemarketing jobs and two retail jobs, which offered what seemed to her high-school-level wages, about $8 an hour. These offers have dismayed her, especially since she, and her parents, had envisioned college as a pathway to upward mobility.

"They want me to not be - how you call it? - a blue-worker, a blue-collar worker," Ms. Khaimova said. "They want me to, like, have a nice decent job, to be well respected, to have everything they didn't have."

A cloud of unpleasant possibilities has begun to condense around her. Maybe opportunity is like the weather, vast and changeable. Maybe deserving it doesn't matter. Maybe ambition can hurt you. Maybe etiquette is insufficient.

After six months of looking, Ms. Khaimova has decided to focus on pursuing a master's degree in industrial and organizational psychology; she begins classes at Brooklyn College in the fall. "I have so much to give," she said. "I want the world. I have so much energy. I want to release it."

A Field Suddenly Dries Up

Aarti Kashyap, a computer science major with no career, would have been an anachronism in 1999. Today she is a different kind of anachronism: a woman who wants to make her fortune from Web sites. That, after all, is what she learned how to do in school.

Her misery has company. One of her fellow computer science majors decided to go to medical school; another is studying to be a pharmacist.

Ms. Kashyap, 23, tutors math and computer science 20 hours a week at Queensborough Community College, the school she attended after moving to New York with her family from New Delhi in 1997, and from which she transferred to Queens College. Each day after work, she goes to the public library in Flushing and sequesters herself in the job-information center.

"The issue for me is not getting a job, but getting a suitable job," said Ms. Kashyap, a solid woman with a full face and serious dark eyes.

After graduating with a 3.1 grade-point average, she hoped that her future would begin with a computer programming job that paid at least $40,000 a year, money she would then pour into two start-up Web sites - one for dating, the other for medical information - that would make her an entrepreneurial fortune.

She believes that Monster.com, the large job-search Web site, will help. However, spending 14 hours a week, every week since November, on that and a few other Web sites, brought her exactly one interview. Most jobs she finds online strike her as irrelevant: Either she is underqualified, or they do not really require computer expertise, or the company's e-mail box is so overstuffed that her résumé bumps back.

Although her parents and most of her friends advise her to take whatever job she can land, Ms. Kashyap doesn't want to get started on the wrong track. "Say I work as a secretary for two years, I can't apply for programming jobs because I won't have the right experience," she said.

EBay went public the year after the Kashyaps arrived in New York.

"You read so much stuff," Ms. Kashyap said. "If you are a hard-working person and you have what it takes, and you are here, you can achieve what you want. That's the good thing about the United States."

India, she feels, requires too much waiting, too much dependence, and is plagued by too many small-minded dreams. She wants to be an American entrepreneur, which to her means being self-sufficient.

"Here you can do it on your own," she said.

Joblessness was supposed to happen to other people. "When I went to college, I was working very hard," she said. "I wasn't going to the movies, and I wasn't having fun. And still I don't have a job."

In March, after five months of frustrated job hunting, Ms. Kashyap decided to start a tutoring business with a friend, which will be run out of the basement of her friend's house. They passed out fliers at local schools last week.

But Ms. Kashyap's plans keep slipping away. "Every month I say, 'By the end of this month, I have to have a job,' '' she said. "Then it doesn't happen, and I have to change the deadline."

Her new plan? "Try harder."

Thinking Out of the Box

Jim Barrezueta works in a tall, boxy building on 52nd Street and the Avenue of the Americas, ensconced in the trappings of Midtown success: four revolving doors open onto a marble-clad lobby with six fat silver pillars and a guard standing by a set of velvet ropes.

A sign bearing the words "Principles have no loopholes" greets visitors who take the wood-paneled elevators to the fifth floor, where Mr. Barrezueta has worked as an auditor for PriceWaterhouseCoopers since January.

As a new employee, he does not have his own desk. Instead, each morning, in a lottery process the company calls hoteling, Jim and his standard-issue laptop are randomly assigned to a cubicle, each of which has a sign that reads, "Be sure to lock down your computer." Young men in khakis and cornflower blue shirts and older men in suits wend their way through the vast, hushed labyrinth of desks.

Mr. Barrezueta considers himself fortunate, but not lucky. "I worked hard for it," he said. After 10 years as an airline mechanic, he was furloughed and went back to school in 2001, at age 30, to study accounting. In addition, he said, "The pay raises weren't coming. I was already maxing out, making $55,000 to $60,000 a year."

The son of Ecuadorean immigrants, he has already far surpassed his parents. And now, a limitless future has unfurled in his mind's eye. His mother, who never finished high school, has worked in the garment industry for 15 years, and his father, who never finished junior high school, worked in a belt factory and as a livery cab driver before retiring.

The son's life is different.

"Here you start somewhere, but you move up different levels, to senior associate manager, senior manager, and if you work hard enough and you stay with the firm, you could even make director or partner," he said. "It's up to you how hard you want to work. Whereas with a blue-collar job, you put your time in and you get a weekly paycheck."

He loves his white-collar job. He loves the office supplies and the fake plants. He loves the machines that spew out papers. He loves the fact that his briefcase weighs less than his toolbox.

The only traces of the economic downturn that Jim sees first-hand are tucked into the corporate S.E.C. filings he pores over. After graduating in December with a 3.966 grade point average and degrees in economics and accounting, he got four job offers.

"It's unfortunate people are losing their jobs and the economy is in a slump," he said. "But my parents always found work. They never had a formal education, but when it was time to put food on the table, they went out and found work. I knew that I was capable of the same thing."

The keys, he said, to his success were grades, interviewing skills and networking. To practice, he joined the Association of Latino Professionals in Finance and Accounting, an organization that held mock interviews with recruiters from PriceWaterhouseCoopers before the formal recruiting process began.

His focus also helped. "It was time to get a skill," he said, speaking of college. "I did 45 credits towards the accounting degree and 42 of those credits were accounting."

He tells his 21-year-old classmates not to envy him. The airline industry took 10 years of his life, and, he feels, gave him little back. But whether he knows it or not, that decade may have given him a critical edge: It gave him stories to tell. He learned how to talk to people. It rubbed off the rough edges of his youth.

"They are always like, 'You're so smart,' " he said of his friends. "I say: 'Listen. Ten years from now, when you're my age and you're a partner at one of these big firms, you are going to see I'm not smarter at all. Period.' ''