By this time, you have found one or two occupations of interest.
You are progressing through the upper division courses of your major
or are taking classes in your interest area. Also, you are pursuing
leadership roles in extracurricular and community activities. It’s
time to test the water. At this point, it is in your best interests to
obtain an internship. We cannot stress enough how educational,
informative, and necessary internships are to your overall career
development and employment potential. Employers like to see students
who are educated on what the market is like and have some indication
about what their job may or may not entail. It is no longer just
enough to have a degree in your hand. You need to be a well-rounded
and experienced student and internships can help.
Now, some of you are stating the obvious, "Internships don’t
pay anything!" or "They don’t have internships for my
major (or interest)." Yes, some internships are non-paid and some
fields do not have a specific means for an internship, but neither of
these things should prevent you from considering and finding (or
creating) an opportunity for pre-graduation work experience. A good
example of a non-paid internship are those in the fields of
advertising/public relations/television. These areas are highly
competitive and highly demanding. Internships allow students the
opportunity to gain hard experience, while establishing contacts in
fields that pride themselves on getting people from the inside. It may
seem difficult to give up a lucrative summer job (i.e. lifeguarding or
landscaping) in order to work your legs off for multiple hours of
unpaid work, but doing it will bring you money later on (because you
will actually be employed in the industry). A famous person once said,
"Do what you love. The money will follow." This is very
true.
Nevertheless, there are those of you who are saying, "Nope,
sorry. My field doesn’t have internships, because I have to be
licensed first or go to graduate school, etc.," Wrong! Many, many
fields have internship programs that you may not be aware of. For
example, Francesco Scavullo, one of the world’s top fashion
photographers who shot Grace Kelly, Madonna, and Paul Newman, has an
internship program for students interested in the fashion and
photography industry. Only 25 people applied for four spots (meaning
that competition may not be as tough as you think). This would be a
great opportunity for a student with an interest in photography to get
top notch experience. To find these "hard-to-find" internships, consult resources such as: The Internship Bible or
America's Top 100 Internships available in the Career Resources
@ CDC.
The point of all this talk about internships is how would you ever
know that the career you are choosing is right for you without
"testing" your decision? While internships is one part of
testing your decision, you can do other things that help you along in
this stage. First, begin to build networks. What is a network? A
network is a connection of people that you know and that’s their
connection together. How does a network work? Follow this example. . .
You are a psychology major and thinking about law school following
graduation. Your father’s co-worker in sales has a son that
graduated from law school four years ago. You contact the son (which
was suggested by his father) to talk about law school. While this
person is talking about law school, he asks what you are doing for the
summer, because they have a clerk position open in his department and
he can give you the name of the partner in charge. This is a NETWORK.
You would have never found that clerk position by looking in the paper
(or just wishing for it), but you did with the help of a network. Your
mother may have said, "It’s not what you know, it’s who you
know." Well, that’s partially true. What you know is always
valuable, but sometimes who you know gets you in the door. This is why
the skill of networking is so important to develop while you are in
college (if you can).
Start small with your network: family, friends, and past
supervisors. Then work larger as you become more familiar with the
skills involved. A part of networking is informational interviewing.
Informational interviewing is meeting with someone in your career
field of interest to talk about their career and their organization.
The key difference between these interviews and actual job interviews
is that you are NOT asking, looking or "fishing" for a job.
Finally, it is especially important at this stage to take advantage
of the wealth of resources the university provides, specifically those
located here at Career Development Center. We have workshops,
seminars, mock interviews, career counseling and the Career Resources
@ CDC.
