By Catherine Gonzalez
Staff Writer
With less than a month left until classes end, many students are hoping to obtain the perfect summer job or internship, a goal that involves some strategies.
Students do not need to worry about being too inexperienced to apply for a job or internship, as their college experiences can guide them.
The Director of Career and Leadership Development in the College’s Career Center, Shannon Conklin, told The Signal that “most employers understand that not everyone is coming into college with college-level experience before they got here. You’re here to learn, to grow, to take advantage of opportunities, so take advantage of them, but then make sure that you reflect on them and that you talk about them, because if you don’t talk about them, who will? You’re your biggest advocate.”
College experiences can even help students find work opportunities.
“One of my classes had a field trip to a church, and they told us about the Freedom School of Trenton there, and that’s how I found out about the opportunity to work there in the summer, and I thought it was interesting,” said Katie Bullecks, a freshman sociology major.
Faculty at the College can also help students find summer work opportunities. This is how freshman mathematics and secondary education major Jean Carlos-Moreno found a summer job at the College where he could help blind and deaf high school students prepare for college or the work-force.
“I was just talking to a professor, and they were like ‘Hey, you seem really interested in working with kids,’ and they took me down to their office, and I just spoke with them, and they offered me this position,” Carlos-Moreno said.
A student’s specific field of interest also determines the necessary steps for attaining summer work-experience.
“If you want to work for profit organizations, for example, you want to make a list of where you’re interested in and see if they have internship opportunities and apply to those,” Conklin said. “If you want to go into academia, then you want to talk to your faculty members, maybe you want to do Muse, and maybe you want to identify research opportunities at institutions that might be where you’re interested in.”
Students who don’t know where to begin can get in contact with the College’s Career Center.
“If a student needs some real specific support, that’s when you would want to come into the Career Center and meet with us one-on-one and have that conversation and activate your network here at [the College],” Conklin said.
Some students find that in the earlier years of college, students tend to work over the summer in fields that are not specific to the ones that they wish to pursue, giving them transferable job skills before they begin more directly pursuing their post-collegiate plans.
“From my experience, I would say that freshmen and sophomores would probably have more summer jobs because juniors and seniors are primarily looking at the [work force], so they’re going to get more jobs that are geared towards their majors or internships,” said Catherine Hayes, a senior classical studies major.
If internship slots are already full, students can still make the most of their summers.
“Make note of what their timelines are for the next go-around, so if they do hire in the fall, you don’t miss that deadline. You’re ahead of the game,” Conklin said. “I think the goal is to have some kind of structured formal experience so that you get the baseline to not only understand what you like and what you dislike, but also to gain those skills that are transferable across different industries.”
