Get internships. Publish your writing. Start a blog. Use your Twitter handle. Keep your Facebook profile clean. Start a LinkedIn to make connections.
College is no longer about getting A’s and impressing a couple professors. It isn’t enough to ace Calculus or perfect your organization skills.
You have to work and perfect your image.
Image doesn’t mean your physical appearance but what you can offer an employer at a quick glance. When the hiring manager at a company looks at your résumé, it’s not going to help much if you were a member of a chess club in high school or know how to weave baskets underwater. Instead, you have to supplement with extra experiences outside the classroom.
Each night, the most studious of us can cram up to six hours after a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. job and night classes. We fit field trips, internships and extra curriculars between. We know we signed up for this busy, clustered ride, but there’s this sense of weight that carries with every newer generation of college students.
You need enough experience, whether you’re paid or unpaid, to get even a glance at your résumé. Finance internships, laboratory experience with professors and other internships to get basic skills under your belt are critical for hiring.
It’s also managing social media to create a professional persona that appeals to hiring managers. You can’t be half-naked holding a Corona on your Facebook and expect to be hired by a top company. Tweeting about how much you despise people and your job doesn’t work either. Companies hire outside hackers to sift past your crummy passwords and public viewing blockers to find your Web presence. Grow up or get off the Internet.
The clock ticks, and we must have these completed by the time we graduate.
It’s competitive to earn a career position, or even an entry-level position for your planned career, right out of college. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 9.4 percent of college graduates were unemployed, and 19.1 percent were underemployed, or working part time instead of full time, in 2012.
But employment achievement is not impossible.
Each day, before I start my day, I ask myself one question: How am I improving my chances of doing what I want to after college? If I can successfully answer that, I’ve kept a clean Internet presence, wrote all the words my mind could produce and kept kind relationships with people who count, then the workload isn’t so bad.
Amanda is a junior majoring in mass communications and is also the news editor. She can be reached at astarling@mail.usf.edu
