That $20,000 piece of paper presented to you at graduation is not a golden ticket for a job. Your clean cut, free of spelling errors, beautifully decorated resume and cover letter will not get you a call for an interview. Most job and internship applications don’t even have sections asking for your grades or GPA.
Unless you’re hoping to become a doctor, lawyer or a scientist of some sort, grades and GPA don’t necessarily count for much in the real world. Employers look for the word “experience” on resumes.
So what if you got an A+ on a five-page paper about Greek Mythology. Who cares if you aced all of your spelling and grammar quizzes and successfully read all six required books for a class?
I’m at the end of the fall semester of my last year in undergraduate school. Now is the time for more internship applications, job searching and continually updating and revising my resume. At this point, I can’t look forward to graduating in May or even be properly excited for the cruise I’m taking in February as a pre-graduation gift. All I can think about is: “What am I going to be doing after I graduate?”
As a mass communications major, my requirements for a good job or internship are a portfolio of clips, experience, more clips and even more experience. Employers want to see that you’re versatile, can do more than just write a good story and have examples of published work.
Here’s the problem: You need experience to get more experience. You have experience writing for your college newspaper? Awesome, now take an unpaid internship with a small, local newspaper 20 hours a week. Oh and you have to get academic credit because they can’t pay you.
But get this: those small newspapers require you to have professional experience (not college newspaper experience) BEFORE obtaining an internship with them. Where do you even begin?
Despite writing and designing for the Crow’s Nest for two years, having a semester-long internship with University Advancement, being published numerous times in both the school newspaper and a small local paper, and having an online portfolio full of clips, I still am concerned about my future after graduation.
My worst nightmare is that I will have to extend my employment in customer service and take a full-time position at a grocery store.
Chelsea Tatham is a senior majoring in mass communications and is managing editor. She can reached at chelsea11@mail.usf.edu or on Twitter @chelsea91T.
