This week I decided to attend STARR workshop for Job and Internship Search Strategies. I figured it would be useful for the future, so I took advantage of the time I had due to one of my classes being cancelled.
Adia, the presenter, taught the room some of the basic components of searching for opportunities: Exploring, Preparing, and Networking.
Exploring refers to brainstorming and researching what opportunities exist and what might seem interesting to a student. It involves understanding the multitude of fields that might pertain to one’s interest and knowing what kind of work is involved. Not only must one explore different opportunities, but one must also explore oneself. This means identifying yourself and listing what skills one has to offer to employers. Knowing what you can do can help narrow down the spectrum of opportunities one can get involved in and helps to choose what jobs will put emphasis on those skills.
Preparing involves researching a company or other place of work to be familiar with the job. This is essential for positions that require interviews and meetings, where employers will want to observe how invested one is in the opportunity. In addition, one should set up a LinkedIn account, because apparently this website has become a major platform on which employers can evaluate a candidate’s credentials quickly without a hassle.
Networking has become the most common way to get new jobs and opportunities. In Adia’s presentation, she told us that roughly 60 percent of jobs in the United States are attained through friends. family, and mostly professional contacts. We connected this fact to the theory in sociology which states that distant weak ties offer more diverse opportunities than close strong ties which probably offer opportunities that a person already knows of. Even once a person lands a job, he or she should continue to network by getting acquainted with the people in the workplace.
Overall, I feel like this workshop did a good job by providing me with a clear perspective of what to expect when applying for internships/jobs and how to get the most out of it.