Even though this is the last weekly reflection it is not the last week of the semester. I read my first weekly reflection and I was saying how smooth the semester was going but I can see the change now. I swear I am getting grey hairs. Next semester I am going to do better because I am going to be dorming. Commute is 2 hours for me and I knock out when I get home so it seriously hurts my studying time. I hope next semester I feel the sense of balance I had.

You really can’t procrastinate in college. I don’t know how my friends part every week. I’ve been sick for a while so I wanted to take a day for myself, but that did not happen. Even though I was in the hospital I was still homework cause if something is due at a specific time it is due.  I put school and studying as my top priority so I had to cancel plans with family and take time off of work which sucks.

I took a math test today and I hope did good on it. Math is the hardest subject for me and my professor isnt the best so I’m in out and out of tutoring all the time. Most of my days are just going to class, commuting, studying and going to work. I am extremely tired all of time.

This week is really hard. We are in the middle on the semester so that means midterms!! I feel like I have been studying nonstop. Its really to hard to manage work school family life and social life. I have a presentation in communications due soon so I’ve made an appointment with the SACC tutoring center to get a letter grade higher.

Final exams are coming and I definitely don’t know what to feel about it. I’m currently very stressed about it and its not getting better. I must study way much ahead before taking the exam because I have a problem with forgetting things very fast. Currently i’m still undecided about what I want to do for the future, but whatever has to come I know its going to be good.

Last week was the last FYS class. I’m still amazed by the fact that a semester is almost gone. I feel like it has been so fast, its like if it was yesterday when I arrived and first stepped Baruch. This first semester I have learnt so many things, and I know there is much more coming for what is left for me to graduate.

For my final Enrichment Workshop assignment, my friends and I decided to visit the STARR Career Development Center. To be honest, I didn’t necessarily know what this center was really for other than assisting you in choosing and developing your skills for the career path of your choice. It turns out it was  just like any other center in Baruch, super helpful with ANY questions that you had. They can help with a lot of things like writing your resume, scouting for jobs, etc. Outside the office were a whole bunch of job ads and pamphlets that could help you. The question that my friends and I asked once we went in was “how do we declare our minor, and what could possibly be our options for our minors?” I wish I remembered the name of the very kind, lady that helped us answer this question but I don’t sadly :(. However, pulled up the Baruch website for us and showed us a list of all the minors we can choose from. I asked her since i was majoring in Accounting, what was an option that would suit me best and she said anything pertaining to liberal arts, and in my mind i automatically thought of minoring in the language French, because honestly nothing else in the liberal arts category interests me AT ALL, iI find it to e very boring. As to where we declare our minors, that would be on the fifth floor of the Newman Vertical Campus, she told us that once we go in and tell them what we were there forthey would give us the appropriate forms to fill out, and be able to help us out. But there isn’t any rush because we have a long period of time until we need to declare our minor officially. Our first visit to the STARR center was a mini success to say the least.

For my last enrichment workshop I had to do something for career. I chose to do a STARR career development center workshop. The workshop I did was called mastering the job interview. It was very helpful as it taught us many tips to perfecting or mastering a job interview. It taught us how to get a background on the corporation/organization before-hand. It also taught how to practice answering potential interview questions, how to prepare a list of questions for the employer, and how to research contact information for the company. The workshop gave great insight on how to be your best self by dressing for success, using specific examples, and really taking time to think. It’s also very important to keep it only around two minutes, to mention professional things only and highlight why you should be hired at the end of the interview. One of my favorite tips that they repeated many times during the workshop was to go with the flow of the interview and keep it conversational. I feel like I am the type of person who tends to get very nervous in situations like these and I start to rant or really get nervous. However, if you keep it conversational between the interviewee there is no reason to be nervous. A brand new source of information for me was them teaching us how to compose a pitch. To compose a pitch you have to make sure you say what the first and second most important things to know about you is, give at least two to three selling points that support your statement, give them a reason why they should be interested in you, say what you can bring to the table, and anticipate any objections and be prepared to neutralize those statements. All in all, the tips the STARR center gave us were very helpful and useful and I can most definitely say I will be using them. 

Cathy Wang

id: 23914690

I went to the Starr center development center to talk to someone and get some help in making my resume. It wasn’t like a workshop but more of a one on one session with one of the peer mentors to talk about what goes into a resume and how to make it stand out during the application process. The session itself was really informative. Since never had a resume in the first place, I didn’t really have an idea of how the format was supposed to look like or what type of useful information to put in it. The person went through the entire resume building process. She told me about what to bold and what to talk about and what the format of the sentences should be as well as the bullet points for job experiences as well as what i should do to make my resume as best as it can possibly be. She also gave me information about the different clubs i could join that was related to my major and add depth to my resume. I was also given a packet on some different examples of cover letters and resumes. She suggested that I come back with my resume when i was done and schedule an actual resume session for starr to further improve my resume and cover letter. It was actually more helpful than I thought. I learned about what starr has to offer in addition to allowing me to discover another resource of the school that I can utilize to future help me with choosing my career path. I’m glad that we had freshmen year seminar and the enrichment workshops because it allowed me to go out of my comfort zone and explore the campus past my classes and the cafeteria.

 

For my last enrichment workshop, I did the career category. My friend, Angelina, and I went to the Starr Career Development Center for a career workshop on how to master a job interview. I’m super happy I went because it was very helpful. The presentation and the packet they gave contained a lot of good and useful information in it. I didn’t know what to expect going in but it was a very welcoming environment because of how friendly and engaging the instructors were when they were giving the presentation. I also liked how they gave a lot of time for people to ask questions because there are a lot of what-ifs when approaching a job interview. I have an internship so I have been on an interview before and I have also worked three part-time jobs in my past so I have had experience with that as well but I still wanted to expand my knowledge on it. Job interviews are unfortunately that type of thing that you have to prepare and practice for almost every time because of how you are put on the spot. Also, you can never really know for sure what the interviewer is going to ask you but that is why informational classes like STARR workshop is great. One really good piece of advice they gave is to follow the acronym STAR when sharing success stories during the interview. STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. This is helpful because during an interview you may be asked how you overcame something and had success and STAR provides an easy way to help you stay on track and not rambling on when telling your success story. Another good piece of advice is when asked “what is your weakness”, we were suggested to not try to turn a strength you have, like being a perfectionist, into one of your weaknesses. This is because it can sound ungenuine and too scripted. I enjoyed this career workshop and plan on going to another one soon!