Second-year: In Pursuit of Employment
It’s crazy time at the Rady School of Management! As a second year, I’m working on 4 projects, interning about 20 hours each week, and job-stalking* like a crazy woman. Every once in a while, I have to hang out at Home Plate, go out to coffee with a prospective student, or gaze at the sunset over the cliff at the glider port. Rough! And even just watching the first-year students stress out over one of the worst weeks in their worst quarter is exhausting.
Really, though, June is looming large in my mind, as is the big black hole that is my calendar after graduation. I don’t even know what country I’ll be living in in 6 months. That’s terrifying!
This terror, which you may be familiar with from other life deadlines you’ve faced, is what drove me to the Careers Office this week. They’d helped me get my dream internship with an amazing company over the summer, and harped on the importance of LinkedIn until I polished my profile, through which I got the internship I’m doing now. The fact is, though, that I have no written contract in hand, which freaks me out.
Enter Robin: Careers Lady and Networker Extraordinaire. She assures me that there’s no reason to stress, I’ve got leads and plenty of time, but she also gave me an assignment: I need to “fill the pipeline” by actually applying for jobs.
I probably don’t have to tell you why I hate applying for jobs: I’m sure you’ve encountered the unintuitive websites, the wordy-yet-bafflingly-vague job descriptions and the repetitive, arduous applications, too. It’s too late for me to pick a new Lab-to-Market idea, but might I suggest an application engine for recruiting companies that’s less of a clunky, confusing, eyesore than Taleo? :/ Of course, I have some sympathy for prospective students, too: you’re facing the same thing, minus the job descriptions, plus piles of essays! I promise, though, it’s been well worth the trouble in my case: I’ve got two solid internships’ worth of experience, dozens of relevant courses’ worth of applicable content and 58 new brilliant, ambitious, interesting friends. Best of luck!
*I prefer stalking to hunting jobs. I like to peruse company careers websites, click through LinkedIn, read KODA’s blog and I even joined BranchOut on Facebook. It’s actually applying that I am afraid of.