Throughout life people are often encouraged to be humble and modest. Generally speaking, those attributes are well liked. Those that are qualified do not want to flaunt their abilities because it might upset others. Unfortunately when you want any position you will have to do some flaunting.

Every step up to receiving the offer is selling. You need to sell yourself. Most companies, maybe even the one your applying for, claim to solve the problem you have and offer a better solution than the competition. You have to do the same, in a polite and agreeable manor. Although the article emphasizes arrogance, really you want to let the companies know the things you are capable of doing. Don’t confuse this with trying to offer the company everything they want.

You don’t know everything, so don’t try to sound like you do. But when they ask you a question, if you have had prior experience in that area, or even something related to it, let them know immediately. One example is my response to the often asked question: “When have you been a leader?” While I had no formal experience in the past, during a summer school program I was involved with, I was the group leader for our project. (more…)

When you are offered an interview, pick the best time they offer and take it. Plan to make it there. If you have a midterm, get it rescheduled. If the interview is 6 hours away, bring some homework to get done on the bus ride. There is never a good reason to turn down an interview, unless of course you already have a better offer. Again, think about what’s going to matter the most in five years…your career, or the assignment you have due in two days. Exactly - your career.

Everyone should know that careers are built over time, not instantaneously. You get a couple internships which give you the experience to get a better job out of school. That job will enable you to get another job more inline with what you want at that time. You build up from nothing into the career that you want. That’s why you want to get an internship, it’s one of the first steps out of many for the rest of your life. (more…)

When applying for any position, you have to prioritize. What I have found more often than not is you don’t get everything that you want. When you are just starting out, the first step is to find the companies you want to see your resume. This can be a very difficult task, since there are so many companies, and even more you’ve never heard of. Since you rarely get everything you want from the first position you have, I say that you need to prioritize what you want. I like to think there are three main categories concerning you choice: where the company is located, how much they pay you, and whether or not you get to do what you really want. Really you have to choose what is most important to you. I’ll use myself as an example.

Over summers I generally want to stay at home, which is the Philadelphia area. Being a computer engineer, there are not very many positions in this area centered around exactly what I want to do. There are still companies that will pay me well, but these companies do not focus on security which I find most interesting. I cut my losses and take the location and higher pay over doing the exact tasks I’d like to do.

So now that you have prioritized your requirements. You have to begin applying. The best way to find your companies will change depending on your requirements.

Salary/Wage – If your top priority is how much you earn, you are in luck – this is the easiest to locate companies for. Though you cannot find out exactly how much you will be paid, you should know that the bigger the company, the more they will pay interns. Find the biggest companies in your field and work your way down from there. Ways to find these companies include: talking to teachers and upperclassmen, attending career fairs, and searching your field in google. You should already have a general idea of the “big players” in your field. These are the positions that will pay the most.

(more…)

You can never have too many introductions, so here’s another one to the job application process in terms that you’ll probably know all too well. Although Majoring in Careers has something helpful for anyone searching for a job in any walk of life, the reader to which our material is most relevant is the college student. With this audience in mind, I am going to draw a link here that will hopefully ebb the foreign feeling of the job application process that discourages so many people from getting started. Applying to jobs is like applying to colleges, and about 1000 words from now you’ll know which old, familiar concepts you’re going to need to retrieve from the crevices of your brain and polish-off for a lifetime of use.

Resume? Think, common app. So many of us had to fill in the blanks of this tedious, general online college application, which consisted of text boxes for name, address info, GPA, work experience, awards and achievements. This is the best way to envision your first resume. It’s a template to provide an employer with everything relevant that you’ve ever done in your life in a single page. You’re going to be dedicating a section of the page to each of the personal, academic, work-related, and extracurricular aspects of your life, usually in that order. A resume, like a common app, is meant to be a way for a company to evaluate your qualifications and compare you to other candidates in ten seconds or less, judging by simple numbers, lists, and sentence fragments.

Cover letter? Think, personal essays. What were the topics of all those personal essays you had to write? There was almost guaranteed to be one about why that specific school was your top choice. This required some research and some flattery, but it could be turned into a cookie cutter response without too much trouble. Guess what - this is actually one popular way to begin a cover letter. Then, there were inevitably some short ones about your proudest achievements, and one or two more about strengths and weaknesses. Well, this is a lot like what you’re going to end up doing in the body of your cover letter, but why don’t you go ahead and leave out the weaknesses. Your last personal essay was to be written on a topic of your choice, and its purpose was to get an insight into who you were as a individual. The closing paragraph of a cover letter is often reserved for this touch of personal voice. Finally, the most superficial goal of college application essays is to make sure you can write worth a damn, and the same goes for a cover letter, so don’t forget to check your grammar and punctuation twice, and leave out the emotocons ; ) (more…)