Handshake and the Career Center

Do you not have a clear direction of where you’re going to work after you graduate?

Do you need to get a part-time job while studying at Stan State?

Are you not sure how you can improve your resume further?

Then have I got a deal for you!

Three block simplistic resumes
Image by Coffee Bean on Pixabay.com

The Career Center is one of those nice little godsends where you can clearly see how people before you had the same problems as you, recognized the need to create a solution, and then actually implemented it.

The Stan State Career Center is awesome. My first job while at Stan State was as a part-time janitor. I had written up a resume for that position, and I thought it was fire, I thought nothing could stop it or me from getting hired. It turns out that a big factor of why I got hired for that job though is that simply I was the first one that stepped up!

After my time with that position and my brief sojourn abroad, I put my nose back to the grindstone and started flaunting that good old resume around again. I applied for virtual internships, remote positions, and lots of lofty and really competitive jobs that would have looked stellar on my resume.

In return, I received silence.

It turns out I had a lot of highly preventable problems with my resume. And if you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time and know that I tend to ramble, then I’m sure you can guess what some of the things were that went wrong.

It was too long, it was too wordy, too many adverbs, not enough action verbs, I could cut some sections entirely, I didn’t need to have to list high school achievements, etc. etc. etc.

But it would have been a whole lot harder to have figured that out without the Career Center literally critiquing my resume for free for me though.

If you treat your resume like an essay you have to write, then it suddenly becomes a lot more manageable. Consider it a working draft at first, then try to cut things out for conciseness (get it down to one page!), then have someone you trust read over it. Then have someone you want to impress read over it.

The Career Center is an invaluable resource, and one that you already technically pay for as part of your tuition! They will not only have lists and lists of companies that are hiring, if you sign up for their website (Handshake!) and put some effort into getting your profile to look polished, then you will have companies contacting you asking for you to apply to their postings.

What a reversal!

Two hands shaking through computer screens
Image by mohamed Hassan on Pixabay.com

Knowing a bit about what I was going to do after I graduated (or more appropriately, what I had deferred to do thanks to the pandemic) I knew that I was going to have some time to kill with my diploma in hand before the next life step. And so, I started researching the career center, figuring out how to best do all of that, and as I was in the middle of preparing for job hunting with spreadsheets and the like, I already got called up into an interview.

I’ve got a short list I carry around with me of dream jobs that aren’t necessarily careers, but industries that I would love to work in for a season of life. As I write this now, thanks to handshake, I may already be looking to be able to cross one of those industries off the list!

Stan State has lots of hidden facets to it, all put there to help you. If you’re worried, unsure, or anything related, then you should pay a visit to the Career Center’s Webpage, maybe talk to some of the fine folks there. They will help you immensely!

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