What Color Is Your Parachute? (24 page)

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Backing U: A Business-Oriented Guide to Backing Your Passion and Achieving Career Success
by Vaughn Evans (Business and Careers Press, 2009)

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Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success
by Dan Schawbel (Kaplan, 2009)

Sophomore year:
Use breaks to investigate those careers further. You want to know which field or industry appeals to you most so that you can
declare a major by the start of your junior year. Students who don’t have a clue what they want to do with their major, or who change majors more than once, are more likely to get jobs that don’t use their college degree. Apply for summer internships.

Summer of sophomore year:
Get an entry-level job or internship in the industry that interests you most or set up a series of volunteer internships in several fields so you can check them out. Update your contact list and your plan for success.

Junior year:
Apply for summer internships. Look for professional conferences or local professional association meetings to attend.

Summer of junior year:
Secure an internship or job in the field. Update your contact list and your plan for success.

Senior year:
Organize your classes so that you can do another internship before you graduate. Get in touch with all your contacts to let them know you are actively looking for work and what you want. Ask them to let you know if they hear of openings. (Seniors who graduate with a job lined up report that it took six to nine months of active job search to secure it.)

The College Experience

Though our focus in this book is on helping you find work you’ll love, life is more than just work. The college experience, in addition to providing you with academic grounding for your life’s work, also challenges you to discover what you truly value and to find a way to balance the many different aspects of your life. If taken seriously, the challenges and responsibilities that you didn’t have to worry about very much while you were living at home will help you grow and mature. These include learning to work out differences with roommates, facing new financial realities (such as using credit and student loans wisely), balancing study time with social time and perhaps work obligations, and maybe maintaining an apartment (cleaning, grocery shopping, and cooking). If you ignore the challenges of college life and just party, you’ll waste not only a lot of money but also your opportunity to be better prepared for finding good and satisfying work after college. The new life experiences of college can develop important skills that will help you when you join the work world.

But most of all, enjoy yourself! No time in life is quite like your college years. Have fun, learn as much as you can, and continue building a strong foundation of skills to help you find work you’ll love.

IF YOU WANT TO EXPLORE FURTHER…

Careers

Coplin, Bill.
10 Things Employers Want You to Learn in College: The Know-How You Need to Succeed
. Ten Speed Press, 2004.

Levit, Alexandra.
They Don’t Teach Corporate in College
, rev. ed. Career Press, 2009.

Pilate, Victoria.
Dorm Rooms to Boardrooms
. Signature Books, 2004.

This website has great music and stories about people’s journies to find their work niche after college:
www.roadtripnation.com
.

This website has job-search tips for college students:
http://jobsearch.about.com/od/teenstudentgrad/a/collegejob.htm
.

This site offers a variety of career information, including a link to a career quiz:
www.princetonreview.com/careers-after-college.aspx
.

Geared to college students and recent grads, this site lists both jobs and internship opportunities:
www.monstertrak.com
.

Designed for the University of Waterloo (Canada), this site’s comprehensive six-step Career Development eManual includes downloadable worksheets:
www.cdm.uwaterloo.ca
.

College: Selecting Majors or Transferring to Another School

Freedman, Eric.
How to Transfer to the College of Your Choice
. Ten Speed Press, 2004.

At this site you can download a PDF booklet or work online with a humorous video to select a major:
http://missingmajor.com
.

You can purchase an interactive DVD to help you select your college major at
www.careeroptions4me.com/products.htm
.

This site lists nearly forty majors and some associated careers:
www.collegeboard.com/csearch/majors_careers/profiles/index.html
.

College: Surviving and Thriving

Carter, Carol.
Majoring in the Rest of Your Life: Career Secrets for College Students
, 4th ed. LifeBound, 2004.

Combs, Patrick.
Major in Success: Make College Easier, Fire Up Your Dreams, and Get a Great Job
. Ten Speed Press, 2007.

Kamenetz, Anya.
DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Transformation of Higher Education
. Chelsea Green, Spring 2010.

Stafford, Susan.
Community College: Is It Right for You?
Cliff Notes, 2006.

Tyler, Suzette.
Been There, Should’ve Done That: 995 Tips for Making the Most of College
, 3rd ed. Front Porch Press, 2008.

A highly recommended book for teens and parents from Great Britain,
If I’d Only Known: Making the Most of Higher Education
, is no longer in print. But you can download it in PDF form at the following website (scroll down to near the bottom of the page):
http://www.agr.org.uk/Content/If-Only-I-had-Known
.

These two articles, written during the last economic downturn, explain the decline in jobs for university grads and the limits of higher education:

http://www.bearcave.com/misl/misl_other/college_grad_unemployment.html

www.epi.org/publications/entry/webfeatures_viewpoints_education_limits/

This site links you to blogs of recent grads going through the frustrations of finding a job:
www.onlinecolleges.net/2009/07/15/100-motivational-blog-posts-for-disgruntled-grads/
.

Financial Realities and Avoiding Debt

Kamenetz, Anya.
Generation Debt: How Our Future Was Sold Out for Student Loans, Bad Jobs, No Benefits, and Tax Cuts for Rich Geezers—and How to Fight Back
. Riverhead Trade, 2006.

Sheer, Marc.
No Sucker Left Behind: Avoiding the Great College Rip-off
. Common Courage Press, 2008.

On the Internet, you’ll find dozens of articles about the cost of college, student loans, and credit card debt. Read several so you know what’s happening and how to avoid mistakes other students have made.

This website has college finance and credit card calculators so that you can see what your real costs are:
www.bankrate.com
.

Financial Literacy

Duguay, Dara.
Please Send Money: A Financial Survival Guide for Young Adults on Their Own
, 2nd ed. Sourcebooks, 2008.

Feeley, Craig and Lisa.
Spendright: The Smart Start for Students
. CMK Publishing, 2005.

Amanda van der Gulik writes and blogs about teaching children how to make, manage, and save money. You can follow her on Twitter: @AmandavdGulik. Her website is
www.teachingchildrenaboutmoney.com
.

A job finances your life. Here are two websites that show what the lifestyle you want will cost and suggest jobs that earn enough to finance that lifestyle:

www.californiarealitycheck.com

www.jumpstart.org/realitycheck

Internships

For listings of internships, apprenticeships, and volunteer and study-abroad opportunities, check out these sites:

http://rileyguide.com/intern.html

www.aftercollege.com/job-channel/internships

www.quintcareers.com/grad_internships.html

www.campusinternships.com

For more information on internships, do an Internet search using the phrase “college internships.”

7

Goal Setting

A TOOL TO SHAPE YOUR FUTURE

As you’ve been reading through the previous chapters, completing the exercises, and answering questions, you’ve been gathering information on your interests, skills, and potential dream jobs. This research on yourself has helped you discover more about your likes and dislikes. You’ve seen how you can use your high school and college experiences to enhance your job readiness and awareness of the work world. This exploration should have given you some ideas about how your interests give shape to your work and your future. Now we’d like to introduce you to a tool that will help you do both. Goal setting helps you discover a bit more about what you want out of life and define how you’d like to spend your time in the future.

A goal is something you want to achieve or accomplish: learning to drive a car, getting a high school or college diploma, or being elected student body treasurer. A goal can also be to experience something you dream of: traveling to India, going white-water rafting, or meeting a relative you’ve never met. Some of your goals may be personal, such as getting to know someone better, reading a particular book, or learning to get along with your little sister better; others
may be academic, like getting into a particular college, earning a 3.0 GPA, or surviving chemistry. Still others, like finding your dream job or getting into a work-training program, may be work-related. Because life is about more than just school or work, your goals can relate to anything—relationships, learning experiences, or just simply having fun.

Goals help us in many ways. Have you ever set a goal and achieved it? What did you learn about achieving a goal through this experience? If you have set a goal, but didn’t achieve it, run over the experience in your mind and identify what got in your way that’s in your power to change. Failure, well studied, is a great teacher.

Goals help articulate (that is, they help us name and talk about) what we really want to do. They help us define what’s most important to do with our time, and how we are going to change how we spend our time to achieve a stated goal. Goals also help motivate us to do what we say we want to do! Just writing goals down makes them more concrete. When we say we want to do something someday, that “something” and “someday” remain very vague, and more often than not we never get around to doing it. Rather than just talking about something you want to do, knowing your goals and working toward them means you are likely to achieve them. A goal on a list is just an idea unless you put in the effort to achieve it. When you achieve your goals, you feel better about yourself. Life becomes more interesting and you’ll feel more in control of your own destiny.