Career Services Center

One of the best and simplest ways to find your future is to just follow someone successful around. Following around a professional of some kind with his or her permission is usually referred to as job shadowing (without permission, it’s just stalking and may get you arrested). Job shadowing can let you find out more about a lot of jobs in any given workplace and help you get a solid feel for whether you would fit in at that institution.
Many people have an easier time understanding information in context. If you have a hard time reading directions, but often do well if you just start working with a new thing with your hands, you are very likely a situational learner who would get a lot more career information from job shadowing than you would if you just read a book about that field.

How Do You Find Someone to Shadow?

I understand that someone who is looking forward to leaving school doesn’t want more homework, but the preparation you do before the interview may be the most important research you ever do. Employers expect a knowledgeable professional to come to the interview: someone who knows about the job they will be hired for and the company or institution they are trying to join.

Every company, nonprofit, institution, and government department has an identity, history, and purpose. From Disney to a small auto parts distributer, every one of these employers is proud of themselves. They expect that if you want to become a part of them, you’ll take the time to learn about them. You should also be up-to- date about any concerns for your profession or industry.

Where to Look for Information about a Particular Employer

The Personal Statement: Where to Start?

The personal statement is an essay that accompanies your application to graduate, law, or medical school. It functions as a kind of interview by proxy—you explain who you are, why you want to enter the program, and what your plan is after you get your degree. Departments typically weigh the personal statements pretty heavily because they demonstrate your ability to write, whether your expectations for the program are realistic, and what intelligence and experience you bring with you.
This means that it’s an essay most people agonize over. It’s important to give the document due consideration, drafting and editing multiple times, but it shouldn’t be the hardest thing you’ve ever written. All of your work in school and experience have been preparing you for an essay like this; it’s just a short piece about your and the program you’re entering.
To help you get started, I’ve broken up the process into a few simple steps, and a couple of warnings to keep you on track. After following these, you should take your draft to a Career Counselor or a professor in your field and get some feedback on how it’s going and maybe some editing as well.

Five Steps to a Great Personal Statement

It’s 90 degrees out, so it must be Fall semester. Of all the students on campus, probably the most calm and cool (as least figuratively) are the juniors and seniors. They know what they’re doing—they’ve got a major, they know how to get from campus to campus, and they have their books and syllabi in order. What some of them don’t know is that this “go time”: they need to get prepared for the next step, whether it’s a job or graduate school. Not after this year is over: you need to start now.

What do you need to do?

If you are a junior or senior who is going to be starting a job after graduation:

*Go to a job fair. * Seriously—especially the Fall Job Fair (there are more employers and jobs, but fewer students attend). You can read a million books and articles about jobs and the workforce, but you have to get out and talk to some employers before you really understand what’s going on. What can you get out going to a job fair?

Some new stories have made it to the press about job seekers being ripped off by people interested in identity theft. Isn’t it horrible? It’s not bad enough that you don’t have a job, but now scam artists are after what little money you have. The sad fact is that while the crime may be new, there have always been people who prey on desperate, especially job seekers.

At this point I could leap into a historical retrospective about various individuals and companies who took money from poor immigrants, promising plentiful land and high wages. Instead, I’ll just assume that you all had to take American history at some point and remember that flier that mentioned that “the streets are paved in gold” in America. Yes, we have long history of job seeker fraud.

What do you need to watch out for? Typically there are three kinds of job postings to worry about: too little information, too good to be true, and bait-and-switch ads.

One of the simplest forms of fake job ad offers too little information. Usually there is a job title and an anonymous form of contact (just a phone number or a P.O. Box). No company name or other employer identity is offered (or something generic, like “a national magazine” or “medical sales company”). There are two reasons a company doesn’t identify itself in an ad: it’s a cheap con and they don’t want to pay anymore that they have to for the ad or the company doesn’t really have an open job. The “cheap con” people are looking for the most desperate job seekers to involve them in rip off sales schemes—typically they make the sales reps buy a “sample case” of products (for a hundred dollars or more) and then send them out to sell the (terrible) product. The company makes money primarily on selling the sample cases to would-be sales people.

I had a student in my office who picked the easiest major he could find and essentially put off deciding what he wanted to do for four years. Then in his senior year, he took a good look around and realized that he really wanted to be a Physical Therapist. He had just wasted four years and thousands of dollars: only some of his classes from his first few years would transfer to that degree, which normally takes five to six years to earn (you need a Master’s or Doctorate to practice P.T.). His family wasn’t going to pay for another degree. He was going to have to work full time to pay for his education and take P.T. classes at night. That five or six year degree might take eight years (or more) to earn that way. I did what I could to help him toward his dream, but he really regretted not taking college more seriously.

The point of my story isn’t that you need to immediately figure out what you want to do or something terrible will happen. He did not get into a difficult position because he didn’t decide on his life’s work in the 10th grade. I think he messed up because he put off taking responsibility for his own future for far too long. If you want big things—a house, to travel the world, the chance to do something important—you are going to need put off some short term fun in exchange for working towards those dreams.

If choosing a career scares you, consider that most people don’t do just one kind of work their whole lives. They switch companies, get certified to do something different, decide to teach, etc., etc. While you need to decide what you want to do next, it doesn’t have to be what you are going to do forever. Thinking about the next five to ten years might be easier to handle than “the rest of your life” (a terrifying phrase to everyone).

In short, do try to prepare for anything and everything within reason. This is the time in your life to push yourself and see what you can do. People who can find a way to be good at calculus or chemistry often get a great payoff later in life when they easily find a good job and make great money. But don’t just put your nose to the proverbial grindstone, take classes and evaluate. Take a personality inventory and see what might suit you. Question your teachers about what kind of work are in those fields, and consider what kinds of work you would be good at and fit your values. Don’t wait for someone else to figure out your future for you: set your own goals and decide what will make you happy.

The worse the economy is, the harder you have to work to find a job, especially if you are entry level. You might imagine that knowing that things are bad, people getting ready to go on the job market would get assertive and work hard to make it happen. I find the opposite is true: fewer students than ever are showing up to our job fairs at WVU and students seem to be putting off getting ready for the job search longer and longer. When faced with a challenge, you can’t succeed while you envision failure. Don’t give up before you’ve even tried.

So if we put aside the belief that it’s impossible to get a job, what is the first step you should you take for your job search? Contact your network.

It’s gotten to the point where I ask everyone that comes into my office if he or she has told his/her friends and family about needing a job. They nearly all say no. It makes me want to knock my head against my desk—if there was a time to call in favors, job seeking for an entry level job in a bad economy is it. Get proactive and start letting people know you need a job.

There are many questions are illegal to ask in an interview; they involve information that has been used in the past to unfairly discriminate against applicants. You should be familiar with the kinds of questions that you are not required to answer.

Illegal questions ask directly or indirectly about:
• Location of birthplace, nationality, ancestry, or descent of applicant, applicant’s spouse, or parents
• Your sex or marital status
• Race or color
• Religion or religious days observed
• Physical disabilities or handicaps
• Age, health, or medical history
• Pregnancy, birth control, and child care

Occasionally a job candidate is required to eat a meal (lunch or dinner, typically) during an interview. This happens most often when the job requires the employee to entertain clients. The important thing to keep in mind at all times is that you are still being interviewed. It may seem like a casual, social situation to you, but it is not. They are still judging your appearance, answers to questions, and manners.

There are many published guides about dining etiquette. If you want to learn all the details about formal dining behavior, you can pick up a thick book at the library and learn the correct placement of the asparagus tongs. This guide won’t do that, though, for two reasons: most interview meals are not that formal and they are mostly about what you say, not about your food. Most interview meals are semi-formal, not formal: you may encounter a salad fork and a bread plate, but probably not a fish fork. If you are focused on the food and the formality, you are missing the point of the interview. You need to eat politely, but not as if you are Miss Manner’s chosen successor. You are really there to continue to talk about yourself. Just follow these seven general rules and stay focused on the interview.

Rule One: Follow the Leader

Pay attention to the people around you and let them take the lead first and foremost. If you see an extra utensil you have never used before, look around to see if anyone else is using it and follow his or her lead. Most guests know not to put their elbows on the table or to eat with their hands. Unless? you are taken to a rib joint, and your future boss plants his elbows on the table while he eats his ribs out of hand. It’s good to fit into the standards of the people around you. Try to be a little more conservative in your behavior than the others—they are not being interviewed after all, so they can get away with more. If there are other job candidates at the table, don’t take your cues from them, they are often making mistakes. Only follow the leader.

A lot of people in business talk about the “elevator speech.” If no one has explained it to you yet, the premise is simple: if you walked into an elevator with someone who could hire you for you dream job, how could you convince him/her of your value in the time it takes to get up to the top floor?

This is not a valuable skill because it is particularly likely that you will end up with someone important confined with you in a small space and at the mercy of your eloquence. The elevator speech is a good concept because it puts the speaker in the right frame of mind: prioritizing the most important information, wasting no time.