Search for a Job / Internship

1. Research and make a plan
   Find out what types of jobs are in your field of interest. If you are not sure what you want to do, assessments and career counseling can help you explore how your interests match up with career choices.
2. Write a resume and cover letter
   Your resume and cover letter are your personal marketing tools; they showcase your skills and experiences to employers. The goal, of course, is to make a positive impression and entice employers to contact you for an interview. Make sure your resume shines. Peer Career Advisors offer resume help and critiques on a walk-in basis.
3. Practice your interviewing skills
   How you communicate, on paper and in person, can affect an employer’s opinion of you. Take control of your interview success. Practice your interviewing technique with online tools like Big Interview or get tips during a mock interview with Career Development staff.
4. Build your network and make connections
   Learn about the fields you’re interested in directly from people who are working in them. Get “inside information” on industry trends, organizational culture, and hiring outlook. Build your LinkedIn profile and start connecting!
5. Stay organized
   Create a spreadsheet to track all of your applications, conversations, contacts, notes, etc. This will help you stay on top of when to follow-up and find names and phone numbers quickly when you need to.

• To effectively sell yourself as a job candidate, you need to be able to persuade the employer that you are a fit for that employer’s needs. Even when the job market is great for job seekers, employers aren’t going to interview and hire candidates who are not a match for their needs.
• You can’t present yourself — in cover letters or interviews — as a match for the employer’s needs if you don’t know enough about the employer to do so.
• By doing research, you get information to decide which employers to contact.  Rather than sending fifty letters/e-mails and resumes to employers you know little to nothing about, send ten letters and resumes to employers you know something about and with whom you have a greater chance of securing an interview.  Targeted letters, individualized to the recipient are more effective than “form” letters — you know a form letter when you receive one; employers do too.
• In interviews, employers expect you to arrive knowing background information about the organization.  If you don’t, you look like you’re not really interested in the job.  You have to be able to answer the critical question of why you would like to work for that employer — and not sound like you would take any job.
• Research helps you formulate intelligent and appropriate questions to ask in your interview.

Talk to people:  Find people who work for or know about the organization.  This could be people you meet at a career fair, family members, neighbors, parents of friends, students who graduated ahead of you, and alumni contacts.

The employer’s website:  This is a no-brainer! Look for basic facts, information about mission, culture, values and more. If the website posts jobs and/or the organization invites e-mail from job seekers and/or accepts resumes online, follow the instructions the employer provides.

Internet research: Note sources of information you find and gauge the credibility of those sources.

Call or write the organization and ask for information AFTER you’ve searched for it elsewhere. This is perfectly appropriate to do if you simply cannot find information about the organization through their website, or if the information is not clear. If you have an interview scheduled with an employer, the employer should have already provided information (website, brochures, etc.); if not, by all means, ask for this.

Be careful. If you e-mail with a question the answer to which you could have found online with a little effort, you’ll be perceived negatively as a potential employee (lazy, not smart….). As a potential employee, you want to be perceived as a person who does work, not creates more for someone else.