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Career Center
5 BENEFITS OF VISITING THE CAMPUS CAREER CENTER
With “career” right in the title, you might think a college’s career center would be focused on upperclassmen about to enter “the real world.” But the average career center wants to see you start forming your career path and making connections much earlier—even as soon as your first days on campus.
Here are five benefits of visiting your campus career center—and the sooner, the better.
1. Help choosing your major If you haven’t even settled on a major, the career center is probably the last thing on your mind. But moving it to the forefront can have huge benefits for your collegiate outcome—after all, your major guides your collegiate trajectory. “Professionalism and career development start right when you get to college,” said Raquel Aurora Toro, student career counselor at the University of Central Florida’s career services office. She seeks out undecided students during orientation for some initial career planning. In her toolkit is “a major in happiness, where we’re doing self-exploration, looking at the student’s values, interests, personality, and skills. What’s their lifestyle? What are their strengths? What would be better suited for the student long-term?” Toro said for Hispanic students in particular, family can play a substantial role in choosing a major and a career path. “Sometimes students want to be teachers, for example, and mami and papi want them to be something else, and that can cause some internal conflicts. So we have those conversations about how to communicate. We want to honor our parents and the sacrifices they made for us to go to college, but we also want to find the best fit for students.”
2. Help gaining relevant experience After narrowing your focus, the next step toward your dream job is trying it out. “You have to get into the field to see if you’re really going to like it,” Toro said. Relevant experience can come from campus organizations, employer workshops, department research, volunteering, job shadowing, or even studying abroad. And when you are ready to try the job on for size, the career center will be ready, with ample connections to internships, cooperative learning, and job partnerships. Depending on the college, those connections can be far-reaching or close to home. UCF, based in Orlando, has a longstanding relationship with aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. Through the Lockheed Martin College Work Experience Program, students in majors from engineering to marketing work for the company while remaining enrolled at UCF. The connection not only offers great experience and resume building but a pipeline to a job
Not sure your resume is formatted properly? Bring it in. Not a good public speaker? Take a mock interview. Blue shirt or black dress? Ask the expert. Toro recommends you start early and come back often to be as comfortable as possible when the big day comes, but help is still available even at the last minute.
post-graduation. Of the company’s 8,000 Orlando employees, about 3,000 are graduates of UCF and nearby Valencia College.
3. Help forming connections Partnerships like UCF’s Lockheed Martin College Work Experience are abundant nationwide. From nearby research facilities to the country’s leading woodworking shops, colleges and universities forge relationships with companies that align with their specialties. Now add in the students, professors, and employers you interact with every day on campus. Then add LinkedIn to reach the people you haven’t met face to face. Then attend a career fair or two. The network grows again when you factor in alumni, such as the roughly 200,000 at UCF. It all adds up to a vast network of opportunity before you’ve even perfected your resume. “Do the work, while you’re getting your degree, to make the networks, to do the experiences, to meet with professionals in industries and companies and positions that you strive to be in,” Toro said. “Do the homework so that when graduation comes, you’re better prepared.”
4. Help with the details To land the dream job, of course, you’ll have to deal with logistics, the bread and butter of career services. Not sure your resume is formatted properly? Bring it in. Not a good public speaker? Take a mock interview. Blue shirt or black dress? Ask the expert. Toro recommends you start early and come back often to be as comfortable as possible when the big day comes, but help is still available even at the last minute. “We have an event called OMGraduation about a month before graduation for graduating seniors and recent alumni,” she said. “It’s a oneevening event full of career services in a nutshell. You get workshops on resume building, interview skills, job search strategies, and salary negotiation all in one evening.”
5. Help finding the right job When you’re ready to start your job hunt, your college likely has one more ace up its sleeve: an internal job listing directory. At UCF and many other universities, that network is Handshake, an online database of employers vetted by the university. “On Monster or Indeed, that’s the open market, the 20 percent,” Toro said. “But 80 percent of jobs are in the hidden market, where your networking strategies and skills are going to be of use. We also vet our employers who post on our Handshake account, making sure these postings are credible.” And remember, the sooner you start, the better your chances of finding the job you really want. “Finding a job is a job in itself, so you want start that job as soon as possible,” Toro said. “Networking and getting to know people is the way to go about it, and presenting yourself as your own brand. We recommend that if you put in the work, meet with career services, meet with a career counselor, get your resume critiqued by us, do a mock interview, put in the work while you’re getting your education, you are highly more likely to get the right fit job out of graduation.” HE
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