You probably remember the troubles of applying for school. From personal statements and interviews to recommendation letters and resumes, application prep certainly had its late nights.
Beginning your career search may feel like application season all over again, but with higher stakes. Once you leave the safety of academia, how do you get a job in the ‘real world’? How should you organize the job application process without feeling overwhelmed, burnt out, or discouraged? And how do you know if it's the ‘one’?
Here at Petal, we’ve compiled a career resources guide from some of the world’s best universities — Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Northwestern, and UPenn. These tips apply to any student and span a variety of research backgrounds.
Self-Discovery
By becoming more in-tune with who you are and what matters to you, you can efficiently direct your time towards industries and roles that align with your interests. To make well-informed decisions in any career search, take 5 - 10 minutes to answer the following questions:
- What are my interests?
- What skills do I possess?
- How would I describe myself?
- What values are important to me?
- What are my non-negotiables (aka deal breakers)?
Resources
Check out the following resources to hone your responses and elucidate your values.
- Yale’s Values, Interests, & Skills Worksheet: Time to bust out that pen and paper because this worksheet will help you dig deeper into discovering who you are. By the time you finish, you’ll have a better idea of what your best-fit industry is.
- Columbia’s Design Your Next Steps: Navigate to the ‘Build Self Knowledge’ section to try your hand at several activities and exercises to help you identify the core areas of yourself.
- UPenn’s Self-Assessments: If taking insightful quizzes, surveys, and assessments is your thing, then you’ll enjoy UPenn’s compilation of resources.
- Northwestern’s Assessment Tools: Look at Northwestern's ideas for even more assessment tools that help expand your career potential options.
Exploration
Once you have a good idea of your skills and values, start exploring career options. There are infinite ways to create value through work. Explore our list of top career resources from leading experts to organize your search. Use these tools to reflect on what you enjoyed in your classes, internships, extracurricular activities, and more!
Resources
- Harvard’s Career Pathways: Think you might be interested in a few industries but aren’t quite sure? You can delve deeper into each sector and explore new ones that you might have never considered before.
- Columbia’s Design Your Next Steps: Navigate to the ‘Explore Careers’ section to learn how to design your professional journey with strategies, handbooks, and more.
- Northwestern’s Researching Careers: Loved research? This resource will help you apply your research skills towards finding your career pathway.
- Northwestern’s Industries: Want a brief overview of all the industries out there but don’t know where to start? Northwestern provides an in-depth list of industries and includes enough basic information to get you started.
Preparation
Submitting applications is the bread and butter of the job-search process. It’s your opportunity to perfect your job application materials (resumes, cover letters, portfolio, letters of recommendation, etc.), learn about companies, explore the marketplace, practice your interviewing skills, and, eventually, prepare yourself for ‘the one’. Though gathering your application materials can be time-consuming, it doesn’t have to be stressful. Thanks to the resources below, you’ll have the best advice to help you craft the perfect job application.
Resources
- Harvard’s Masters & Ph.D. Resume and Cover Letter Resources: These pdf packets include all the information that any graduate student needs to take their resumes and cover letters to the next level. Whether you need action verb ideas or examples to model from, you can find it all here.
- Harvard’s Resume Writing Video: Prefer a more engaging way to learn how to perfect your resume? Watch this brief video to learn more.
- Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Job Search: This invaluable pdf teaches you how to approach your job search from an entrepreneurial perspective.
- Harvard Law School’s Job Search Toolkit: Are you graduating from law school wanting to learn more about careers in Public Interest Law? This toolkit has everything you need to prepare an application in that field.
- Yale’s Four Steps to the Job Search Process: This resource not only simplifies the career search to four simple steps but also directs you to a plethora of other helpful materials along the way, from resume crafting to interview preparation.
- Columbia’s Virtual and Phone Interview Preparation: Virtual and phone interviews are quickly becoming the new norm in today's job environment. This resource prepares you to impress your interviewers in the new “normal.”
- Columbia’s Employer Perspective: Ever wondered what it was like to evaluate job applicants from an employer’s perspective? Read this article to learn about the top qualities that employers seek.
Networking
Networking is a skill that can get your foot in the door. However, if you don’t have prior training or experience, developing the talent on your own can be confusing and scary. For starters, what is networking? Where do I start, and how do I do it? Are there unspoken rules I should follow? The resources below will answer your networking questions and prepare you to make the right connections.
Resources
- Harvard’s Building Professional Connections: This pdf details the fundamentals of networking and how you can facilitate the most engaging conversations.
- Harvard’s Sample Networking & Thank You Emails: Reaching out to your network and showing appreciation for their help are two critical steps that you can’t afford to miss. This pdf contains several examples to use as a template for your emails.
- Yale’s Networking Video: Prefer a more visual and audio-based way of learning how to network? Yale created a video just for you.
- UPenn’s Meaningful Connections: This brief presentation highlights the importance of networking in the career search process and how to best leverage your existing connections.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve read through the materials above and followed their advice, you should feel confident about how you will appear on paper. However, there are no substitutes for practice and a positive learning environment. Call up some friends and ask them to mock interview with you. Challenge yourself to connect with three new network contacts a week and invite them for informational interviews. Record your successes and failures; these will encourage you later on.
If you’re wrapping up grad school but stuck writing papers, check out a powerful tool that will save writing time so you can spend more time in your job search. Petal is a cloud-native reference management solution developed for academic research labs, university faculty, graduate researchers, and industry professionals. Petal is built with the latest web application technology, offers the most intuitive user experience, requires no download or training to use. Sign up today and check out Petal’s unique and powerful automation capabilities for yourself!