College Grad Lessons

Graduating college can be overwhelming. One of my biggest stresses during senior year was figuring out what I wanted to do as a career. I majored in Economics and minored in Asian Studies, and almost applied to law school. Then, around this time last year, I decided that I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I was faced with challenge of coming up with a new career path. Of course, your first job out of college does not have to be what you do for your entire career, but I wanted to have an idea of the types of jobs I might want to pursue.

The first thing I did was research. I spent a lot of time googling entry-level jobs, looking at job listings and reading about how to choose a career path. This helped me get an idea of what was out there. It was particularly useful to look at job listings for places I wanted to live to get a sense of what industries were in each city. It also helped to see what skills were in demand. Based on the skills I had and the internships I had completed, I figured that I should focus on business analyst or communications positions. I still wasn’t sure what I actually wanted to do though.

I spent some time working on my resume with my dad and asked him what types of jobs he thought I might be interested in pursuing. He agreed that communications would be a good fit for me and offered to ask some people he knew through work if they would be willing to talk to me about their careers in communications, as well as what types of jobs a recent college graduate typically filled. This is where networking becomes very useful, as I’ve discussed in a previous post.

Talking to people that have been working in a field that you are considering is a great way to decide whether or not you are actually interested in it. As an added bonus, talking to people that do what you are interested in can lead to finding a job opening that is a good fit for you.

Ultimately, it’s okay if you graduate college and don’t know what you want to do. It’s okay if your first job ends up having nothing to do with what you want to be your career. Sometimes trying something you have the qualifications for leads to career options that you never considered, but turn out to be a perfect fit.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Finding a Job, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.