Be A Leader And Choose Your Attitude!

With Get On Board Days right around the corner, choosing the right attitude could be the key to your success in your next job. Many would not link Get On Board Days with their future employer. However, the attitude and work ethic you choose while serving different organizations within the college are relative to the way you perform in your career. You have the opportunity not only to build your resume by joining campus organizations but also to strengthen your professional and networking skills.
The following article is from Jobweb.com. It can help get you get started in the right direction.




Developing an Internship State of Mind

By Marianne Green

Most students know that internships are considered the gold standard of career experience, but you may find it difficult to pursue internships because of academic time pressures, credit issues, community service commitments, or the need to subsidize your college expenses with more mundane employment.

Even if that’s the case, you can adopt the “internship state of mind, ” a key attitude that will help you translate your experiences—clubs, social organizations, jobs, volunteer work, leadership, cultural activities—into valuable, career related opportunities that will rival a formal internship for career value when noted on your resume and discussed in an interview.

Here’s how it’s done:

1. Get an Attitude! Start with an attitude of curiosity, persistence and optimism. Consider each experience—no matter how mundane—a springboard for learning and development.

2. Set an Agenda. Set your own learning agenda. What skills do you want to hone or learn? What questions would you like answered? Be realistic.

3. Learn. Learn. Learn. Do the best you can with the job at hand. Claim small victories each time you succeed. Learn from your mistakes.

4. Watch and Listen. Be a keen observer and listener: Notice organizational culture, management style, financial problems, and challenges beyond your own niche. Take note of how your small job or position contributes to the organizational mission.

5. Build New Skills. Look for opportunities to take on new responsibilities to increase your skill set, above and beyond your prescribed duties. Ask to attend meetings, shadow other professionals, read official documents such as annual reports, strategic plans, etc.

6. Turn Small Talk Into Big Talk. Engage people in your environment to gain insights about the organization or their particular jobs. Do informational interviews to glean additional information. Consider the people you talk with part of your network. Plan to keep in touch with them when your summer experience concludes.

7. Reflect on your experience. Keep a journal or blog about your daily or weekly observations and accomplishments. Chart the ups and downs of your performance.

8. Add Your Summer Experience to Your Resume. Write about this experience on your resume. Use action verbs, cite specific skills used or acquired, quantify, and include your accomplishments.



Jess really wanted to do an unpaid marketing internship at the local food bank during the summer, but also needed to earn enough money for books and school supplies for the fall. He took a lucrative job as a waiter at a high end restaurant, freeing up time to volunteer at the food bank.

He decided to approach his volunteering as if it was an internship: He worked his hours stocking shelves and unloading trucks but he also got permission to shadow the CEO of the Food Bank, attending board meetings, and marketing strategy session. He created some appealing displays for canned vegetables, and offered to paint the back wall to spruce of the space. He used his weekend time to work on an outreach campaign for the Food Bank, walking through various communities to spread the word. By the end of the summer, Jess had created a set of experiences and skills that were as good or better than the skills he would have gotten in a formal internship.

Kaitlin, an English major who was interested in a publishing career, worked for the Jefferson Bank all through college. She disliked the administrative and financial work she had to do on a daily basis, but it paid the bills. Since she couldn't do a formal internship in her field, she decided to seek out tasks that would help her hone her editing, proofreading and writing skills. Every time someone needed help with letter writing, she volunteered some ideas. She offered to proofread correspondence and the draft of the new procedures manual that was being developed. She found out that the bank had a newsletter that mentioned events that occurred in the employees lives. On her own time, Kaitlin started writing short articles on trips that employees had taken, their hobbies, as well as milestones in their lives. Eventually, she was typing, illustrating and printing the whole newsletter. Kaitlin's resume listed all of the skills and experience she had acquired at her banking job, skills that related to the field of publishing.

Reference: http://www.jobweb.com/studentarticles.aspx?id=1905