CAREER LESSONS
Extracting and Marketing Your Job-like Experiences
Bottom Photo - Andrew Stevens, USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center.
Michael T. May, MEM-0586 and Thomas Brackman, MEM-2383
Michael May is a professor of geology at Western Kentucky University where for 22 years he has had interest in sedimentary geology as applied to solving problems in the environmental and energy sectors in which he integrates low-temperature geochemistry and geophysics.
Thomas Brackman is the Vice President and Senior Geophysicist for Near Surface Geophysics Innovations and the Director of the Western Kentucky University Geophysics Laboratory and he has over 20 years experience teaching and consulting in near surface geologic scenarios including karst and other challenging environments.
Have you ever seen a job posting or even a graduate school
position with a stipend stating that the ideal candidate would have work experience yet you may not have full-time work experience or even a full summer-time related job on your resume? You should consider that your formal courses, field camp, field trips, and senior projects, or presentations resulting from these given at conferences at local, state, regional and national meetings may have engaged you in acquiring skills that you can market as being quite similar to tasks you will be completing for a job that starts a career.
Marketing and advertising professionals are effective only if they package the “deal” to a potential customer or client. How effective are you at packaging your experiences from formal courses, independent research opportunities, part-time work, volunteering, and projects? Many advertisements for positions may strive for the ideal candidate, but many students getting out of the undergraduate experience have little or no on-the-job training, a situation which is obviously less than ideal. On the other hand, perhaps some of the courses you as a student have taken contain elements of real job tasks commonly in the form of client or regulatory body “deliverables” such as reports that may be an integral part of course assignments. You should look for those and pull them out, highlight them and put them in a summary section or “select accomplishments” section in your resume.
We have decades of experience interacting with geoscience students and preparing them for additional schooling or employment, primarily from undergraduate programs. Since most of our experience as teachers has been at “teaching insti- tutions” as opposed to “research 1 or R-1” universities, we have seen the challenges that instructors/professors and students have faced, particularly as most state universities nowadays are merely assisted by state legislative bodies commonly at less than 20% of a given university’s annual operating bud-
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get. Over the past twenty years for example, in Kentucky we have experienced a decrease in state funding from over 50% to about 17% of a given year’s operating budget. There has also been administrative pressure to get students to graduate “on time” and to apparently always seek ways to slim down programmatic requirements, cutting B.S. programs from 130+ credit hours to 120. Additionally, another initiative is to create “JUMP” opportunities (joint undergraduate-master’s program) in which a student earns an MS degree with about 130 total credit hours earned. There are pros and cons to these initiatives, but as the saying goes, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Thus, there might be strong opinions as to what is “best” depending on where one is positioned on the spectrum from university presidents and provosts to profes- sors to students.
As a student however, we suggest that you select the cur-
riculum and degree structure that you can best benefit from in your particular situation, even if there appears to be a push to take “fewer credits.” Decades ago students did not have to work as much as they do now to make ends meet, thus the reality of life getting in the way of life is upon college campuses everywhere. Administrators and politicians and those count- ing number of graduates per year appear to have ignored some of the realities of students having to work more and more while in school (and thus average finishing times are mostly more than 4 years). We live in these times and may not be able to have a big choice in changing this situation, however what you as a student can do, with the help of advisors, is to seek out courses, field trips, and learning opportunities that you can align with career readiness and continued graduate stud- ies. Since the number of hours in programs may be less than in the past, it is important to wisely choose elective courses that provide the most hands on, out of doors, field-oriented, and overall project-management-style learning opportunities.
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