Finals are around the corner, your friends started planning a graduation trip, and your lease is almost over at your college apartment. You are ready to finish school but started to think, now what? What I will do now without a set schedule from Monday to Friday. My parents already motioned that they would like to stop paying for my housing and food, or just like in my case, you want to stop taking student loans.
Well, I brag about going to business school because they are constantly reminding you that you need to find a job after school there. However, to my surprise, that is not the case for everyone, and that statics (not made by me) show that almost 53% of recent college graduates have no job after graduation or end up working in a job that does not require a bachelor degree. How does that happen? I found out through my short experience as a student leader that those students share a few things in common:
- They don’t have a network
- They are unaware of the resources offered by the school for professional developed
- They are unsure of the path they would like to pursue after school
- They don’t know how to leverage their skill or background
I know what you are thinking. School is already hard, and now you are telling me to do extra work to get a job. Well, the short answer is yes. In a world where you only get what you ask and work for, I encourage people to work hard to get the best out of the best (because you deserve it). So what should I start working on? I have a small list for you below, and I will be breaking each item in the list in upcoming posts.
- Know yourself. Know what you like to do or, in the worse case, what you don’t like to do. The early you know where you want to take your career, the faster you can get there (spoiler alert: it is a work in progress).
- Get involved with organizations. You need to get involved with people that have similar goals in life to you. This would start building your support system (you will need one).
- Grow your professional network. Universities are the best place to start creating your network because you may be taking classes with the next Jeff Bezos at the end of the day, and you don’t know it YET. I recommend you to listen to others. You can always learn.
- Do the extra work. It may be 2 hours networking event at school or 30 min job search, but trust me, the jobs would not knock on your door.
Navigating life after undergrad should not be stressful, but it does require some work from you. I hope this helps you start your out-of-school journey and that you come back as I share my ever-growing experience on how I went from being a community college student to working in Corporate America.
Best,
Loymi
Smart is the New Black 