Entry by Bobby Wade, Peer Career Advisor, Wabash College Career Services
It’s been a hectic first half of the semester at Career Services, and it promises to get even busier. As students returned for fall, the scramble for on-campus jobs was in full swing the first few weeks back. As a result, all 14 peer career advisors, including myself, were busy every day with resume and cover letter critiques. Now that campus jobs are mostly filled and recruiting season has begun, I’ve kept busy helping seniors who are flooding the office with questions about post-grad job applications.
I’ve had a number of independent projects this semester that I am very excited about, one of which began this past summer. In June, I was notified that Paul Wineman, former president of my national fraternity and current negotiations consultant, was going to visit my house for homecoming weekend. With the help of a fraternity brother, I was able to contact him and arrange a talk for the Friday of homecoming. Paul, who normally charges $5,000 to $10,000 per engagement, was gracious enough to talk for free! Mr. Wineman gave a talk about how to become a more effective negotiator in all types of situations. He was even kind enough to give away his guide to negotiating to the first 25 people who showed up. The event was a great success, and I was glad to see an outstanding attendance of over 40 students.
Most recently, I’ve been helping the Director of the Business Leaders Program, Angie Cook-Smith, organize upcoming networking dinners to be held in late October and mid-November. I’ve really enjoyed these projects, because they’ve allowed me to utilize the skills I developed this past summer while putting together the Wabash College Community Fair. To help prepare students for these events, I created a how-to guide for networking. It is still undergoing a few revisions with the help of Scott Crawford and Betsy Knott, but I look forward to sending it out to students in the coming days.
That has been my first few months in a nutshell. In the coming weeks, I look forward to heading the promotion of our new international job and internship resource, Going Global. This is a new subscription the office has purchased that will allow students to search for employment opportunities all around the world. It not only has job postings, but also other fantastic features such as: cultural advice, industry analyses for individual countries, access to professional and social networking groups, as well as information on salary ranges and cost of living. Going Global is truly a one-stop-shop for your international job search needs. Once I become more acquainted with the website, I will post an event on WabashWorks to show students how to effectively utilize our new tool. As you can see, even though fall weather has arrived, things are just heating up here at Career Services.
