Photo courtesy of Debra Stark
The Cahill Career Center celebrated Career Development Month with the launch of Career Café on Nov. 14 and 15. This was the first of a series of Career Cafés the Center plans to offer throughout the year. Students were invited to enjoy a beverage and snack while meeting with a senior peer career adviser to have their resume reviewed or learn how to start one. While most of the students attending brought a paper resume, students were also to receive feedback while sharing their resumes on their cell phones. Students were encouraged to bring career, internship and cooperative education questions which were answered by the peer advisers.
“This is exactly the environment we wanted to create,” said Debra Stark, one of the Assistant Directors of the center. “We want students to feel welcome and comfortable in the Cahill Center and we thought an initial meeting with a senior peer career adviser was a good way to break the ice.”
Students were encouraged to make appointments with their personal career advisers. Each student has his or her own career adviser based on the school they are enrolled in. The career advisers are experts in the majors in the school they advise and can provide many resources to students including internship and cooperative education searches, resume advice, mock interviews and research on jobs, industries and companies. Students are encouraged to stop in at any time to discuss potential career choices and get assistance with developing their job search tools.
Students at the event found working one-on-one with senior peer career advisers helpful.
“It was very informative. I got a nice review on my resume so it really helped my resume to stand out,” said Subin Mala. “[The Senior Peer Career Adviser] also gave me what the employers are looking for in employees and she also helped me to develop my LinkedIn page.”
Approximately 80 percent of employers say that they use LinkedIn as a recruiting tool so it is important to have an enticing page that employers will want to review. Besides job searching, there are other tricks to LinkedIn such as searching for Ramapo alumni in your career field to network with and looking for Ramapo alumni with a particular company you would like to work for.
“I thought my resume was good because I had put in a lot of effort,” said Tejas Baidya, “but coming here, I know that it’s better now because the session pointed out little mistakes and shortcomings I had that I did not see before.”
In today’s rapidly changing economy, it has become more and more important to be well prepared to enter the job market and to know what your goals are. You cannot get there if you don’t know where you are going. The Cahill Career Center staff is here to assist you.
This article was written by a student employee of the Cahill Career Center.
msheikh@ramapo.edu
