Month: February 2012

A Day in the Life: Environmental, Health, and Safety Software

Last year’s Year of Water theme demonstrated the variety of green career paths out there.  We are excited to continue to explore these paths during our week focused on Green Careers, leading up to the All Ivy Environmental Career Fair on Friday, February 24th.  We welcome alum, Clare Epstein, to @PennCareerDay on Wednesday, February 22nd.  Clare will post about her role with TRA, an environmental, health and safety software company.  To learn more about Clare, read below and remember to follow her on the 22nd!

Clare Epstein graduated from Penn in 1994 with a Bachelor in Urban Studies and has ended up 18 years later as Vice President of TRA, Inc in charge of the IndustrySafe Safety Management Software.  How did her time at Penn help her prepare for her current position? How did she end up 1) working from a home office in the suburbs 2) starting in environmental, health and safety software and 3) managing programmers and developers (among others)-  all things she did not anticipate upon graduation and some of which she swore she would never do?  Learn what “A Day in the Life” is like for Ms. Epstein as she conducts virtual meetings, participates in webinars and sales demos, utilizes social media and technology for sales and marketing efforts and makes time for “real” non virtual activity in the work day too, like exercising and eating.

Day in the Life: Marketing in the Entertainment Industry with Disney & ESPN Media Networks

We’ll be focusing on Entrepreneurial Careers next week, February 13th-17th leading up to Wharton’s Entrepreneurship Conference.  On Tuesday, February 14th we welcome Sasha Mitchell to @PennCareerDay on Twitter!  As the Affiliate Marketing Coordinator at Disney and ESPN Media Networks, Sasha is focused on branding, negotiations and other critical pieces to start and run a business.  Post your questions to our Facebook page or send us a tweet  to @PennCareerServ leading up to February 14th.   Sasha will answer them on @PennCareerDay throughout her day.  Read more about Sasha below, and remember to follow her on Tuesday the 14th!

Sasha is the Affiliate Marketing Coordinator at Disney and ESPN Media Networks. Her group, Affiliate Sales and Marketing, is a unique group within The Walt Disney Company, generating tremendous revenue each year by negotiating billion dollar deals with cable, satellite, and teleco providers. Sasha works specifically on the Cable Network Group (CNG) Brand Team, which includes Disney Channel, Disney XD, Disney Junior, ABC, ABC Family, and SOAPnet. Her counterparts work on the ESPN channels.

Day to day activities include: coordinating the planning, execution and implementation of multiple Affiliate Marketing projects to support the sales and distribution goals with smooth efficiency,  Overseeing all aspects of the fulfillment of requested marketing materials including processing, tracking and fielding requests from Account Management teams, writing creative briefs for assigned projects and serving as the liaison with external and internal vendors, and tracking the Affiliate Marketing budgets. She attributes networking and cultivating valuable relationships throughout her college career for getting her “foot in the door” with Disney and ESPN Media Networks.

Sasha graduated from The College in May 2010 with a Economics major and a Mathematics minor.

Laughter is the Best Medicine for a Sluggish Dissertation

Julie Vick

The first thing I wrote for the Career Services blog was “’Makes ‘Em Laugh:’ A Comic a Day Gets the Dissertation Written.”

In that little piece my goal was to help current doctoral students take a break from their research and writing to laugh at Piled Higher and Deeper, a comic strip that documents the humorous, and not-so-humorous, aspects of grad school.

Now, more than two years later, Jorge Cham, the author who started writing the strip while working on his PhD at Stanford, has to his credit four published books, a movie (which was shown at Penn this past fall) entitled “The Power of Procrastination” and an online store full of T-shirts and mugs with such PhD-pithy sayings as “Grad School: It seemed better than getting a real job” and “The Origin of the Theses”.

Undergrads who are considering graduate education: Piled Higher and Deeper can help you get an interesting read on your possible future.  For first-time readers, there’s a page to check where you can learn about the characters and link to the most popular strips.

As I said last time, not only are the comics themselves great to read but so is the fan mail:

“Oh God, it hurts! It’s all so true, and so evil! I can’t tell whether I should be laughing or crying in sympathy” -Chemistry grad from Caltech

“Your comic strip rocks!  I’ve decided not to go to grad school.” -Electrical Engineering undergrad from Yale U.

“Everybody in my lab loves your work. The songs help soothe the hurt when my experiments fail and I think about the next 6 yrs here” -Microbiology grad from NYU

You can join a mailing list to be notified of new strips.  So once again, I advise, “Give yourself the gift of laughter and spend a little time with PHD!”

Where Do I Start???????????

By Barbara Hewitt

The internet is a terrific resource for job seekers, making information on job openings, employers, and job search techniques instantaneously accessible to all of us. The down side, however, is that the amount of information can be overwhelming. Luckily, Margaret Riley Dikel has provided a terrific resource through the Riley Guide to help you sort through all of this!

The Riley Guide is a regularly updated directory of employment and career information resources available via the Internet. It provides instruction for jobseekers and recruiters on how to use the Internet to their best advantage. While she links to job hunting resources on topics like writing cover letters and resumes and interviewing, I most appreciate her A-Z index which makes finding specific links relevant to your particular search a snap. Click on ‘N”, for example, to find resources for your nonprofit job search or “E” if engineering is your passion. The RileyGuide has loads of links, so you will still need to do some searching to see which might be the most useful for your personal job and internship search, but it is a terrific starting point.