CareerCast: Finding an Internship in the Public Sector

by Jaclyn Chen (W ‘12) & Angie Luo (C ‘11)

Career Services is pleased to present the third episode of our “Finding an Internship” videos from CareerCast: The Penn Career Services podcast.

Current Penn students Jaclyn Chen and Angie Luo interviewed their peers in a wide range of industries to find out how they approached getting an internship. In this episode, they talk to students who ventured into the public sector. Enjoy.


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CareerCast: Finding a Communications Internship

by Jaclyn Chen (W ‘12) & Angie Luo (C ‘11)

The next industry in our “finding an internship” video series is communications.

Not only have these students had a wide array of internships, they all have something unique to offer about how they found their internships. For the communications industry especially, internships can pop up anywhere – start your search early – and at any time, so be persistent.  We sure learned a lot – who knew you could make real contacts freshman year, or get rejected and then receive an offer?  Take a listen, and perhaps their experiences will spark your search.  Good luck!


Want to watch on your mobile device? Click here!

CareerCast: Finding a Consulting Internship

by Jaclyn Chen (W ’12) & Angie Luo (C ’11)

Introducing our first of many industry-specific videos!

As work-study students in Career Services, we were given the project to interview Penn students about their internships in certain industries: consulting, finance, public sector, and communications (we’ll be expanding to more industries in the future).  We asked different questions about how they found their internship, what their responsibilities were, what they learned, what skills they used, etc.  We tried to ask the kinds of questions we have ourselves about the internship process and we hope you find their answers as enlightening as we did.

The response we got was great, and we’ve started to compile the videos by industry and then by question. Here’s the first one:  “Consulting: Finding an Internship”

Enjoy – and let us know if there’s a specific industry you’d like to see explored in the future!


Want to watch on your mobile device? Click here!

Drumroll, please!

Penn Career Services is delighted to announce our new blog name and contest winner!

The Penn Career Services blog will be called: Penn & Beyond: Thoughtful Career Advice for Penn Students and Alumni.

(courtesy of ADoseofShipBoy via Flickr)

Congratulations to Lin Yuan, who will receive the $25 iTunes gift card for submitting the inspiration: PENNsive: Thoughtful Career Advice for Penn Students and Alumni and also to counselor Helen Cheung for suggesting “…& Beyond.”

Thanks to everyone who participated and keep coming back for thoughtful advice for your life beyond Penn!

Make sure Facebook is your Friend, not your Enemy

by Lin Yuan

My name is Lin Yuan and I’m a workstudy for the Career Services office. I do a lot of Facebook and Twitter posts for the office. It’s a pretty sweet job because how many people can say they get paid to be on Facebook and Twitter all day? It’s definitely a fun job, but also pretty informative and I’ve already learned so much from work that I want to share with you all.

I come across a lot of articles at work about social media making or breaking a job offer. Employers these days definitely search  job applicants on Facebook and other sites to see if they can dig up any dirt or just get to know you better. Even if you’re not applying for a job or internship now, make sure your Facebook profile always puts your best face forward:

1)      Untag unattractive or incriminating photos of yourself. Better yet, ask your friends to delete them.

2)      Use Facebook’s friend lists functions.  Friend lists are great to classify your hundreds of friends into manageable groups. I made a friend list for acquaintances and family friends called PG, with limited access to my profile. Closer friends go into a PG-13 list. And remember, if it’s R, it probably shouldn’t be on Facebook!

3)      Put some thought into your About Me section. Employers might have something in common with you that could give you more to talk about in an interview. Use your About Me section to make your profile more personalized and show off what an interesting person you are! (Check out this student branding success story).

4)      Exercise general caution on Facebook. Facebook creates a huge, complicated web of contacts, so even if you do use privacy settings, make sure you don’t put anything on your profile that you wouldn’t want everyone to see. For example, a popular privacy setting is only letting Friends of Friends see your Facebook photos. It sounds pretty reasonable, but when you have 500 friends and each of them have 500 friends, that’s suddenly a lot of people with access to your pictures from last night’s party.

More resources and tips about Facebook can be found on Career Services’ Social Media page.

And if you aren’t already, become a fan of University of Pennsylvania Career Services on Facebook!

We’ll keep you updated on our events & workshops and post information that can help you with your career search. (I promise to keep the corny puns to a minimum!)