Tag: Alumni

Social Media Update

by Shannon Kelly

It’s been a busy semester here at Career Services.  As a result, we knew it was critical to get creative and look for some new tools to add to our social media presence.  We’re always looking on ways to keep our resources up-to-date and help you get the information you need in a way that meets your busy schedule.

New Tool #1: Pinterest – http://pinterest.com/penncareerserv/.  What is it? According to their website, “Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.” We took this in a new direction and are treating it as a visual bookmarking tool to share career resources we come across while surfing the web.  Yes, we have our website that has a TON of useful content.  But, there is so many helpful resources out there that we can’t pass up, and we know these resources are critical to your career and internship search.  We’re creating boards (or categories) organically, so as we find a new resource – we’ll create a board.  I think the most fun boards we have are What To Wear – Men, What To Wear – Women and our Words of Wisdom.  Do you have outfits/words of wisdom/resources to share? Let us know!

New Tool #2: Storify – http://storify.com/PennCareerServ. What is it?  “Storify helps its users tell stories by curating social media”, this was taken from the startup’s About section.   We realize we have lots of social media channels, and that we share a lot of information on them.  Not to mention there are even more resources out there that aren’t created by us on LinkedIn, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, online news outlets, etc.  Phew, that is overwhelming!  Well, our Storify account will help aggregate that information and put it in one place.  This means, if you missed our alum post on @PennCareerDay or didn’t realize we had a week dedicated to Careers in Design resources on our social media platforms – you can access this information after-the-fact.

Stay tuned when you get back after winter break (or over it) for even more from us.  We’re excited to have our brand new Social Media Advisory Board, comprised of undergraduate and graduate students, to help us roll out new tools and enhance our existing ones.

 

 

Guest Blog: Career Paths for Psychology Majors

Alan Carniol (C ’05)

It was probably around this time in my senior year that I started to panic. As a psychology major, I didn’t know what my career options were or how my education could help me get a job.  Worse, when I shared my major at career fairs, I often received, “When we need a therapist, we’ll call you,” or the quickly overplayed, “So you can read minds. What am I thinking right now?”

The good news is that there are a ton of jobs that benefit directly from psychological know-how and the skills learned in a psychology major. I’ll discuss some here.

Marketing: Understanding what different people want and connecting products to these wants. The work is rarely developing advertising slogans. More often it’s about data. Qualitative data includes running focus groups or following people in daily life and recording actions. Quantitative data includes collecting surveys, tracking purchases, or measuring online activities.

With this data, products are designed, prices are set, sales channels are selected, and branding is chosen. Straight out of college, you can land a job in market research. From there, you can enter marketing strategy and design marketing campaigns.

Talent Management: How to make an organization stronger by making people happier, better incentivized and more productive. This field includes: hiring, training, executive coaching, structuring compensation (e.g. to make employees collaborative or competitive), building cultures (e.g. connecting cultures of two recently merged companies), and teaching managers to be more effective.

Entry-level jobs include recruiter, human resources analyst or human capital consultant (like at Deloitte or Philly local Gap International). Some jobs require more education. Columbia has a Master’s in Organizational Psychology, and there are other Master’s and PhD programs in Organizational Behavior.

Product Development and Design: Creating products to fill human needs. Building a new product requires design, engineering and understanding of human behavior. The number of opportunities is limited for non-technical experts, but design firms such as IDEO hire people into positions with titles like Human Factors Specialist.

Consulting and Finance: Using data and analysis to determine the value of resources and to make recommendations about these resources. At this point, on-campus recruiting may have finished, but know that the analytical skill set you’ve developed through psychological research can be strong preparation for jobs in these fields.

Entrepreneurism: Building something out of nothing. The web and new web technology, some tailored to non-techies, have made starting a company pretty low cost. As an entrepreneur, you may be called upon to do any or all the other jobs I’ve described.

Education: Education is an industry hungry for innovation and talent. Yes, Teach for America, NYC Teaching Fellows, and individual charter schools would love you in the classroom. In addition, national charter school management organizations like Achievement First or KIPP need help identifying methods to improve education and launching new schools.

Counseling and Therapy: You are probably familiar with some, but not all, of these opportunities. These include social work, family counseling, and clinical psychology. There is a growing field known as life coaching where you enable psychologically healthy individuals to achieve their life goals. Some opportunities exist straight out of school, though often you need additional training.

Wrapping Up

If any of these opportunities intrigue you, reach out to career services and ask for companies who have recruited Penn students in the past. Also, contact Penn alums in these fields and ask for a 20-minute phone call to learn about their experiences.

At the end of each call, don’t ask for a job. Instead, ask for the names of two or three more people to speak with in this industry. Eventually, from these conversations, you will be invited for interviews.

To your success,
Alan

Alan Carniol C’05 is the founder of two companies Career Cadence and Interview Success LLC. There, he uses his psychology major training to design new products, develop marketing strategies, and analyze data qualitatively and statistically. Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, Alan received an MBA from Yale School of Management and worked as a municipal financial consultant for Public Financial Management Inc.

Linking In

I have links on my mind today.

No.  Not those kind of links.

Not those either.

Ah yes.  That’s the ticket.

I hope everyone has been following Penn alumna Ada Chen as she live Tweets her day as an employee of LinkedIn today on our @PennCareerDay feed!

Ada has been working with us all month to highlight opportunities at LinkedIn and also telling us about her career working in (and then creating her own) start-ups!  She wrote a great guest blog about it a few days ago that you really have to read.

Our friends at onlineuniversites.com (who recently named us one of the Top 25 College Career Center Blogs) wrote a great article today about how you can use LinkedIn’s Classmates Tool that I think will be of interest to anyone who has been reading Ada’s day-in-the-life tweets today.  You can catch it here.

Guest Blog – Learning to Let Go: The Toughest Lesson to Learn

by Alyssa Schwenk, CAS ’10

When I was at Penn, I had a certain routine: up at 9, class, gym, library until 3. A late lunch with friends, then into the Daily Pennsylvanian offices to report, write, and edit until the wee hours. I’d break for dinner around 7, return to the office, go home around 12:30, catch up with roommates, do homework, and send emails until about 2:30, when I’d crash. Lather, rinse, repeat. I loved it.

Now — two months into my second year teaching in D.C. through Teach for America — I can’t give you a daily schedule. I have the broadest strokes: Up at ten till six, at school by seven, and the kids come at eight. After that — who knows. While there’s an academic schedule, no two days even resemble one another. Some days, my math lesson goes amazingly, and every one of my 23 kindergarteners can count to 20 (trust me, it’s a big deal). Other days, there’s a tough-tough-tough conversation with a parent, an administrator, or a social worker. Or there’s an earthquake. So it  goes. It’s an experience unlike any other, and one that I’m incredibly proud of doing on a daily basis.

I joined TFA immediately after graduating Penn in 2010, surprising even my closest family and friends. In September of senior year, excited and anxious about the future, I’d decided to apply. I wanted to try something new, to push myself farther: It was time to put myself in a situation that was bigger than me, one that made an impact in the world. I also was struck by how unbelievably lucky I’d been to spend four years at Penn, for being from a family with the savvy to make that happen, even if we didn’t have the resources. I wanted to give back. Like most major life decisions, it wasn’t exactly planned, but in retrospect, it made perfect sense.

Everyone I’d asked about TFA said, “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” While I appreciated the enormity of the work, I also saw the phrase and the sentiment as partly cliché: If closing the achievement gap were easy, obviously it would have happened. Of course it was tough. I was expecting hard and frustrating and a learning curve on teaching. I was expecting to experience situations that I had never encountered. I was expecting steep statistical odds and long nights and a struggle.

But I was not expecting the crash course in emotions, acceptance, and letting go. It’s all in how you look at it. Nothing can ache more than watching a child, who you see every day, who you taught to do multiplication and whose shoes you tie and whose milk you open, not getting what she needs and deserves. But nothing can bring you as much joy as that same child figuring out how to really do subtraction for the first time. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing a student dealing with a situation that can’t be fixed through hard work and strategizing, but nothing is more empowering than seeing that student learn to read, count, and think independently. Even just eight weeks into the school year, I can already see enormous growth in my five-year-olds. Seeing my hard work pay off in such a concrete, immediate and life-changing way — so soon after leaving college — is a rare and amazing privilege. It’s that ability to affect change in my students’ lives that keeps me going on a daily basis.

A Day in the Life: Public Relations

If you value communication, creativity, and working with the media and public to get the word out, then public relations may be for you.  On Wednesday, October 26th, 2011 we welcome alum Meagan Sloan to @PennCareerDay on Twitter.  Public relations is a field where social media has grown in popularity thanks to the variety of tools it offers to this industry. We’re excited to have Meagan post to give you an inside look at what her day is like in the current communications climate. To learn more about Meagan, read her bio below and follow her on the 26th!

As an Account Executive for Brownstein Group’s PR team, Meagan is responsible for day-to-day account activity for clients such as TireVan, Harcum College, and Craiger Drake Designs. In addition to executing public relations tactics for these clients, she also provides support across other PR account, gaining experience in a variety of industries, including real estate, education, non-profit, and consumer products. During her time at Brownstein Group, Meagan has assisted in social media and media relations campaigns, securing placements in a number of local outlets, such as The Inquirer, Philadelphia Business Journal, Philadelphia magazine, Metro and local broadcast affiliates.

A Philadelphia native, Meagan graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in Communication and a minor in Consumer Psychology. While in college, she interned at Brownstein Group in the fall of 2009, supporting the Harcum College, Bancroft, and Asian World of Martial Arts accounts. In addition, Meagan held public relations and advertising internships at other Philadelphia agencies, including Red Tettemer, The Star Group, and The Karma Agency.

If you would like to learn more about a career in public relations, visit our resource page for this field here.