The Penn Internship WHAT?

Anne Marie Gercke, Associate Director

One resource in Career Services that is seemingly underutilized yet highly useful is the Penn Internship Network.  As a current student, you may be familiar with our annual pleas to fill out our Summer Surveys to tell us what you did with your summer whether it be travel, intern, take coursework, etc. We then compile extremely robust reports with the data for students to use as a point of reference for their own exploration and search. What we ALSO do, however, is ask the students who complete the surveys to indicate if they’d be willing to be an information resource for future students interested in the same type of opportunity. If they say yes, we include them in what is called the Penn Internship Network. The quickest way to find the tool (aside from clicking the hyperlink I just provided) is to type “Penn Internship Network” into the search box on our website. It’s usually the first thing that will pop up.

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You only need your PennKey and password to access the database and once you do, this is what you’ll see:

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Notice that you can search by multiple fields including industry, job type, major and more! Are you a freshman wondering what types of internships other freshman have gotten in the past? Use the ‘Choose Class Status’ dropdown to sort by class year! Want an internship this summer but know you need to live at home in California? Search by location! Once you select your criteria and hit search, you’ll find a list of students who have agreed to be contacts for other students interested in the same type of summer opportunity. We’ll provide their email addresses and you are more than welcome to reach out to them to do some informational interviewing. (For tips on informational interviewing, click here.) The point of this process is to learn from your peers and perhaps get better connected and acquainted with various opportunities through networking. One of the greatest perks of coming to Penn (aside from your stellar education, of course) is the personal and professional network that you will build over your four years here and beyond – and there is no time better than the present to get started! For questions on better utilizing the Penn Internship Network or anything else career-related, feel free to stop in to see us so we can help!

 

 

Resources for our Veterans

Career Services is pleased to announce a new section of our website dedicated to career resources for our students and alumni who are veterans of the armed forces.

rotcYou can check out our new page here.

You’ll find job boards, military friendly career fairs, internship opportunities and more.  If you have a resource that you would like to see included, please feel free to contact our webmaster.

Our Resources for Veterans page is just one part of our collection of resources for specific populations and affinity groups.  Be sure to see all that we have to offer!!

Website Maintenance Tonight

UPDATE (11/11/14 11:07am EST): Our website is back up, though some features like the design database or the career plan survey forms are still offline. Stay tuned. PennLink and iNet remain unaffected by these problems on the main website. Job hunt away!!

For any night owls out there, please note that the Career Services website will be down this evening/early tomorrow morning from 3am-6am EST.

The blog will stay online, as will our HPAB letters service, iNet and PennLink. However, you will have to go directly to their landing pages to access them, so please go there now and bookmark them.

We don’t expect this outage to last past 6am, though some individual pages will continued to be updated throughout the day.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Take Another Tour

I posted the following blog a couple of summers ago, but I’ve updated it a bit since we have revamped our website.

Taking a Tour

By Sharon Fleshman

Ok, so I’m not referring to a quick getaway to the islands.  I’m actually suggesting that you take a “tour” of the Career Services website.  (You could check out the website while relaxing on the beach, but I digress…)

Based on our previous analysis of Career Services’ website use, many visitors find information by way of Google or some other keyword search.  While this is certainly an efficient way to go, it’s easy to miss valuable resources if you always take this approach.  Assuming you have some down time during the remainder of the summer, try to explore our website a bit more.

As in the past, our website has plenty of content, but we anticipate that our new format will be easier to navigate.  So just start somewhere, perhaps setting aside a little time each week to browse. One of my favorite sections is our Resources by Career Field web page, which now has helpful categories such as Career Advice, Job and Internship Listings, Sample Employers and Opportunities, Professional Associations, and Additional Links for each career field listed.

As you go along, take some snapshots by bookmarking web pages with resources that will be the most useful for you going forward.  And while you’re at it, do enjoy the last days of summer and get a little touring in (offline, of course).

The (Adaptable, Resourceful, Multitalented) Versatile PhD

Graduate students and postdocs may be aware of Career Services’ many resources on academic careers and the academic job search.  But are you also familiar with the resources we have for PhDs/ABDs who are considering a career beyond academia? The Versatile PhD is one of the valuable tools Career Services provides to help you in your decision making and your job hunting.

The Versatile PhD is a web-based resource that you can use anytime, from any computer.  It includes:

  • A thriving, supportive web-based community where you can participate in discussions, network with real “Versatile PhDs” (humanists, social scientists and STEM trained individuals working outside the academy) or, if you prefer, just read and learn.
  • An online collection of compelling first-person narratives written by Versatile PhDs who describe how they established their post-academic careers and give their best advice for you.
  • An associated LinkedIn group where you can begin to build an online presence and network with Versatile PhDs in a wide variety of fields.
  • Free online “Career Panel” discussions where Versatile PhDs working in a given field share their specific professional experiences in that field and answer questions from members. Online panels in 2012 included Careers in Market Research, Careers in Corporate and Institutional Research and Careers in Program Evaluation.  Panels from prior years are archived on the site.

Coming up on November 12-16, 2012:  Entrepreneurship for STEM PhDs featuring STEM PhDs currently running businesses they started from the ground up, or working in small start-ups.  The panel is presented in an asynchronous format; participate anytime during the week.

University of Pennsylvania graduate students and postdocs have access to all the content areas on the website, including the upcoming panel  – go to the Career Services Reference Library (on the left side of Career Services homepage) and click on Online Subscriptions.  You will be asked to provide your PennKey and password to access The Versatile PhD.