Mina

I’m sure it’s been marked in your calendar since last September. It’s bigger than your homecoming, prom, graduation, birthday parties and everything in between. Last Thursday, the most exciting event of the year arrived…the Career and Internship Fair!
Was that anticlimactic for you? Perhaps even cruel? Well, fear not, fellow/prospective Hawkeyes, I promise to make this post worth your time. It might seem pointless for a freshman to go to events like this one, but trust me, it’s not. As a computer science major, internships in software development are crucial to landing a job in the future, so the earlier I can get my foot in the door, the better.

When I went to the fair, I was well aware that I was one of very few freshman in the room. I knew that I would have to compete with juniors and seniors who were far more qualified than I am for an internship. However, knowing the right companies to target helped me secure two interviews for the next day! I wasn’t expecting everything to happen so fast. All I did was walk up to a recruiter and have a conversation with him. It helped that I did my research beforehand, and slipped in information such as “my WISE mentor interned for you guys last summer” and “I read this article on your website and found it fascinating.” What also helped was my resume.

It’s commonplace that you have 6.5 seconds to impress recruiters, so if the first thing they see on your resume is “two years of experience programming in JAVA,” that automatically distinguishes you from every other freshman computer science major. Over the course of the five hours that the recruiters are there, they are going to see hundreds of people, but only have room to interview a handful the next day. That’s why it’s important to scope a few employers out ahead of time and target the ones that you want to work with the most.
Am I getting ahead of myself here? Let’s backtrack for just a moment. At the start of my senior in high school, my resume was a total joke. I didn’t have any work experience, nor had I worked on any coding project that was worth bragging about. If I were to go about finding an internship, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. All I knew was that I didn’t want to enter my adulthood having never made a dime on my own, so I asked around and was able to get a job tutoring in Latin. Then I asked my friend who had a job at a tax accounting firm if she knew of any job opportunities, and it turned out that the company she worked for was hiring, so I got a job there as well. Then I asked my old golf coach for a summer job, and so within a year I was able to say that I had worked three different jobs.

I also did a hackathon, wrote an iPhone app, and attended a computer science workshop at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Add that to the list of random accolades that seniors get when they graduate, like “High Honors Student” and “Illinois State Scholar,” and within a year I had actually managed to cultivate a decent resume. My guess is that most college freshman do have a lot to brag about, but don’t know how to present their skills in a compelling way.
That’s where the Pomerantz Center comes in. The Pomerantz Center is the place where you go for all things job-related, from paid internships to working at a local restaurant for extra spending money. The Pomerantz Center will look at your resume, help you get through an interview, and provide you with a list of job openings in the area. Using the Pomerantz Center as a launching point for your career search is a great way to manage all of the little details that matter to potential employers.
While I may not have landed an internship yet, I am so grateful that the University of Iowa has provided me with all of the resources I need to get one. I think there’s a stigma at a lot of schools that the only freshmen who have the ability to land internships are geniuses, so as a result a lot of underclassmen won’t bother to show up to career fairs and networking events. Even if I don’t get an internship this year, I think this mentality is wrong because building connections is part of the career process, so the sooner you establish a relationship with a company the more likely you are to stand out from the crowd.
Everyone starts somewhere, Hawkeyes, and I personally wouldn’t want my emergence into the workforce to start anywhere but here.
-Mina

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 29th, 2016 at 1:51 pm and is filed under General, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.