I signed up and went to the How to Spend Your First-Year Summer panel with peer career advisors on March 6th at the Gordon Career Center. It was a short but impactful experience and I recommend it to all incoming first years at Wesleyan. I will definitely book an appointment with peer career advisors in the future as they have the most up-to-date information on the “Job Search.” In this reflection piece, I want to talk about what I learned during the career panel, some questions I had, and feedback on the overall organization of the event itself.
The career panel consisted of five or so juniors and seniors from different backgrounds. All of them sans one were peer career advisors at the Gordon Career Center. What stood out to me the most during the talks, where each panelist elaborated on their first year summer experience, was the opportunities available abroad (Europe!), the difference between an on-campus and off-campus experience, and the effectiveness of cold emailing and messaging Wesleyan alumni. I was feeling slightly discouraged about my summer experience after I found out that international students cannot work during their first year summer and that the CPT allows only 6 months of authorized work. I want to gain some experience during the summer but also do not have the funds to travel nor the authorization to work. However, I will look into programs and scholarships for the summer without limiting myself to only Wesleyan. And I will try to work on my network and my resume during the summer to apply for a winter internship in 2025. One panelist’s experience has also inspired me to pour some time into learning how to invest during the summer.
One question I had was how exactly to reach out to an alum and have a fruitful conversation that yields a meaningful connection that I can actually utilize in the future. I talked with Cece after the main panel event and we ended up looking through example conversations she had through LinkedIn. Cece was transparent and pointed with her advice on connecting with people. We talked about how to approach a phone call with an alumni to explore career options. I will be compiling a list of ten questions for my phone call with Andrew Daggon, a 2021 alum, tomorrow thanks to her advice. She showed us some of her cover letters which got her an internship at Bloomberg, a globally renowned fintech company, and how she linked her past experience in the fast food industry to customer interaction to land the interview. Needless to say, it was a very uplifting experience that illustrated that not all summer experiences are the same.
Some suggestions I would like to give the organizers of the panel would be to use name cards, provide a brief brochure with the panelists’ information, and have a longer Q&A section. The name cards and brochures would help the attendees ask personalized questions to the panelists as I had a hard time memorizing their names and experiences as the event went on. I was impressed and wanted to ask questions during their speech but had forgotten what I wanted to ask by the time the Q&A section rolled around. It would also help if the moderator asked a few questions for all the panelists to answer to essentially “dig” for useful information. Because I definitely felt like the panelists had a lot of useful information to give. But I couldn’t verbalize my questions on the fly. However, overall, I think it was best that the event wasn’t too long and not too formal. I enjoyed the event and got a lot out of it.
