Remember when your teachers and parents would always say that as long as you worked hard in school, you would have amazing opportunities after? Well, that is probably the biggest misconception you could ever have. Let’s get it straight: snagging fantastic grades and being captain of the math league at school aren’t qualities that will land you a job with the Big4. What will better aid you, though, in landing employment after graduation is actual work experience during your undergrad years.

Gaining hands-on experience in the industry of your choice is essential. You make yourself that much more marketable with honed-in skills and a real perspective of the business world. Listing only a fabulous GPA on your resume does not, by any means, communicate technical and soft skills; however, work experience does. With a couple internships under your belt, you can easily demonstrate several soft skills that are essential for success: communication skills, perseverance, and an eagerness to learn.

In addition to demonstrating that you have a working knowledge of the field, you also to yourself that this industry is where you belong. Let’s use an unrelated example: when you go to a restaurant and you look at the menu, you find your mouth salivating just reading the names and descriptions of some dishes. But when the plates arrive, you find that some of these dishes are not to your liking just but that’s only out of preference. So you see, there’s a fine line between theory and practice, and this idea also applies to professions. You might enjoy the idea of a career up until the point where you find out that the people and environment aren’t for you. Why would you want to wait four years to find out that you wasted your bachelor’s degree on a career you end up waiting when you could’ve spent a summer interning to find out?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that school grades are completely useless. Doing well and having the grades to prove it does give you an edge, but only so much of one. The market is saturated with many excellent graduates, so you have to make yourself stand out by showing your interest and bypassing the need for basic training.

And so what if you went to a prestigious university? Well, if all you ever did was study then the money spent was a waste. That lump sum of a tuition you paid bought you a wedge to stick in the door of the working world. The name of the school awarded you more credibility than what you had when looking for your first job (which is equivalent to zero), as well as a chance to open your mind and to make fabulous connections. After all, not every school can have the EVP of Time Warner Cable come to speak to a small class or have the editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit do a speaking engagement while on vacation in Paris. If you have the opportunity to go to a school with great connections, take advantage of it and get ready to jot down your own experiences, instead of reading about others’.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.