Career Services helps secure jobs, internships

Career Services, located in the Bill Moore Student Success Center, offers weekly information sessions for student internships. They also offer assistance in resume building, interviewing skills, and job search strategies.

Summer is a popular time for students to seek a summer job or internship. Career Services offers assistance to students in many vital aspects of the daunting task of finding a suitable job.

"We have an internship information session every week; it is offered at 11 a.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays," said Ernest Walker, associate director of Career Services.

According to Walker, an average of eight to 10 students per week visit the Career Services office, and the majority of them arrive hoping for one thing "A job. Or how to find one," Walker said.

Although Career Services does play an integral role in many students' searches, they cannot complete all of the required steps in placing students in a job.

"Some people misunderstand our role in job placement. We don't have jobs we can place students in. What we do is job advertisements and postings. Each student has to apply and interview with the employers, and those employers will determine which candidate will receive the job," Walker said.

"We basically center on job search strategies...[but we also] offer resume help, resume origination. We find out where [students] are with their resume and assist them in getting to resume completion," he said.

According to Walker, the interview is often the deciding factor when determining whether one candidate gets a job or another.

"We also offer interviewing skills-because [the interview] is often the most important part of a job search," he said.

Career Services often directs students to Monstertrak, a division of the Monster job website that focuses on students and alumni looking for full-time and part-time positions, internships and on-campus employment.

"We post on-campus jobs through Monstertrak. Around 40 departments on campus use this system and post the jobs themselves," Walker said.

Because Tech is respected for its engineering departments, the most frequently available internships are with engineering firms.

"Of course engineering-type internships are the most popular, but we get a wide range for most majors," Walker said .

According to Walker, Electrical, Mechanical, and Computer engineering, as well as Computer Science internships tend to comprise a substantial bulk of the most commonly available fields.

For some students, summer is the best time to be begin an internship. It is also common, however, for students seeking potential internships to strengthen their job-seeking skills over their extra time during summer and wait until a later semester before actually beginning a new job or internship.

Either way, Career Services offers information and job skills that may help any student in his or her next big career step.