 Hello, everyone. Welcome to our third Tuesday talks conversation. We are so excited to get to feature some of our lovely colleagues on campus. And we know that a lot of these offices are people you're going to regularly interact with in your time at university. My name, as always, is Gray strain. I use they them or she her pronouns and I'm one of the staff academic advisors here in the CSC UAO. And I am joined today by a colleague from the engineering career resource center Amanda, would you like to take a second to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your job and what you do in the ECRC. Sure. Hi everyone, my name is Amanda Costin and I am a career services manager, as well as an event manager within the College of Engineering Engineering Career Resource Center. So the ECRC is here to help engineering computer science and data science students and alumni successfully make a transition from college to career. We are here to assist students with their internship co op and full time job search, job searches, and offer a variety of services such as individualized career advising appointments, professional development workshops. We do have an online recruiting system that is for student use as well as employers. And we also host career fairs career events and networking events. We have a team of staff and a team of career services managers work with both companies and students. So we have the best kind of insight into both the student world and what you're looking for and how to help you as well as what employers are looking for when they're wanting to recruit Michigan engineers. Yeah, ECRC is honestly one of my number one resources that I feel like I'm always recommending students to you all truly do it all when it comes to anything career internship. There's truly so many reasons to send students your way. I do have to start with the question I think I get the most often from students and I apologize because it can be a bit of a big one. So I'm curious how you in the ECRC respond when a student asks, you know, what is an employer looking for or how do I make myself the perfect applicant. Yeah, that's a good question. We do get that fairly often. And a lot of times it comes down to just fit in it in terms of fit for the employer and fit for you. So you want to think of it as, you know, how can I show up and present myself in the best light for an employer to see me and my skills and what I can contribute to their company. But also you want to make sure that the company is in line with what you're what you are looking for as well. So doing research on the companies that typically recruit Michigan engineers, and the industries that you're looking into going into can really give you insight into a company's culture. And what they're looking for in terms of the skills that are required to do the jobs they're recruiting for, as well as, you know, what their kind of day to day work life is like sometimes a company will have an open air workspace sometimes it will be remote opportunities sometimes it's going to be you know you're going to be in a lab, or facilities are going to need to be on site. So all of those things will add up to what a good fit is going to look like for the company and for you so there's not one answer to how to prepare or to showcase your best side to a company it's really going to be based on the research you do the industry you're looking into and the companies you're looking to work for. I appreciate that piece about fit I think students often get caught up in. Oh like what is the GPA I need or how many internships what you know many how many hours of research experience so I think that that fit pieces is really important. Yes. I'm curious kind of related to that question. What would you say and this might be hard to narrow down I appreciate. Your opinion are the top three most common piece of advice that you give to students around searching for and applying to jobs. Yeah, so top three pieces of advice when you're coming into the fall semester. Keep in mind that's when recruiting starts. So, recruiters and employers will be on campus in the beginning of September wanting to recruit for their internships for the following summer, or for full time jobs that will begin after you graduate in May. And this starts early so lots of lots of employers want to get on campus and talk to you as early as possible so your first step would be to update your resume so what did you do this past summer. Do you need to add qualifications to your resume and internship. Make sure you've got everything ready to go and have an ECRC advisor look over it for you. And I'm sure we'll talk about how to make appointments here in a little bit, but getting your resume reviewed is is definitely step one and preparing for the recruiting season and to begin applying for positions. The next step would be to attend one of our career fair preparation workshops. This year we're really excited because we can offer it to students virtually, as well as in person so we're going to be doing one workshop in person one virtually, which will be really nice because it's going to give some students flexibility and how they prepare to, or how they would like to learn about the career fairs, but definitely attend one of those because we give you great information about what companies are looking for what you can expect how to prepare how to create what we call an elevator pitch. And that will go into more during the workshops but it gives you a lot of great information. Those are available through engineering careers by 1220, which is our new recruiting system. So if you're interested in the dates and times of those workshops they are in that system for you to view. You can also go on to the engineering career resource centers website and viewer workshop schedule there as well. And then the third piece is to really start to research companies of interest. So depending on you know what your interest is and where you see yourself in the in your future career, start to look at some of those companies and what their typical practices have been in the past, their job postings what are out there currently right now, what skills are there, you know requiring and their job postings taking a look at your resume to see if it lines up so those are the three, three biggest pieces to kind of jump into the fall recruiting semester get your up, get your resume looked at and updated, go to a career fair preparation workshop and start to research companies of interest. Sounds good. Yeah, I hope that all of our students take advantage of really all the ECRC resources but especially that piece that is the career fairs. I think it is so important that our students get that face time. I know you've talked a little bit about kind of the career fairs and also you know the recruitment season which we know is the fall semester. When would you say a student should start applying for jobs and is that different when they should start applying for internship or co-op experiences. You'll definitely want to start applying for all jobs so internship co-op and full time right beginning in the fall semester so right when you get back to campus and are ready to start that process, start looking and applying to jobs. So thank you. So I am curious, what would you recommend for students who are unsure about their career plans or who are just trying to figure out how to connect their interests and their passions to future career paths. So network, I know it sounds like a scary word and many students when you even myself hear it you're like oh boy, but really networking doesn't have to be as stressful or high maintenance as it sounds. It's basically just having conversations with people like your peers, any of your friends did they have an internship this past summer friends of friends that you could chat with over coffee for five minutes. Do you have CSIs anybody that has some sort of knowledge that you'd be interested in learning about have some quick conversations with them. And in addition to that you can do some more targeted networking with company representatives and recruiters, which we call informational interviewing. This is a great way to obtain information about your about a field of interest. So, you know, asking questions to help you better understand a specific role, a specific industry or company. For example, you could ask a recruiter at our career related events like how would you describe how this person would spend time day to day in the job that you're recruiting for, or what opportunities and challenges are you seeing within your industry. What kind of skills are most needed to do a job well so you can determine whether or not that's a good fit for you and for the company. So all of those questions kind of encompass a little bit of what networking is and you'll have many opportunities to start to do that in the fall semester through career fairs. Information sessions that are hosted on campus through student organizations. We will be having company days where companies are just going to come and use those as networking events for students so that they can connect with you and talk more about the their side of things. So all of that and asking those questions is really going to be the best way to start figuring out what you're interested in and how you can connect your background and interests to what's available and coming up in the recruiting scene. So the importance of networking and kind of those exploratory conversations I don't think can be, you know, overstated enough is so important to kind of do that, that detective work really to find out what the right fit is for you. So I know there is truly so much we could talk about when it comes to the ECRC we've only really scratched the surface of all the various resources that are on hand on your website. So I'm going to go ahead and send students check out and certainly all the functionality of the careers portal, but I do want to give you a chance now that we have covered a few different questions. Is there any, you know, sort of closing thought or additional advice you want to offer to students that we haven't covered so far. A piece of advice would be get into engineering careers by 1220. So that is our new system we previously were with simplicity as a recruiting portal but over the summer we transitioned so if you are a student that has not been into that system just yet. Make sure that you go in and set up your account. That's where you can view jobs that are posted by companies you can view all of our event information, including career fairs and the companies attending those fairs. You can see all of our workshops, all of our events coming up so I definitely recommend getting into the system just kind of get yourself set up and ready to go. In addition to that, I think the biggest piece of advice is to explore all opportunities. So there's many many companies that are very interested in recruiting Michigan engineering students. There's a lot of amazing opportunities that fall under companies that you might not have heard of before that would be potentially a better fit than some of the bigger names that you hear out there. So just go in with an open mind and be willing to explore all that's available to you, and you will likely find some really robust opportunities to get you closer to your career goals. Awesome thanks so much Amanda this has been a great conversation I think we've covered a whole lot of information in a very short time so I hope that it's been useful for students. I do want to invite everyone back next week we're going to continue these Tuesday talks throughout the semester as long as we can. We'll be chatting next week at 1pm live on Instagram with international programs engineering so hopefully a whole lot more great information just like today so again thank you so much Amanda I really appreciate your time today. Thank you for having me and definitely come and see us in the ECRC we're here to help you and you don't have to be a junior or senior come see us as a freshman sophomore. Let's get you started early on your career paths and your questions and we can help you out. Yes absolutely we'll take care of one have a good rest of your day.