 So hello, everyone, and welcome to the SJSU School of Information Career Colloquia session. My name is Jill Cleese, and I am the iSchool's Career Center Liaison. Thank you for joining us tonight. We have the great pleasure of having three of our alumna with us tonight to share their experiences in our MLIS program and share their unique advice for making the most of your time as a student in order to successfully prepare. Let me try that again. Successfully prepare for a professional career. We have Christina Mune, Colleen Cook, and Jessica Creighton with us tonight, but I will let each of them introduce themselves. The session for tonight is one hour. It is being recorded. I ask why you hold your questions until each of our three speakers has had the opportunity to present, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. At that time, you can type your questions in the chat box, and please do feel free to ask questions. I think this is going to be an excellent opportunity to learn from people who were literally in your shoes. So, you know, whatever kind of burning question you have for them that you're wondering about, this is a great time to ask, because all three of these speakers have been exactly where you are. So, you are also welcome to join us on Twitter tonight by tweeting comments using the hashtag SJSU colloquia. I'll type that in the chat box in just a moment. So, during the presentation, please do keep the dialogue in the chat box to a minimum, and we're going to get the, let me try that again. We're going to go ahead and get started. We'll start with you, Christina, so go ahead and take it away. All right, great. Thanks, Jill, and I'm really glad to be here talking to you all today. I'm going to talk about three hints for making it as an information professional. I'm Christina Minnet, and I'm Information Technology Services Manager for San Jose State University. That is kind of an information professional mouthful title right here. What Information Technology Services Manager means is that I oversee kind of the digital services and digital literacy efforts of the library. So, IT, the backend infrastructure, our learning commons, mobile, and web development, student technology training, which we do here, and student device checkout. So, we check out laptops and iPads, and I kind of oversee all those services. And that started about a month ago. Before that, I was an academic liaison librarian and a digital initiatives librarian for San Jose State, which I've been since I graduated in 2011. Before that, I dabbled in instructional technology, like online learning design, and also worked at the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library as a processing archivist. So, I've been a number of different kinds of information professionals through student assistantships, internships, and as a librarian. So, hopefully, I'm going to address a number of different ways you could go in your path. I'm going to give some three hints, three broad kind of hints. And then Jessica and Colleen, I think, are going to go more down very specific career paths and looking at your skills and attaching those to job descriptions. So, hopefully, this will be a nice overview for you guys. So, my hint number one is actually expanding your horizons. I think we all come into iSchool or Swiss, as I may accidentally call it occasionally, with this idea of what a librarian or an information professional looks like. And that might be something like the children's librarian that, you know, makes children love to read in a public librarian, that academic librarian, reference librarian that provides graduate-level research assistants on obscure topics, or maybe the archivist at the Smithsonian who preserves ancient artifacts. No matter what that is to you, there's more. The breadth of information professionals is amazing. And I just love meeting new people and learning more about it all the time. Some of the ways that I think you can do that as a student is some of these four things. And I didn't put these in necessarily the order that I would recommend them. I think that varying your assignment topics in class and scheduling lots of informational interviews are the easiest for you to do, and maybe the most quickly beneficial. So, I initially went into the program wanting to be a digital archivist. I have a BA in history. And in my 200 class, I actually decided to do an assignment on homeless, services to homeless people in the public library. And that was just based on a reading we had had in the class. And I thought, I don't know anything about this, but it's kind of interesting, and I'm going to look at it. And I learned a ton about public librarianship and services to underrepresented populations that I would never know. And I will probably never be a public librarian, but I learned a lot about their struggles and their issues, and it expanded my knowledge. And if I had had different kinds of inclinations, that might have inspired me to go that way instead. So, just by doing a paper on a thing that I normally wouldn't think of, that expanded my horizons. And informational interviews. So, definitely interview people in your kind of area of interest. So, I interviewed a lot of archivists, but also people in areas that you wouldn't necessarily imagine you'd be interested in. You can learn about other possibilities before you really focus in on one and lock it in. I just think there are so many possibilities that, you know, you don't want to limit yourself early on in the program. And I'm going to say the kind of, the next easiest thing is to take an internship someplace new. This isn't always easy for people. I see at San Jose State, we have a lot of student assistants from high school because we're here and we're closed. And a lot of them, like, will maybe work as a page or as a staff person on the reference desk, and then taking internship in our special collections and maybe another area. And it's good to take internships in different departments, but it's great to take an internship at a different organization or a different institution because, you know, the job that you want may never come up in the organization that's like the easiest to you or that you're already part of. You need a fallback plan. I think having, like, that second choice, like when you're applying for college, it's the same way as applying for a job. It's good to have another group of people at another institution know how valuable you are and know how you work so that when you're applying for positions, you have more recommendation letters you can get and more people that know you and more possibilities. So, you know, do these informational interviews at lots of different places. Let people know about you. Take internships other places. And you may not be able to use your credit hours to take a class totally outside of your normal track. I know there's like a precious number of credits you can get. But one thing that I did is I was working in the archives at Berkeley and that actually came out of an internship that I did there. And I kind of came to realize that it's a very solitary profession and that archivists often work on grants that are not permanent. And if you love to do something new every two or three years, that might be really great for you. It wasn't necessarily great for me. And so, I decided to take a class where I could look at a couple different kinds of things. But that still would maybe apply to that track if I kept on it, the archives track. So, I took 210 reference because if I worked in like a reading room, understanding the reference interview would help me. But it might also open up the idea of like academic librarianship and public librarianship to me. And that was great. And in 210, I kind of realized I love reference and it drove me towards academic librarianship. I ended up taking an internship at CSU East Bay in instruction and reference to see before I decided to completely change my ideas that that was going to work for me. And it was one of the best things that I ever did, just expanding my horizons in that way. And I think it's also strategic. So, you know, when you graduate and you're going out there to get the job, you need to have a leg up on the other people that are going to apply for your position. In 2011, when I applied for my academic visa and librarian position at San Jose State, 60 other people applied for that job. And that was kind of a bad time in history. It was like the end of a recession or maybe in the middle of it. And that doesn't happen so much anymore. But, you know, I think some of my past experiences in different areas of information professional responsibilities and the fact that I've taken internships and instruction and reference and knew something about instructional design really helped me get that job because I strategically kind of got experience and things that I knew would help as I became an academic librarian. So, some of the things that you could do are also read lots of job descriptions and postings. Those are online. They're out there. They're free for you. You should use them. It's a major resource. If I was going to look into being an academic librarian now, if I was back in school, I'd be reading those job postings on ACRL and seeing what do they require and do I want to do those things that they're describing? If I'm interested in like medical librarianship, I like might look at MLA. SLA would be like corporate librarianship or other kind of special libraries like music or art libraries. BayNet is a really cool organization and that is a local Bay Area organization that's cross library types. So, when people get together, they come from everywhere, non-profits. They're solo librarians. They're public librarians, school librarians. And they network together and they have really cool events like touring like the Mechanic Institute or an airport library. And you can really see a breadth of stuff and connect with people. And I know that organizations like that exist throughout the country. So, even if you're not in the Bay Area, you can find one that's local to you and they have listservs that you can get on and see cool stuff. Indeed is cool if you're interested in kind of those more technology or systems job. Maybe web developer in the library. That might be like look at those Indeed job descriptions. And library journal has a ton of different kinds of job postings. And they also have school library journals. So, if you're interested in being a school librarian, you want to look at those because really right now, some states may be not even hiring school librarians and some states might be and it would be really good for you to know where your best opportunities are and if you are geographically mobile to go there. So, that's kind of part of what they want, where, what they want intersects with what you want. So, think about what you want to do and then think about what these job descriptions are asking you to do. And where do those things kind of come together? Where do the things that you're interested in, the things that you're good at, what jobs do those seem to apply to more and are those near you? If I was stuck in a place like I couldn't move out of San Jose, I might want to look at what libraries or organizations around San Jose that are hiring information professionals are looking for. And I might want to tailor my classes, my internships, or my experiences to that because I know I can't move away from here. So, you really need to weigh kind of what you need by what they're requiring. And then identify what you bring to the table. So, some people might have a background in like paralegalism or like law. If you had say background like this, you might want to think about being a scholarly communications librarian or working at an open access or open educational organization because they're looking for people that can understand copyright law, that can interpret fair use. If you have an existing skill, if you bring something good to the table, see where that's applicable and start to focus on that stuff. So, I'm not trying to like and insult anyone here. And I was also one of these people in the past. I guess how many people with an English history, art, art history, philosophy, VA, are in library school right now and want to work with ancient manuscripts. It's pretty funny. I wanted to be this. I need a lot of students who want to do this, who have this kind of background. There are a lot of people that want to do that. And that's okay. And I'm not saying you can't. But if you want to do that, you better be really good at it. You better have a lot of qualifications to do that. Don't think that you can walk out of school and do that like amazing pie in the sky job. You have to work at being qualified for that. And you may have to make a couple stops along the way. And you may have to think about how you can tweak that a little bit. Maybe you don't preserve the manuscript. Maybe you digitize the manuscript. Maybe you do something else around ancient manuscripts that isn't maybe as popular. And so, you would have a step up when you go to apply for those jobs. And one way you can have a step up, of course, is to get really good at something. You want to develop the skill. So, after you've expanded your horizons and then kind of thought about all the different professional, information professional jobs that you might want and found the places where those occur, you then want to find a niche. So, what do you need to get really good at to be the person that's going to get that job? And I think the key to doing that is finding out what you like best in your classes or maybe what you're working at now or what you like best in one of your internships. And just research the heck out of that. And you have access to so many like publications and journals and books through your high school matriculation from being part of high school that you can read all the literature about something that you're interested in and know all the recent information about it, you know, the past information about it. You can be an expert about it. Then you can read blogs about it. So, what are people really talking about this thing that you're interested in? And then tweet about that and start to become part of the community of people talking about it. So, I'm really interested right now in data visualization. And I was reading blogs about it and I took a MOOC about it. That's a great thing to do. And one of the things I couldn't figure out is like where is all the information about data visualization on Twitter? I know it's there. I know it's there. And I found out that the best hashtag for it was actually data viz with a z. So, I started looking at not just the top tweets about data viz, but all tweets about data viz. And then tweeting with that hashtag and starting to become part of the community that talks about it, replying to people who talk about it. And now when people think about a librarian who's interested in data viz, they're emailing me. They're talking to me. They're inviting me to their presentations or to speak on their panels. And that's what you want. You want to be seen as really good at this thing. Take internships about that. If you can, one thing that I did is I left one of my internships for last to do with my e-portfolio so that at the very end I would be able to do an internship in the thing I knew I really wanted to do at the organization I most wanted to work at and kind of make out the cream of my time as a student. So, it might be good to push off one of those internships to the end when you're really sure what you want to do. And then practice an elevator speech about this thing that you're really good at. So, I want you to go to conferences if they're local, if you can afford it. I want you to go to these networking events that you can find. And what I want you to be able to do is when people introduce themselves to you and they say, what do you do? And you say, I'm a student. You just don't say, I'm a student. You say, I'm a student. And you know what I'm really interested in, blank. And you know what the greatest part about that is and you know what the future of that is and you know how you're going to apply that to your career when you get it. And that's how you can talk about yourself. And that's something people remember. So, I might say, like, oh, I'm really interested in data visualization. I think that's the future of showing the library's worth and assessing libraries and getting people to interact with data that shows the value of collections. And I'm going to, you know, create great data visualizations through Python and R. And you're going to sound really knowledgeable and really on top of it. And people are going to remember you. And then when you go to apply for positions when you've graduated, they're going to remember that you were enthusiastic and knowledgeable. And that's what you want to be. And it's okay to only be about, like, enthusiastic and knowledgeable about, like, two or three things because you haven't really started in your career yet. But you want to identify those things and then I think do these steps to become that enthusiastic and knowledgeable person. And then meet people who work with that. It's really scary to go to networking events, but it's really useful. And I think once you have that elevator speech, you can feel really confident that you can introduce yourself and speak well and engage with people a little bit more than when you're not sure what to say. So, that is how to get good at something. And also, I want to remind you to take jobs that will make you good at something that you like, even if it's not the right title. One thing I find a lot is people graduate and then they want to find, I mean, I think because I'm an academic librarian, I run into a lot of people that want to find something with that librarian title. They are maybe in the pool at a public library or they're an adjunct librarian. And they can't seem to get into that librarian position. But maybe they're really good at something like they know a lot about publishing. They know a lot about publications and publishers or they're good at systems or they're good at web design. And they could be something like an acquisition specialist or an electronic resources coordinator. But because it's not got librarian in the title, they're hesitant to take these positions. But I think that's a great starting point. I think starting in a position like that and growing your experience to get into a librarian position if you want to is good. But I also know people who are electronic resources coordinators that have become the best in their field and they do presentations about that and they are respected nationally. And that's a great information professional position also. So don't be persuaded by titles. I think be persuaded by things that you learn and things that you're good at. So to recap, expand your horizons, be strategic and get good at something. I think those are your best bets and I hope that I provide you some information on how to do that stuff and this is me. So if you are wondering, hey, what is being an information technology, what is it, services manager really like and I want to do an informational interview with you, please email me or you can learn a little bit about DataViz by following me on Twitter. Thanks, Christina. That was great. So Colleen, I think you're up. Well, thank you, Jill and thank you, Christina. I just learned a lot. So hopefully everybody else did too. Hopefully you all took notes. That was excellent, excellent advice. So my name is Colleen and I get to talk to you tonight because I went through the iSchool, as you can see, from January 2009 through August 11th. I graduated a senior as Christina and I was a part-time student during that time and I came out the other side of successful archivist and librarian and records manager and pretty much an information professional. But I'll let you look me up and you can see all the titles I've had and whatnot. So I'm thrilled to share my tips, tricks, and lessons learned with you about my time through school. So to start, it might be helpful to get a historical picture of my situation in grad school. I had a BA in history, so I was one of those millions who were entering with a very similar background and I had no clue what to do with my degree at the time. I was also working full-time in human resources and I was on the board of a historical society and I volunteered as their docent coordinator, newsletter editor and writer and secretary. So aside from the fact that I began a relationship part-way through, this was my situation when I started grad school. So I was not bored by any means by a lot of other stuff going on that all ties in. And so hopefully for some of you that have a similar situation, some of what, some of my tips may be kind of helpful. So there's a bunch of stuff I did before even starting school that if you haven't done already, I highly encourage you to do so now. I read, oh, this is going to get interesting, they came out weird, oh well, I read and researched about being and becoming an archivist and librarian before even starting school. I had an idea of what a typical job consisted of, what agency they might be in and what the basic qualifications were. I knew what professional associations were out there, the major schools and once I chose San Jose for my school, I learned everything about their program and I'm not kidding. I had read the entire website for the iSchool before I even started. So in all of that, that was kind of my informational interview research, prior to even starting school and trying to figure out why, why did I want to go to like, you know, library school, what did I want to get out of it? I came up with a game plan for what I wanted out of grad school. I wanted to be loftily an archivist with a university or the National Park Service. That's kind of what I had in mind when I was going through grad school. However, and hopefully most of you will recognize, that's fairly specific and may possibly be unattainable. So I did translate that into a slightly more realistic goal with which to choose my classes and try to decide what I was going to get out of school. And that realistic translation, I'm very sorry for the slides. I don't know what happens, but I wanted an archival and library skills. I like library as much as I like archives. So I'd be happy in either to function as an archivist or librarian in a general government or academic setting. So I broadened it out, but at the same point still had a sort of direction. I wasn't necessarily looking to be a school librarian. I wasn't going to focus all my time on cataloging. However, I did take courses in those areas. But the bulk of my time was spent on archives and records management and not jobs. And I would like to point out that I was able to actually work with the university and the National Park Service plus in the course of my career do so much more as well. But having that goal was very helpful going through school as I tried to identify what I wanted. So now I'm just had to get through school basically to get the degree, to get the experience. So to do that, I created a roadmap of what I needed to successfully graduate with the skills that would get me the job. And so pretty much what I did, and again, I'm very, I apologize for the slides, but I created an Excel spreadsheet and I used the spreadsheet in conjunction with multiple PDFs and a Word document that kept all of the course titles and descriptions. But I went through and decided what I needed to take because as Christina mentioned, we had that very precious amount of credit and I wanted to get the most for the time I spent. So I sat down and figured out what I had to do, what I wanted to do, and what would be interesting if I had the time. And every semester prior to registration, I would look at this again. I would keep track of what I had accomplished, what I had left to do. And that was to some extent the first choice, second choice, third choice. I had backups for what I wanted to do and it happened. There was a summer, I didn't get into two of, I took part-time student two courses each semester. I didn't get into the two courses I needed, but I had backups. I had other classes I was interested in and sometimes I just did courses out of order, you know. So this can change, but having an idea ahead of time of why you want to focus your energy and what you want to do and making sure you get the required courses that you have to have in order to get the degree is going to take a lot of stress off you, make it a lot easier to register for courses and assuming that they tie back into, again, that kind of overarching idea and goal and like Christina said, and I'm sure Jessica will say the same thing, keep being a creative mind open to what the job may be. This is going to help you get where you want to be because, again, I followed at that time the high school had career tracks. So I followed an archival career track, but I took collection development. I took records management. I took cataloging. I made sure I had a smattering of classes to cover other environments I might end up in and things I was interested in and I guess what, pretty much actually every class I took has helped me land a job. So even the ones I took that seemed a little weird at the time, but I was interested in them. They have come in handy. I have used them on resumes and in defense of my skills. So a roadmap isn't enough to get you through because as you all know, because I'm sure most of you are also probably part-time students juggling family, work, you know, other responsibilities, you often need time management. So the other thing I did was color code a master's calendar and I highly encourage you to use whatever time and organizational tool works for you. Color coordinated calendars worked for me because if you remember, I was juggling, well actually that's when I was juggling multiple volunteer activities, full-time work, two classes at a time, family activities and commitments. And so it became really essential for me to keep track of when I was volunteering, events that were coming up, when assignments were due, and if you can kind of see on this calendar that big block of red, so that was a week I had a paper due at the end of that week and so I was, or I think it was actually at the end of that month. But I was, that was the best week for me to work on that paper because I had all of these activities coming up the next week, so I blocked out that week. Any extra time I had was going to be working on that paper. This actually saved me planning out homework time for, I had a couple of family emergencies come up in the middle of school that I was able to work my homework around. I was able to take mini vacations in the middle of school, homework with me. But keeping track of when my classes met, what assignments I had, when they were due, in conjunction with everything else, was huge. And guess what? I do this nowadays. I still use these massively color coordinated calendars to keep track of all my activities and all the extra stuff. So I really do recommend in school that you not only keep track of your progress on school but all your other activities and hopefully that will help you have a lot of other activities because certainly the next thing, the one thing I didn't do that I wish I had done in school was get involved. So like Christina was saying, get involved with what you're interested. So there are student groups on campus. There are, we didn't have one in Orange County when I went through school, or at least not close enough to me, but I could have formed a local meetup group to hang out. I know a lot of other locations have them because I was not living in San Jose at the time. I wish I had formed one of those. I would have had a peer network group or just also really got to know my professors better. Dr. Franks was one of my favorite. But, you know, so these are all things that I also wish I'd done. Got involved with student groups or formed my own local hangouts so that I had peers to interact with and really got to know my professors better to talk to them and hang out with them after school. So there's my little tidbit of something I wish I had done. And so the other thing, you have school. School is wonderful. Your education is essential, but it's not going to get you a job. So hopefully this isn't news, but you really, really need experience, especially because we are coming out for a session. There's a lot of qualified individuals out there looking for work. So the experience with your education, with that degree, the specialized classes is huge. So what I did, again, I wasn't working in the, you know, in the field when I started school and I spent my entire graduate education in HR. So I used what I learned at work whenever it applied and that gave me some good experience. That actually helped me translate some of that experience on my resume to land me jobs in the future. So if you are currently working outside of the field, if you're at Starbucks or Costco or maybe you're an accountant or, you know, any number of different jobs, see what you're learning. See if you can apply any of it at your current job. It might help. This helped with some of my records management principles. And then I also, because I worked at the Historical Society, they were so excited when I started library school. They thought, excuse me, that was so cool. They had a small library. They had a variety of historical items. They managed a house museum. So they were thrilled. They were more than happy to, one, let me come up with little small projects that utilized some of my knowledge and to advise and guide them on standards and practices of the field. So I spent three years basically or two, I should say, two and a half advising them on everything I was learning. And fun fact, I actually used the skills I gained from my preservation class to help clean up blood off of yearbooks that they had on display following a break-in. So I directly applied a very interesting knowledge. So look at what you're currently doing, where you currently are, and see if you can use those skills there. If you can create almost like an internship for yourself. It won't be quite an internship. But again, that volunteering aspect, if you're in a position to do so. And then I also, you can do this as well. I arranged my personal files and photographs. I even catalogued my own library according to LCC after my cataloging class. So try to practice what you're doing. Find ways, and that'll all come in two later. So especially if you're not able to go out and do other volunteering or internships or in part-time jobs, look at your own life. You know, where can you apply this? Learn to use the skills you're learning above and beyond the classroom. Now, I also was very fortunate. I had the opportunity to do some additional volunteering. So I actually had three volunteer activities throughout grad school. So I found out, because again, I was originally very interested in archives, that the National Archives takes volunteers. And I happened to have a regional center next, or near me, near enough to commute to. And so I contacted them. And because I was working full-time, I was only able to volunteer once a month on the one Saturday that they were open. But it was wonderful. I met archivists. I got to talk to them when I was there. And I got to do actual archival work. It was very low level. I was still early on, but it was something. It was a really good experience. It gave me a good feel for what the job would be like. So look for, you know, actual volunteer opportunities. Or if you have your opportunity to possibly create your own. I worked at UCI, that's right, at HR work. And the director at the time of the Special Collections and Archives found me through the Historical Society and let me come volunteer in my lunch hour. I was able, this is a finding aid for one of the collections. I helped scan photos. So I would 40 minutes of my lunch hour. I'd walk there, scan photos, walk back, you know. So it was something. It was excellent. I made some really good contacts. I had a lot of fun and I got to do work. So even if you're working full-time, even if you're completely out of the field, there are ways to get experience while you're in school. So I highly, highly encouraged volunteering, especially where you're not being taken advantage of and obviously in these cases where either formal programs or I was doing really low-level work that really did benefit me without taking advantage because I know that's a whole thing with the volunteer and internship, which leads me to if you can. And I know not everyone can. I didn't think I could. But if you can, I saved up. I prepared for this. I was so determined to do an internship. It was amazing to work for a professional and to really get that experience. And unlike Christina, I actually wish I'd done mine earlier. So there is something to be said. I did mine at the very end. It was pretty much the last class I did, which was wonderful and it transitions me well into the workforce. But I also wish I'd had an opportunity to do it a semester or two earlier because I got so much out of it, especially for all the work I'd been doing. I think it would have also been helpful a semester or two ahead of time. So it has to work with you and to throw this out there because I would always terrify. I searched through the career site, you know, for their internships and the internship I got, which was in the Everglades, I actually found through an old posting on the website and I contacted the woman, just asked if the program was still running. I was very interested, nearing the end of my degree. We formed a relationship and she worked out a whole program for me. So they actually were no longer doing the formal internship program they had done a few years before. But because I reached out and contacted her and we started talking, she basically formulated a program for me. And there were other interns there doing other things. So if you find a place you'd really like to go to, even if you're not sure that they currently have a formal program, I really do encourage you to reach out. It worked so well in my favor and I know there's so many people out there that, you know, especially if they're able to do some, they'll create, you know, a project or an internship for you. They'll just be so happy to have you there. So that is going to be, and it's vital experience. I had two internships, both of which have absolutely helped me get additional work. And I know they're very competitive, but you got to try. So, oh my goodness, I am so sorry about all my slides. So finally, I just wanted to review. So since you can't read it, it's a good thing. Hopefully you can hear me. That my tips for successful graduate experience is to research information science and specifically the career path you're interested in. And those job postings are essential. Look at jobs. Be looking for jobs while you're in school. You'll know what people want. And remember that your skills can be used in a variety of ways. And the title and the grand scheme of things won't end up mattering as, won't end up mattering as much as you may think. I've had a number of different titles. And they've all had something to do with it, but it's the experience. If you can absolutely define that you've cataloged or that you've done archival work at this type of library, that's what we'll do it. So be creative when you search. Map out your progress while you're in school. Keep track of your classes. Know where you want to go. Manage your time. Find a tool that works for you. It will just alleviate so much stress. And don't forget your experience. Really look for any way, even if it's your lunch hour, you're doing it for 30 to 40 minutes, it matters. It helps. That did help me get job. I have used that in interviews that have directly affected getting work in the future. So any way you can get experience right now will help. You just may have to translate it a little on your resume in the interview, but it will help. And if you can, in turn. In turn, volunteer, get involved with the student groups. They are great for building a network and leadership. And you definitely, you can do it. And you know, reach out, ask for help if you need it. If you're getting stuck, you know, like Christine mentioned in informational interviews, you can definitely interact with them. So again, I'm very sorry about all my slides, but you can look me up on LinkedIn. If you'd like to, feel free to connect with me. My name is Colleen Cook. And I work currently with the Agua Colleen Say Band of Korea Indians. So if you look me up on LinkedIn, look for the Colleen Cook that's working there. I'm very sorry about the slides, but thank you all. And now I'll turn it over to Jessica. Thank you, Colleen. So good evening, everyone. My name is Jessica Creighton. And I am the payroll coordinator at the Wireless of Rise and Retailer. So just in case you were wondering if that's a typo on the slide, no, it is not. I have my master's in library and information science. And my title is Payroll Coordinator. So I know that requires a bit of explanation, quite a bit. But I will definitely provide that for you. Before I do, I'm going to go on a slight tangent. So just a quick interaction. I know there's check marks on the slide here, on the side right here. If you want to go ahead and click yes or no, are there any fans of the show? Gilmore Girls out there? Anyone as obsessed with it as I am? Looking forward to the mini-movies that they're currently doing? A couple out there. So for those who don't know, one of the main characters on the show is Rory Gilmore. And from a very early age, Rory decides she wants to be a journalist. Specifically, she wants to be Christiane Amanpour. So the show follows Rory's journey from deciding at a young age what she wants to do with her life into high school, through college, an internship at a newspaper, and finally landing her dream job, a journalist. And I'm very sorry to burst everyone's bubble, but there's a reason that's fiction. Real life is not as clear-cut, and it's very rare that a 10-year-old's idea of their dream career actually becomes their career. So tange over, back to my life. So I thought it would be best if I kind of go through a play-by-play of everything, how it got me to my title, Payroll Coordinator. So this is my story. I started my life in math. Math has always come easy on me. I've never had to study it a day in my life, kind of cut myself in the shoulder there. And after high school, I just kept going. It was the easy thing to do. So without studying, I ended up with an associate's in math. And that's when I started asking myself, is this what you really want? I was always good at it, so counselors always pushed me towards it. But it was almost as if the more I was pushed towards math, the less passionate I felt about it. I don't know if anyone else has ever experienced that, but I felt like I had to find a passion for myself. So I finished my associate's in math at the junior college, and it came time to transfer to a university, and I thought, this is my opportunity. I can't let counselors or aptitude tests determine what my career should be. I have to put myself out there. I have to try and fail and try again and experience everything for myself, because experience is the only way for me, for anyone, to determine where their passions truly lie. So the first thing I did at the university, I took the course catalog. It was about the size of this book, and I read the entire book from cover to cover. Every course, every description read the entire thing. And then I marked the courses that sounded interesting to me, and those were exactly the courses I took. I didn't stick to math, I just followed my passions. And by graduation, I had my associate's in math and my bachelor's in political science, the weirdest combination ever. So now I have two degrees, and I took courses and subjects I felt passionate about. But how does that get me to a career? So I decided to take my idea about reading the course catalog and just take it one step further. I got onto monster.com, and I started doing extensive research on jobs. Not focusing on titles, but instead looking at the descriptions and the tasks. And after quite a bit of research, I realized that the majority of the jobs that sounded interesting to me that had descriptions and tasks that I felt like I wanted to do for the rest of my life had one thing in common. They required a master's in library and information science. So I applied, and the first thing I did, I read the course catalog. I took courses that sounded interesting to me that I wanted to learn more about. And once I got to about the halfway point going through the program, that's when I started applying to internships. So if Gilmore Girls, if this career colloquia has taught us anything, it's that internships work. They help you make connections. And when I applied to internships, I not only looked at those that matched the courses that I was taking, but I went back to my research on monster.com and I matched those internships with the job descriptions that I felt passionate about. So just like Colleen was saying, don't just look at the titles. You want to look at what they're actually doing. So then after that, sorry, I think my slide got a little messed up here. After that, I went one step further. When I applied to those internships, multiple internships, I look at the, sorry, I decided if I'm going to do all this research, if I'm going to do all the research through the course descriptions and the job descriptions and lining everything up with my interest, I wanted to make sure that that showed on my applications. So for each internship application, I wrote a cover letter to go along with my resume. Nothing new, right? But my cover letter wasn't paragraphs. Mine was a table just like this. I went back to my math roots and I applied with a table. So on the left-hand side of the table, I wrote each of their requirements for their position. And on the right, I wrote how I met that requirement or planned to meet that requirement with upcoming courses. Now imagine you're a hiring manager tasked with reading an endless stack of resumes and cover letters day in and day out. All of a sudden, you come across a cover letter that looks different from the rest. Just at a glance, it stands out because it's a table. It's designed to stand out. And so you start reading this cover letter because it stood out to you, it called to be read, and you realize this person has just done my job for me. My job is to find applicants that meet our company's criteria and this person has just given that to me. They've shown me how they meet each criteria and they've done so very clearly. There's no dots to connect and no lines to draw. On top of that, you've already demonstrated to them your commitment. Because this isn't a cover letter, you can just copy and paste for every application. This cover letter was obviously hand-designed for this specific job. So I hope not everyone, oh, this one got a little messed up. Sorry about that. I hope that everyone's out there thinking this girl's crazy because I know all of this time and research and hard work just to find a career path sounds crazy. But let me tell you how this worked for me. So we're at the point in my tall tale where I have my associates in math, my bachelor's in political science, and I'm working on my master's in library and information science. And then I've just been accepted for a virtual internship with Credo Reference, which is a reference database company. And the courses I'm taking and my internship are all aligned. I focused on the information science path in my master's degree, and I'm working now at Credo as an instructional designer and technology specialist, which is a fancy way of saying I teach people how to do research, and I present it in a way that makes it easy for them to learn the process. So then I graduate with my master's, and I'm immediately offered a full-time position with the company. Now here's Beliep. I love what I'm doing working at Credo, and I feel very passionate about my expertise. But I still felt like I was missing something. So I went back to my career research and I found the missing element, math. I still felt drawn to it. And I realized careers weren't as cookie-cutter as everyone made them seem. There's no one-size-fits-all, and there's no rulebook that says I have to be passionate about one thing. So that's what I did. I found a payroll position with Go Wireless going back to my mouth roots, and through my application using the table, I positioned myself in a manner that also highlighted my information skills. My cover letter to them looked like this. Here are the skills you're looking for. Here's how I meet them. And here are additional skills I possess that I'm eager to use in furthering your company. So my title right now may say payroll coordinator, but technically that's only half of what I do. The other half of my time is spent working with the training department as we work to completely redevelop their training material. I became even more valuable to their company because I was able to feel not just the needs they were advertising, but additional needs they had within the company. The time and money they spend employing me goes further than it would have with any other applicant due to my additional knowledge and expertise, due to focusing on what I felt passionate about and not limiting those passions. So going back to my basics of instructional design, what are your takeaways for my convoluted journey? Number one, if you're spending money to take classes, take classes that interest you. Do your research, read the descriptions, and follow your interest with an S at the end because it's meant to be plural. No one said you have to pick just one interest. Number two, if you're going to be working eight hours a day, five days a week for the rest of your life, find a job that you feel passionate about. Number three, don't expect companies to see your value just because you looked their way or even gave them a little wink of the eye. Do your homework. Prove to them why you're the candidate they've been searching for. So that's me. Thank you everyone for sticking it out and I've included my LinkedIn URL as well as a blog post I wrote about tips for surviving a virtual internship. I actually wrote this one while I was doing the internship. So I'll go ahead and send it back over. Thank you. That was pretty incredible. I kept being struck by how bold you are and how confident you are. I love that. So let's open it up for questions and answers. So please, participants, go ahead and type your questions in for either of the presenters. They all come from a different perspective, but I found a lot of commonalities between each person's story. So go ahead and type your questions in. While we have them here, we've got about six more minutes. So I want to hear what you guys all have to say. And it looks like we've got Trevor and Victor are typing questions in. Oh, Victor says can we type the blog link there. Yeah, Renee, will you do that? Will you put the blog link in there? That would be great. Let's see what Trevor's got. Sure, no problem. No other questions from people? I'm curious then why we're waiting. How many people is this who are on tonight? Are you in your kind of first year or finishing up your first semester through MLS? So how many of you are new students? So just one. How many people are getting ready to graduate? So a couple of some is everybody else is somewhere in the middle. Okay. Oh, Trevor, it doesn't look like whatever you had was. Oh, there it is. Here's Trevor's question, you guys. The biggest struggle I feel like I'm facing is that I'm not in a current job that is not in the field. What's the best way to find a job is entry level to help gain experience? So probably any of you can take that question. So I'll leave it up to you. I'm jumping in here. I was actually in the exact same spot as you. When I applied for the program, I was not in a library field whatsoever. I was actually working at an insurance company. And the best way to find a job that is entry level is exactly what we were talking about before is the internships. That is absolutely the best way to get your foot in. So Jessica, I'm going to add to that. Totally second that my internship, I think the Canada is my entry level job and employers work with it or went with it or like, sure, of course that was. I will point out my volunteering counted because I've been with the historical society and I basically spent 10 hours a week for them. And a lot of that experience, I translated on my resume, on my cover letter and in my interviews to experience. So I walked out of library school with pretty much counting, you know, almost a year of experience through all my volunteering. So if you have the opportunity to seek out maybe a grassroots or a nonprofit or somewhere where everybody's volunteering and they'll just be happy to have another volunteer that has skills, the other thing is along with that, depending on what your current job situation is, see what translates. I was and the job I have right now at the tribe, my HR background directly tied in. The other records management experience I got there was necessary for me to get my current job. So really look at what you're currently doing. And I bet you there's at least some part of that job. You can translate as experience that would relate to a, you know, maybe not quite an entry-level field but maybe a technician or an assistant as you're starting to look for jobs. They're maybe not looking for as much experience but you probably actually already have experience, you may not realize. So really look at what you're currently doing and see what you can translate. I would also add as someone who hires people these days that you don't need to list on your CV or your application or your resume that necessarily it as a volunteer, a student assistant or an internship, you could just say the title of what you did. And I don't think that's cheating. I think if you did like an internship for four or six months you could say you were an archives assistant for six months at UC Irvine. That's fine. I'm way more interested in the experience that you got than maybe what your ranking was. Yeah, and I'm glad Jill doesn't think it's cheating either. Yeah, I think any kind of experience you get, whether it's paid or unpaid, it counts. So each of our speakers had done a variety of things while they were students and they weren't working necessarily in the field in their current job but you heard everybody talk about doing internships, volunteering, applying what they were learning to their current job which it wasn't related. They were doing a lot of things and all of that counts as experience then it comes down to how is it that you can articulate that back to an employer to really show them that you can do the job and Jessica in terms of showing, I mean literally going back to her math roots wrote out a table. I mean that's really getting into it but that was powerful and that would be a great thing for anybody to do even if they don't want to use the table directly on their cover letter but to go through that exercise so that you really can connect the dots for yourself as to how you are the best candidate and if you can do that then you can sell yourself and talk to anybody about how you can do the job. So that was a great tip, Jessica. Christina put a comment about virtual internships might be the way for people that are working full time. I think that's a great opportunity and I think we, I think our school is very, very fortunate that we put so much effort into identifying those virtual internships for people so that, we're very fortunate for that so do take advantage of it. It's 6.30 now but if anybody has another question or comment, please, please, please, feel free to type it in there. If not, I mean I'll be keep checking here to see if anybody typed something in but each of our presenters has given you their contact information so you can certainly follow up with them to do an informational interview or ask another question if something comes up afterwards after we log off here. So one last chance, it looks like Danielle's typing, we'll see if that's a question. She's just saying thank you. All right, so it looks like we're going to wrap it up. Thanks everybody, great information. I was taking lots and lots of notes because I would like to be able to use this, write something up about everything that you've been talking about.