Holiday “Grill”

Students often face the holiday break with a degree of trepidation. As well as the usual home cooking, free laundry and other benefits of spending time with family, you are often faced with various friends and relatives who want to reassure themselves that you are doing well. They’ll ask about your progress in school and/or career plans. This is usually done in the spirit of caring about you and wanting you to be happy and successful, but sometimes the timing is just plain poor.

As a senior, you may not (in December) be ready to answer questions about your graduation plans in June. Or as a freshman, you may not want to go into detail about how in less than one quarter you’ve discovered the major you declared entering UCSB isn’t working for you, but you haven’t found a good alternative major yet. And sometimes the answers that you could give are just not the answers they’re going to want to hear. “I’m spending a gap year (or year abroad or summer internship) in Somalia taking care of AIDS babies,” isn’t necessarily going to give them the reassurance they’re seeking.

I’d like offer you a few tips to help you navigate these caring well wishers. Only YOU know the proper behavior in your family context, so use whatever will work for you.

STRATEGY 1:

Ask them for advice. “I’m working on that question right now. It would really help me to know how YOU chose your major/career after college/internships/ etc. Can you tell me about how you made your decision?” This will keep them busy recounting their own path and might give you some ideas both about strategies that work as well as what NOT to do!

STRATEGY 2:

Ask them for help. “I’ve decide to look into careers in finance, but I’m not sure whether accounting, insurance, or banking would fit me best. I could use your help in meeting people who (for example) work at these companies. Do you know anyone I could talk to?” Enlist their help in finding people who do something you think you might like to explore for an internship, shadowing day, or full time job.

If you’re further along in your decision process, you can ask them for more specific assistance. “I want work for a small company in the Bay Area doing technical writing for the computer industry. Might you know people like that?” Use your contacts to make those direct connections. More jobs and internships result from questions like this than from all Internet job listing sites combined. Social networks trump even the Internet for job hunting success.

STRATEGY 3:

If there’s a relative or friend at home who is working at a job that you think you might like as well, ask them about it in detail: “How did you get started? How would someone new start? What would you recommend to a new person trying to enter this field? Who works most closely with creative programs (or budget, or acquisitions, or whatever)? Can you introduce me to them? What do you read that is exciting in your field? What are the problems you deal with? What’s the most exciting development this year?” People who love their work can talk about it all day and your questions will each feel like a gift to them.

STRATEGY 4:

Use Career Services to arm yourself. Much of our work is on our website: career.ucsb.edu. Log in to your GauchoLink account, click into the amazing Vault database (which is free for you because you’re a Gaucho) and print some of their highly detailed industry guides. Hand one of these to your worried well wishers and say, “I’m seriously looking into a career in Actuarial Science and I printed this report about the career. Will you read through it and see if it seems like a good career for me?” Even if you are only remotely interested in this career, this strategy will engage the services of the most caring and diligent research team you can imagine. And it might just open the door to a great career.

Micael Kemp is the director of Career Services at UCSB.