Thinking ahead as an open letter to the Class of 2014 and the Class of 2015

In 2010 I wrote an open letter to the Classes of 2010 and 2011 to share some thoughts on the job market for new graduates and soon to graduate students. I wrote of the challenges and opportunities these new job seekers would face and I sought to offer some advice to help them through their upcoming transition. I wrote a similar letter to the Classes of 2011 and 2012 at the start of 2011. Both of these letters were directed towards juniors and seniors – students one year out from graduating and those just about to or who just have graduated. I am going to post a similarly directed open letter tomorrow, but I have been thinking a great deal about the potential for opportunity lost and certainly where college students wait until the second half of their college experience – or until near its end, before seriously, methodically, strategically beginning to plan for life after college and for jobs and careers. So this year I decided to write my junior and senior oriented letter, but I wanted to precede it with an open letter directed more towards freshmen and sophomores.

When you are just starting a journey it is not usually all that easy to think in terms of its finishing, and certainly when entering into as big a change in life as found when first starting college. And for perhaps the first time in your life you find yourself facing a widely comprehensive range of day to day and long term choices that you have to make – and certainly for students who find themselves living away from home and family for the first time. But for purpose of this letter, I would write of college and the college experience from the perhaps very limited perspective of preparing for a next step after, and with all emphasis here on that. And I want to focus here on two things – two types of detail that you can control and that to a substantial degree, depending on how you address them, can increase or decrease your job and career changes later.

• Picking the right major, that will both interest and involve you and also help you build a foundation for landing that first post-school job.
• Planning for, applying to and securing the right summer internships and other “real world” workplace experience for setting yourself apart from the graduating crowd when you do finish your degree and move on.

I list these issues as separate, but in fact you want to think through and follow through on them coordinately and so that you can build a solid foundation. With that in mind I begin with picking a major.

When you enter college you immerse yourself in a world of ideas and of knowledge sharing, and whether you see that range of opportunity around you or not. The opportunity is there, and all around you. From a perspective of interest and curiosity, all possible academic paths offer value and certainly to the degree they would enrich you as a person and as an individual. But some are in effect career dead ends with few if any graduates from them finding work related to their academic fields. And graduates of these programs are more likely to face difficulty in landing any job after graduating. A breakdown of current unemployment numbers for new college graduates by degrees majored in shows that.

There are other academic paths that are in effect job and career door openers. Right now and as I write this, new bachelors degree recipients with library science degrees, like those with medieval history degrees or literary criticism degrees are not faring well. Engineering degree graduates and particularly new graduates with currently hot specialties (e.g. mining engineer) are being signed up before they can finish their degrees with well paying jobs waiting for them, generally only subject to their successfully completing their degree programs and passing those last courses.

There are fads involved here. It wasn’t that long ago that virtually anyone completing an MBA was essentially guaranteed a better, higher paying job and right away after graduating. Then reality set in and the market became glutted with new MBA’s and businesses began to get a lot more discerning as to which MBA programs offered more value to them, with real, tangible value coming to them from having these new “experts” on-staff. So the perceived value of getting that MBA per se went down and has fluctuated up and down since then. The same will happen for any current fad degree that might be out there, mining engineer included. And some of the degrees that are not faring so well in the job market might see an upturn. So you cannot simply look at the recent past and set an absolute, immutable scale that degree major options could be pegged to, in set positions for all times – a “this is a good one” for jobs, and “that is a bad one” for jobs prospects. Still, with that set of caveats in mind, trends can be discerned.

Find out how graduates of the programs you are interested in have fared over the most recent four or five years. Note: it is very important that you get your baseline data here from your own school as well as for the marketplace as a whole. So for example, the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology has an excellent reputation for its mining engineering programs and has so for a great many years now. A degree in this area from a recognized-leader school would carry more weight and open more doors for a new graduate than would a same-title degree from a school unknown in this area that was just starting a new program in it.

• Look for degree program majors that are sought after and for which you have reason to believe will continue to be sought after.
• But also look to the stature and reputation of the specific programs that your school offers and with the success of its graduates as a measure of its success.

I am going to continue this open letter in a few days, there looking into internships, and summer and part-time jobs pursued and carried-through on while you are a student. And as a foretaste of that posting, I note here that finding the right work experience in this to add to your starting resume is not necessarily entirely about finding work in a business in your target career field. There are a range of factors and considerations that go into finding the best work experience while a student for meeting your longer term job and career goals.

You can find this and other material about jobs and careers at my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development and its continuation page, and with these open letters included at the bottom of those directory pages as supplemental postings.

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