By ALYSSA HOLCOMB
The winter quarter is already off to the races for the current MSLCE cohort. We recently participated in an advanced Career Management Session titled “New Year Reboot: Your Career Strategy + Opportunity Search,” led by Mandi Glowen of the EPICS team. In the session, we focused on strategies and ways to enhance our process of researching, applying for and securing summer internships and post-grad positions.
Mandi started the session with more of a reflective focus by employing self-reflection and group-think activities that required us to think more critically about how we were approaching our job search. We individually ranked our personal priorities regarding positions before moving on to a group-think activity where everyone wrote a number of strengths, challenges, and questions that we were facing as we began our search. I particularly found the group-think activity to be rewarding; seeing my colleagues’ answers inspired me to reflect on my own experience so far in researching, writing and applying at the graduate level.
As the session progressed, Mandi provided additional tips for structuring our process, including organizational tips, cold e-mail strategies, and the LAMP Method of research. The LAMP Method is a 2 hour development exercise that hones in on the specificities of your job search and helps you achieve them. In this exercise, you list 40 employers in 40 minutes, whether they are your dream employers or have school alumni as employees. Then, the process takes you through listing:
List of employers (through research)
Alumni/Advocates (yes or no)
Motivation (scale of 1-5)
Postings (scale of 1-3)
Mandi’s accelerated look into this process was helpful to many of us in terms of narrowing down our personal and professional requirements. A lot of the cohort are just now beginning to focus on the internship search, so this session couldn’t have come at a better time.