Making Friends During and After College

I was recently featured in Student Health 101 by Haley Shapley, in her article about making new friends at college--good advice even if you already got your degree!

Check it out here: http://readsh101.com/unm.html?id=e051d37d (Starts on Page 10)

It's even harder to make friends after college--you lose that on-campus community. You almost have to go out of your way to make friends. I didn't do that so much after I graduated--I hung around with my college buddies. Now I find that as I grow, I am looking to expand my network, and boy, do I miss being able to do it on a campus. It takes work to make friends!

How are you making friends--whether you're in college or you've already graduated?

The 5 Things Every New Graduate Should Know

A guest post by Dawn Papandrea, CollegeSurfing.com

When you graduate college, a lot of people will offer you cliché advice that sounds like a compilation of every commencement speech you’ve ever heard. But before you go out into the world to make your mark, fight what you believe in, remember the valuable lessons you learned, and embrace your future, try on some of these practical tips for grads that actually mean something beyond being quotable speech material…

Know how to use social media. I’ve been to three very different professional conferences this year, and I can say with certainty, the theme that came up again and again at all of them was that social media is here to stay. You must get familiar with social media if you’re not already, no matter what your industry, and you must use it responsibly (unlike a certain former congressman we’ve all heard about). Get the drinking montages off of your Facebook page. Create a smart-looking LinkedIn profile. Mind your tweets on Twitter. Learn how to leverage the “noise” instead of having it knock you down.

Figure out where the jobs are. Having a passion for a particular field is great, but it’s not enough for landing a job in said field. You need to do your career homework in order to understand what it takes to break into your industry of choice. Sometimes, it’s all about the college degree; other times you’ll need to have a portfolio of work examples; still others may require a move to a big city. Know what you’re getting into, and use that information to your advantage.

Realize you don’t know everything. If anyone told me 12 years ago that the day would come when I’d rarely pick up a pen or have a stack of paper on my desk, I’d have cracked up. I’m a journalist, after all. However, as I’ve seen firsthand in my industry, the digital age has transformed the way I do my work, and I had better be willing to adapt and learn if I want to survive. If you want to be successful, you should expect to think beyond your job title, take additional courses, get certified, or perform on-the-job training at some point in your career. Otherwise, you’ll be left behind.

Be prepared for career shake-ups. Along the lines of the above, things happen that can affect the way you do your job, and you need to go with the flow. The world of accounting changed forever, for example, with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which aimed to reform standards of corporate responsibility after the financial scandals of Enron and company. And, as I alluded above, technology has certainly changed the face of business (just ask your local video store owner… if you can find one).

Accept that what you learned in college actually does matter. Why in the world should an English major take an accounting class? If you plan to be a computer programmer, why is a speech class required? Having been out in the world for some time, trust me when I say a liberal arts core curriculum does matter. I’m so thankful for the business minor I forced my way through every time I have to analyze an Excel spreadsheet or understand things like copyright law and contracts. And you’d be shocked if you read some of the correspondence of high-level executives, wrought with misspellings and grammar errors. So yes, those term papers are necessary! Finally, getting a job and getting ahead is all about making connections with real people. And you never know how those connections will happen. Perhaps you were in the same fraternity, or you both minored in classical music. The point is, all of the learning you do can be useful in some way once you learn how to harness it.

Dawn Papandrea is the editor of The CollegeSurfing Insider blog.

5 Things to Do when Moving to a New City for a Job/Internship!

I loved this post over at InternQueen about exploring a new city. It made me think about Staci, a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate that I used to babysit for. We sort of "grew up" together, and despite a slight age difference, I consider her the closest thing to a little siser that I've ever had. She is off to Baltimore to be a teacher and I couldn't be prouder.

Wherever life takes you, take the time to plant seeds!

5 Things to Do when Moving to a New City for a Job/Internship

by Michelle Langer

Michelle is a campus ambassador for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a theatre and journalism double major. This summer she is interning at the Maryland State Arts Council and is profiling her experiences on madtownfoodie.wordpress.com.

1. Don’t be afraid to do things alone. When I moved to Maryland this summer for my internship I didn’t know anyone, and maybe more importantly, I didn’t know the city. This meant that I had to learn about the city and meet people by myself. It isn’t like college where you move into a dorm with people your age and they are all in the same situation as you, you’re completely on your own when you move for a job or internship. I had to accept that I may go out to dinner by myself or go to festivals alone for awhile until I met new people. Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with being alone because it opens you up for new opportunities and for you to meet people!
2. Ask the locals. I’m a huge foodie, so I want to make sure to hit all of the best restaurants while I’m in Maryland for the summer. I also want to make sure to go to the good summer events and activities happening here, and also the cool hangout spots where they will be other young people. I found that the best way to find these places was to ask the people who know them, the locals. When I’m doing activities on my own I ask the bartenders, waiters, and cashiers at the locations I walk into where they suggest I go, and most of them have been SUPREMELY helpful. One bartender even made a list for me of all of the hotspots!
3. Live in an area with young people, i.e. a college campus. Since I was moving to an area for the summer that neither my parents nor I knew, I did some research online and found out where the college campuses were. I figured that by doing this I would reap two benefits: I would be living around people my age and a lot of people may be subletting for the summer so I may get a good deal on rent. I happened upon both of these in my apartment search. I also made sure to share an apartment so that hopefully I would have built-in friends in my roommates (which luckily I do) and if that didn’t happen at least they would be able to help find basic things in our area.
4. Sites like Yelp and Urbanspoon can really help you out. Before I moved away for the summer, before I could get the chance to meet anyone in the area, I used sites like Yelp and Urbanspoon as guides for the good places to go in my neighborhood. I would generically search restaurants, clubs, stores, or bars on these sites and it would come back with the reviews from locals, who know the good and bad places to go. Then, when I moved to Maryland, I had a better idea of what places I should hit up.
5. Take days to discover your city on foot. One of the first things that I did after unpacking was walk around my neighborhood without a map. I took the chance to see what the neighborhood was really like—what you can’t see online or even in a car. This is the best way to learn about where you live, and for the neighborhoods that may be farther away, drive to them and then park your car and walk around. Everyday since I’ve moved here I have taken the afternoon, after work, to walk around a different neighborhood and experience the sights, sounds, smells, and most importantly, the tastes of that neighborhood.

See the whole post here.

The Business of Freelancing: Onward Search Career Cast #22

I recently joined Hillary O'Keefe for the Onward Search Career Cast. The podcast has some great information about careers--especially for those in the creative field. Check out my episode and listen to the others, too--lots of valuable information and the episodes are short!

The Business of Successful Freelance Careers

Onward Search Career Cast, Episode #22

This episode of Onward Search's Career Cast Podcast takes a look at the business side of a successful career in freelancing, whether it's freelance writing, designing, developing or marketing.

Career Cast guest Kristen Fischer, freelance copywriter, journalist, and author of the new book, "Creatively Self-Employed: How Writers and Artists Deal with Career Ups and Downs", shares valuable insight about what it's like to transition into a freelance career and take on the new requirements that not all creative professionals are familiar with. Kristen discusses how important it is to treat a new freelance career as a business and how to handle the less appealing aspects of a freelance career, like taxes and legal preparations.

If you are considering becoming a freelance designer, writer, etc., this podcast will prepare you to better understand and approach the business side of self-employment.

Check out all their shows here!

Be Yourself, Learn Yourself

Graduation season is wrapping up for college grads, and it always amazes me how wonderful and silly commencement speakers can be. Silly? Yes.

On one hand, they deliver amazing advice and great stories. But on the other, the "be this, be that" mentality is futile. Why? Because new grads have to figure it out themselves. They have to live and experience things for themselves--only then can they react.

In many ways, commencement speeches are nothing more (for the most part) than a speaker unloading his or her knowledge and lessons learned on the young. Which is great, but really, do grads need to be told what to be? No. They--you--have to experience things on your own. Then you gather your own lessons learned. But you have to learn them yourself. Someone can't tell you how to be, or how to react. You can try to use that advice to better navigate a situation, but in the end, you really have to take your own, authentic approach to a situation--you can't live off someone else's perspective or take their path, you can only keep it in mind and draw from it.

Sorry to knock graduation speakers--not my intent. I was just reading something and it really got me thinking. I always disliked being told "how to be." Why not share your experiences and invite me to make my own?

I hope you took something from your commencement speaker, something hopeful. But as far as how to be and how to experience things, just go for it. How you experience it is never wrong and you'll get to gather up lessons learned for yourself, by yourself.