Career - Getting Experience at School

Regardless of where everyone wants to end up after college, whether it is an advanced degree from graduate school or joining the rank and file of the working world, you’ll need to get some relevant experience. What comes to mind when people hear, “Go get some job experience first”, are the prized summer internships. Those are great for someone who already have some prior experience, but what about for someone just starting out? You need no t look further than your own college campus.

To the untrained eye, colleges are just a place for students to attend lectures and professors to harass them with midterms and finals. In reality, colleges are bustling places of activity where teaching classes is just a small part of what they do. Most professors are also there to advance themselves through research and publishing papers. Granted that most of the help comes from their graduate students, but even they don’t like doing the small time grunt work required in research. This is where you come in.

Undergraduate research positions provide great opportunities to not only work one on one with graduate students and professors but to get some great job experience as well during the school year. Research positions can encompass anything from working at the lab bench making solutions to rolling out a survey to collect statistical information. Either way it will look good on your resume and will provide that difference that can set you apart.

So how can you get these great experience building positions? It can be as easy as asking your professor and showing interest in their research. Additionally most schools have a career center that helps fill research positions where needed throughout the campus. These however can be on a first come first serve basis and require a basic or advanced understanding of the research topic, so sign up early and study up before meeting the professor.