In a two part series called “Finding Career Bliss”, blogger and professional copywriter Kristen Fischer discusses her journey through college and career and gives advice on how students can make an easy college to career transition. The first part, How to Select a College Major You’ll Actually Use, explains the right way you should go about selecting your major and the second part, How to Use Your College Major for Career Success, goes over how to apply that major to your career.
Pick a major that capitalizes on your strengths
This is the most difficult part because you must first assess what your skills are. So how do you do that? Well, first of all, what do you enjoy doing? Your career choice doesn’t necessarily have to be something you’re good at; although it does help since such tasks in that area would generally easier. For instance, I may be technologically savvy, but that doesn’t necessarily that I enjoy working on other people’s computers.And don’t even get me started with programming; nothing fills me with more loathing than having to spend countless hours out of the day trying to fix a program to only find that I just forgot to put in a semicolon somewhere.
The career that you’re going for may have the job security that you’re looking for, but if you’re finding that the workload that the job presents torturous, you’re going to find yourself going back to school to major in something else. Aside from networking, internships serve as a great means of testing out different areas in the particular career field of interest. If nothing interests you, then you may want to pick a different career. You want to be intrigued enough to where you’ll want t pursue that career diligently, getting better as you work at it. The best advice that the article gives is to find something that you’re willing to skip a meal over.
Use that major to push your platform
Essentially, your platform would be your core skills or strengths. Many students who graduate from college end up going into a career that’s unrelated to their degree. This brings about the popular belief that what you major in really isn’t important; as long as you major in something. I don’t totally agree with this, but having a major does help in some cases. For instances, may majors require set courses in technical writing and as long as you can prove to employers your proficiency with that particular skill, then it’s plausible that you’ll have multiple doors open to you, whether it be in journalism, marketing, or even in the medical field.
It’s likely your interests will change over time, but as long as your skill set matches what employers are looking for, you shouldn’t have to worry about finding a job. This is why it’s important to make a good assessment of your skills before going into college, because even if your career interests change, it’s likely that whatever it was that got you interested in the career you majored will be applicable to your new career.
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