Near the end of any academic year, the anxiety and stress levels of students begins to shoot through the roof. On top of the frenzy they go through to finish assignments, papers, labs, and organize study groups for those dreaded final exams, many of them begin to ponder what they’re going to do with the next four months of their lives.
Finding a decent summer job is hard-especially for those who don’t work during the school year-and questions abound.
“At this time of year, the Career Centre sees a lot of inquiries about internships, something that will give students experience for when they graduate,” said Mary Giamos, the Career Management consultant at the U of T Career Centre. “It’s mostly coming from students who aren’t graduating but haven’t found a summer job and some of them are getting anxious because they feel it’s getting too late” said Mary Giamos. Giamos said that many students, especially international students, are confused about the opportunities that are available to them.
Choosing what you want to do is often the hardest part, Giamos said.
“Graduating students in Arts and Science mostly look at how they can use their degree or what kinds of occupations that they should be considering,” she said. “Those in more professional faculties such as engineering, computer science, or business usually start looking in the fall, because they already know their career path.”
And Giamos added that it’s never too late to start looking: “Our services are 12 months a year; we don’t offer services that shut down during the summer. We have a roster of workshops and services that we offer every month,” she said. “If you’ve missed any workshop, we’ll be offering it 3 or 4 times next month. We set up the workshops to accommodate student schedules and sometimes they’re in groups or one-on-one with Career Centre staff.”
“Some of the services that we offer are marketing tools such as résumés, cover letters, and interviews, and finding summer work.” Giamos said. “Others are more career-planning-related, where students can identify potential careers through their skills, values, interests, and personality.”
“We try to get students to understand that there are lots of unadvertised positions that they can get through networking.” Giamos said. “Our workshops get into details on how you can market yourself through networking. Students can search our databases online for summer, part time, internships, volunteer and full-time. Also we suggest that they take a look through our library for some good strategies and contacts, industry directories. It’s a great place to start looking for a career, especially if you don’t know what you want to do.”