Monday, February 11, 2013

Your Education And Priorities Are?

 Go online and look up your college or university's mission statement. It's great way of telling what their priorities are.

Here's what  I found when I looked up mine:    

"The goal of the university is to develop, transmit, and utilize knowledge in order to provide access to quality education for diverse groups of students and to prepare citizens for a lifelong learning in global society".

Now ask yourself a question: Does your university's mission match you own for what you want from a school?

It probably doesn't shock you that you can't find the word career never shows up in the GSU mission statement I listed above. 
After all, institutions of higher learning are famous for the values of dedication to knowledge and pucblic-spiritedness.
Those are both great things, but it means that their primary goal is not to help you find employment once you walk out their doors. The school makes that your responsibility. Identifying opportunities for their students to find work in the outside world is treated as an ancillary duty, at best.


Think about it in terms of the costs involved in college and what gets invested in your job search. CNN recently estimated that it costs over #60,000 to graduate from a large public university ( and as much as $250,000 at some private colleges), but students are likely to get less than 6 hours of direct education from their schools about how to find their first out-of-college jobs.


College career do what they can, but are generally underfunded for the tasks they face, and they end up providing gifted and energized students with cookie-cutter, single-page resume formats and one-size-fits-all advice. If you're lucky, someone will look at your resume and critique it with the same advice they give to everyone else.
 
My point is not to sour you on the benefits of your education or even your campus career office. Take advantage of everything you have access to. But remember that your school sees its job as to education you and finding you a job comes in not a distant second or third but maybe fifth.
Career Accelerator exists to fill the void that develops between your university's mission and your own.

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