We’ve been live for a little while now and have had some great reviews! We want to thank everyone for their valuable contributions to PolyCareers. Now we want you to tell us what you think. Be honest. What sucks? What could we improve on? What would like to see?
-b
The question of whether to include your GPA on your resume often comes up, and I asked one of my professors who is very well versed on the subject of interviews and resumes. Her answer was to only include it if it’s a 3.0 or higher. What happens if yours is lower? Don’t include it and pray that your incredible list of experience will overshadow the missing GPA. Now this only applies to those that are still in college looking for an internship or full-time opportunity. However, I did a bit more research on this and found that, even years out of college, it is very worthwhile to include an outstanding GPA such as a 4.1 and above. Employers like to see this and will make note of your excellent achievements considering the circumstances.
With all the news about the lack of jobs for graduating seniors at colleges around the nation, it’s hard for many of us to be optimistic. According to the Chicago Tribune “Employers expect to hire 22 percent fewer new college graduates this year compared with 2008.” Even for those with job offers, it is never a sure thing with many offers being pulled. However, we must realize that the economy is in a slump and that history has proven the recessions do not last forever. Does this mean that the chances of getting that dream job out of college are shot? Most likely so, but the doesn’t mean there will be no opportunity in the future. The circumstances are only pushing college grads to weather the storm, be frugal, work harder, and gain more skills needed to get to the desired location.
Here is a compliment that we got for PolyCareers. We hope to please all of you just the same.
I just ran across your advertisement on Facebook. I know the site was recently launched and in progress, but, as a Cal Poly Student I would like to extend my appreciation for a site like this. This is great way to have a more centralized networking spot for students entering the workforce. As a young student looking for internships I think this is great as well. I hope to see this grow and will be a visitor.
Great idea.
Brittni Kiick
Cal Poly 2012Brittni, Thanks so much for the words of encouragement! I definitely saw a need for something like this as well when I was looking for internships. We’ll be continually iterating to make the site as useful as possible.
All the best,
Brad
We’re doing a soft launch of PolyCareers this week! That means we’re actively publicizing PolyCareers to a small group of friends and early adopters who would be interested in helping us get started by writing the first batch of reviews. That doesn’t mean that PolyCareers not open the public (it definitely is) but it’s difficult to draw traffic to a site with no content so we’re leveraging our personal networks to get some help. Be sure to check back soon as reviews start to roll in!
As many of you may well know, Cal Poly students are seriously becoming worried if they are graduating but don’t yet have a job. I was talking to a classmate of mine who is in this particular situation himself. He’s a totally smart guy and very well maybe be smarter than me making me feel extremely lucky to have a job lined up for me already. So what makes or breaks the possibility right now for a college student? In my opinion I’d have to say it’s Who you know and previous experience. I was able to get my foot in the door a bit easier than other kids because I knew one of the recruiters personally, this doesn’t mean I got a free lunch, but it did help in regards to getting some face time. Secondly, having a resume with some real world experience says loads more than just a bunch of club affiliations. Having some job experience in your specific field of interest will show that you can solve real world problems, or at least know what they look like.
So what if you don’t have these things? Be scrappy. Get your little red book out and be as resourceful as possible. You pretty much have to be an entrepreneur and get creative. Now get out there and do work!
After spending hours trying to configure and customize the drupal interface we have decided to go back to wordpress. The possibilities are limitless and platform is beatifully built for optimum customization.
A major issue that drupal presented was the inability
to to have a homepage that is totally different from the rest of the the drupal platform outside of a “node”. The drupal platform encourages the author to only write text or code in a “node”, which is the drupal platform for publishing.
With Polycareers, we wanted to have different sets of information shown in different locations of the site, which made things quite a bit more complicated. Wordpress is an amazing platform that is designed for the simple everyday blogger and the hardcore programmer.
Here is a rough design for for our three basic pages we want. The front page is what PolyCareers is about with latest activity, company profiles, and conversations on specific companies.
