Monthly Archives: March 2011

March/April 2011

I can’t think of anything more irritating than dragging myself out of bed at the crack of dawn all summer long for work while my college-age student sleeps until two in the afternoon. Then, while I am prepping for bed at a reasonable hour before David Letterman starts cracking jokes, that same college student begins primping and preparing for an evening out. So, since this is all about me, that nightmare scenario is enough to prompt a heart-to-heart with my freshman in college.

“Let’s talk about the summer,” I say while the wind howls through the trees outside our house and the winter’s second blizzard is blocking all exits to our street.

I am greeted with a blank look.

It’s tough out there. My hometown slashed the summer work program for teenagers this year. With unemployment in New Jersey hovering near the double digits, the influx of college students into the seasonal work force is difficult. Our students need to be planning now for the three-and-a-half month hiatus from school that begins in May. In fact, if they haven’t given any thought to the summer, they are actually running behind.

We encouraged all our students, not just graduating seniors, to take time out from Spring Break to attend the Big East Career Fair in New York City. That opportunity is gone, but students should still be looking to parlay their Seton Hall credentials into networking or employment opportunities.

First stop for the interested student should be the Career Center website. We dissuade students from the erroneous notion that they don’t need to be concerned about the location of the Career Center (second floor Bayley Hall) until their second semester senior year.

We introduce students to the Career Center when they are freshmen in their University Life course. We require students who are undecided about their major to take an online career assessment course that helps them identify their personal strengths and consider ways of turning these strengths into work skills and, ultimately, a college major.

The savvy student takes this introduction to the Career Center and parlays it into a four-year relationship that provides regular stepping stones to the work force. For rising sophomores in the class of 2014, that often means using the Navigator job list (that they can link into from the Career Center website) to find summer work. For a sophomore and junior, that relationship should be extended to find an appropriate summer internship. Ultimately, the Career Center is the go-to place for post-college employment.

“Hiring employers expect to see that college students have utilized their summers in productive ways,” says SHU Career Center Director Jacqueline Chaffin.

As parents, we want our students to be productive so they gain valuable experience during college that makes them more attractive to employers when they are finished with college. We want them to learn how to network and to understand that the people they meet along the way can open doors, make introductions and move them along their chosen career path.

We parents want our children to use their summers off from school so productively that they collapse exhausted in bed at a reasonable hour every night and that they spring out of bed in the morning excited to see what the work day brings. Lacking that, we would appreciate a little money in their pockets so that the Bank of Mom doesn’t have to open for business.

The time is now to whisper good ideas in their head. Psssst. The Career Center. Psssst. Internships. Psssst. The Navigator Job Bank. Spring Break might be over, but there’s still nine weeks left until Commencement – plenty of time to transform the time off into a life-affirming summer.

By Tracy Gottlieb, Ph.D.