Congratulations, you’ve successfully submitted your application to a recent job posting and have been invited to interview! What can you do to prepare? Consider the power of stories when answering interview questions. Continue reading “Interviews: Leaving Space for Stories”
3 things to consider to make the most of your down-time
By Peter Koerella
UVM Career Center
Fall Recess is just around the corner, and a few days of rest are nearly here! Whether you’re planning on relaxing at home or somewhere else, it’s a perfect time to get a head-start on exploring career opportunities! Here’s a few ways to make the most of your time away:
• Reach out to an Alum on UVM Connect: Search through the Directory and make a new connection. You can also look under the “Members” tab in your Interest Groups. Make sure to look for alums with a “Willing to Help” banner above their profile picture. You can also use the Mentoring – Offering Help filters to find alums who are open to discussing career paths, offering job and internship opportunities or networking in the industry. A simple message can go a long way!
• Prep for a Job Shadow during Winter Break: Want to explore an industry or a possible career path? Consider a job shadow! These hands-on experiences are low-risk, highly rewarding chances to get outside the classroom and into a field, to meet folks in the industry, and to see if a career might be right for you! Think about what company or industry you might want to explore and reach out to contacts on UVM Connect to set up a job shadow! Check out the Career Center’s Job Shadow Resources for help finding a job shadow, messaging examples, questions to ask during a job shadow, and how to follow-up.
• Start thinking about summer internship opportunities: Internships engage your strengths, interests, and values, while building your professional network. Interns build reciprocal relationships with community partners and deepen and apply your academic learning. Browse internship opportunities on Handshake, Jobs on UVM Connect (type “Internship” in the search bar), and explore micro-internships with Parker Dewey.
Finding time to recharge your mind, body and spirit doesn’t come often during the school year. But a little preparation and investigation into what’s out there can make a big difference.
Heading home for the break? This November we’re focusing on how to talk about all the cool stuff you’ve been up to in college—whether it’s classes, internships, or campus involvement.
An interview with Jaz Routon, the Career Center’s 2024 Faculty Career Champion Award Recipient
Jaz Routon, PhD, a lecturer in Human Development and Family Services in the College of Education and Social Services, has been awarded the Career Center’s Career Champion Award for her outstanding dedication to supporting students in their career paths. In our interview, Routon shares their approach to empowering students and some of the best career advice they’ve been given in their career path. “Change is scary, even when you know you are making a good decision,” says Routon. “Do not let the fear of change stop you from making positive moves in your life.”
How does it feel to win the Career Champion Award?
I am honored to be selected for the Career Champion Award but could not have done this work alone. I must credit my teaching assistant, Arima Minard, many guest speakers, and our UVM and community partners who supervised our HDFS interns throughout this academic year.
What is your approach to supporting students in their career path?
My primary approach was demonstrating to the graduating seniors that their career trajectories did not need to be linear. I wanted to ease the stress and anxiety associated with graduating and figuring out the next steps. I invited helping professionals (such as counselors, mental health professionals, social workers, and clinical psychologists) to elaborate on their career paths and the twists and turns leading them to their current roles. I wanted the students to understand that what success looks like is diverse. I wanted the seniors to know there are no wrong turns because each step will give them experience and insight to inform and benefit their next step. It’s never too late to follow a dream.
What motivates you to go above and beyond to support a student’s career development?
In my first year leading the HDFS internship capstone course for our seniors, I realized that students were unsure what to do with Human Development and Family Science after graduation. Although the majors learn about numerous helping professions early in the program, they are not given explicit directions on exploring these options. I also remembered how hopeless I felt at the end of my undergraduate years and how much I could have benefited from this type of guidance. To help them better prepare, I asked what information the students wanted or needed, and I worked to meet those requests. We covered resume building, cover letters, recommendation letters, types of graduate degrees, job readiness, and career exploration, to name a few. I provided the students with various links for career and graduate school exploration. The students even learned about budgeting and received a crash course in Excel.
How do you foster a sense of confidence, courage, and curiosity in students regarding their career goals?
When the students first start at their internship sites, they think they know with certain which population they want to work with in the future and have a good idea of what they may want to do. However, the internship experience can sometimes change their perception altogether. For instance, I’ve had interns who thought they wanted to work with children only to find that they did not enjoy doing so or have the patience needed. Or, I’ve had an intern who was interested in working with the aging population but found they could not deal with the grief and loss when a client passes. When their original perception changes, the interns feel a sense of loss, confusion, and concern about what to do next – especially if they had spent their undergraduate years expecting to go into a specific helping field. However, I reiterate how critical it is to gain this insight and grow from it. I hope this has built courage and curiosity to keep seeking a path that feels right to them. I also teach the students to stand in their privileged social locations to push for change in the helping field. I think this has helped build confidence in their ability to make positive change and impact on individuals, families, and communities.
What’s the best career advice you were ever given?
That change is scary, even when you know you are making a good decision. Do not let the fear of change stop you from making positive moves in your life.
What’s the most important piece(s) of career advice you give to students?
To retrain your brain about “failure” because no matter what, you have gained experience that can serve you.
How can other staff support students in their career pursuits?
Making efforts to engage with campus and community partners deliberately and consciously in a way that does not only serve the University. As a land grant University, faculty and staff must be critical and consider how their teaching techniques and assignments can serve the community. Doing so builds trust and social capital that is highly integral to career development.
Chris Offensend graduated UVM in 2010 with a degree in mechanical engineering. He went on to pursue graduate studies in aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech before launching his career at Boeing. Throughout these experiences, Chris paid attention to what he wanted. And that desire led him to business school and entrepreneurship. In this interview, Chris talks about his journey and the early indications he felt leading him to start his own business. He offers students a helpful framework for how to approach their internships, as well as the different stages of their career, thinking of each experience as an experiment to test a hypothesis.
Sam: Chris, could you tell me about your story and how your path set you up for a successful start-up?
Chris: My story is a winding one. I started out at as a mechanical engineer major at UVM. But even by my junior and senior year, I still lacked a clear sense of where I wanted to go. My classes were good, and I really enjoyed the advanced courses. That uncertainty led me to go to graduate school.
Graduate school helped me in a couple of ways. It involved a lot of system design, which would serve me later. It also helped me to land an internship in aerospace that led to my job at Boeing.
My work at Boeing put me in a context that I was not used to; I was involved in manufacturing, research, and development – subjects that my UVM courses only provided a generic understanding. But it did involve a great deal of problem solving, which I enjoyed.
I encountered a personal problem when the Boeing corporation made the decision to move away from Seattle. I was not willing to relocate. This challenge led me to think more broadly. As a result, I enrolled in a Startup Weekend program, where participants would quickly move from ideating, pitching, and then launching a project all in the course of a weekend. It led to a lot of failure, but the experience was highly formative.
As a result, I became more curious about starting my own venture and decided to enroll in business school. As I learned about business theory, I wondered about if I still had what it takes to launch a start up. When it came time to secure an internship, I ran the experiment by joining an early-generation startup. I learned a lot, but the whole time I was asking myself, ‘is this a fit for me?’ The whole internship experience was transformative. It taught me a lot about scale, and I was empowered after that to go back and revisit my vision.
Sam: What immediate experiences led you to the idea for your startup?
Chris: There are people who are shoe-horned into entrepreneurship. These are the people who solve a problem, whose idea itself holds tremendous value. The process then becomes a matter of commercializing that existing idea. For people like this, entrepreneurship is kind of forced on them.
And then there are people like myself, who op in to become entrepreneurs. The reasons can be different, and for me it was a desire to be impactful, to address social concerns through a double bottom line. When entrepreneurship is your decision, then you have to decide what is the problem area that you want to tackle. The key is to find a problem that holds enough energy for you that it can sustain your efforts for five to ten years.
I found that problem area with a former UVM roommate who was telling me about the problems local governments face in procurement. The problem is costly since it involves steep overhead that can overtax local municipalities. And through our startup, Qwally, we are able to help local governments address that procurement issue.
Sam: What is some advice that you would give to students who are now studying at UVM and may have entrepreneurship aspirations?
Chris: I think internships are a big one. For me, this was a transformative experience. Every internship is like a career experiment. You get to run a test on a career hypothesis. Even if the internship is a bad fit, you can ask, why was this a bad experience? What went wrong? What did I learn – not just about an industry, but about yourself?
I remember one internship I had at UVM. It was not a good fit for me. It did not match my expectations. But I learned from that experience by asking myself: do I like this? Do I want to do this? The reaction is either hot or cold. In that case, it was cold, and I moved forward.
Sam: You had a couple of experiences in graduate school. Could you talk about the differences in those settings and how they shaped your journey?
Chris: It is important to understand that in graduate school you can’t always get what you want, but you do need to know what you are looking for. In my first setting, I gained a lot of exposure to a subject area that was a good fit. I even thought about a PhD for a minute; but that was another experiment that didn’t play out. The experiment as a whole did play out, though, because it increased my overall career options.
From there, I continued to follow my gut. This was certainly true by the time I went to business school. From the first setting to the second, I moved from a focus on one particular industry to a general, or broad range of possibilities. This range offered me more flexibility; it opened more options. It allowed me to diverge from my current trajectory. In business school, everyone was doing something totally different; and I suddenly became aware of options that I had never considered. It was really inspiring. Again, this allowed me to run lots of career experiments, helping me to refine what I wanted to do, so that I graduated feeling much more confident about where I wanted to go.
Sam: I can tell this was transformative. Could you tell me more about what you felt in that space?
Chris: It was definitely overwhelming at first, but then it was inspiring. I go back to the startup weekends. That experience was completely overwhelming. I left that not exactly feeling confident, but I knew I needed more experience. I think experiences of overwhelm can teach us about those gaps in knowledge or skills. It is an opportunity for us to develop ourselves. The startup weekends gave me a basic framework to work on those gaps, when I got to business school, it clicked and everything suddenly made sense.
As an entrepreneur, you are going to experience overwhelm. There is always a gap between theory and practice. And the bridge between those two is curiosity. Entrepreneurs have to be inherently curious to succeed. It is my biggest driving force. That curiosity pushes me to keep seeking out new experiences. If I encounter something new, I can join in, learn from it, and test more hypotheses. It doesn’t hurt to have a good fall back. In business school, I thought, I can always pivot and take on a job. I knew lots of classmates whose experiments failed, and they took a job somewhere. But in either case, the day to day is the same: positioning yourself in a new place where you can learn and operate to position yourself for the next experiment.
