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Were you able to get an internship with this career? If so how did it help you?
How did having an internship help you with your career and how long after did it take you to get the job? #career #internships #college-jobs
2 answers
Fuzzy Md
Fuzzy’s Answer
some cases you can squeak through by demonstrating that you’ve achieved better grades in your particular major or in classes related to the job to which you’re applying. For this strategy, you can list your “major GPA” or “grades from relevant classes” on your resume, in a cover letter or verbally during a job interview.
Here’s the most important thing about GPA: it matters less and less as you advance in your career and have more experience under your belt (no one asks a 52-year-old executive what grade she got in Freshman Econ). Applying the transitive property of career advice, this means that if you want your GPA to matter less, you need to make your experience matter more.
Understand that employers use GPA to gauge a few things about you:
• Your intelligence
• Your discipline
• Your ambition
Good grades imply that you are smart, serious and motivated. Mediocre grades imply the opposite. So, if you’re just not a good student or you slacked off in school, you need to show that you possess the attributes of someone with a higher GPA.
How? You can do this through impressive internships and letters of recommendation confirming your intelligence and work ethic. You can do this through consistent participation in extra curricular activities or volunteer work to show that you have discipline. You can do this by taking additional classes to show that you are interested in developing yourself.
If you have a low GPA, you’ll also need to alter your job search accordingly. A resume with a low GPA will likely never make it out of the slush pile, so your better bet is to find jobs through networking rather than online resume submission. On several occasions I’ve been impressed by eager, ambitious, engaging young people who have later told me they have low GPAs. Once I liked and trusted them, the GPA mattered a lot less. In other cases, I’ve never even asked about a person’s GPA simply because he came so highly recommended from someone I know and trust.
p.s. Since you are not required to list your GPA on your resume (I suggest only listing a GPA of 3.0 or higher), some employers may never even ask about your grades. If you get lucky and GPA is never mentioned, you are under no obligation to reveal it.
How important has your GPA been to your job hunt? Share your experience in the Comment section below!
Nicole Baillie
Nicole’s Answer
In general terms, an internship can be very helpful in building a career. The steps taken to get an internship can be great practice towards the steps taken to get a job, then the next job and then the next....so that individuals can learn the ways that work best for them to be seen and employed by employers of their choice.
Getting internships can be extremely helpful in building your career. They were very, very helpful for me. To be clear, depending on an individual's desired field of work, sometimes getting internships can be challenging. In those cases, one way to lighten that challenge is to volunteer your time. Whether it is through volunteering or paid internships, getting the knowledge and discipline that comes with showing up and participating everyday...solving problems and meeting business initiatives...these are things that employers value which would also help individuals to get jobs they can feel good about in reasonable time frames.
Hope you find this answer helpful. Best of luck to you!