As we, college students, look to begin our full time careers, we always have that question in our minds: “what am I going to be doing in 5 years?”. While this question may come with many different answers, one of the many questions that we are looking to answer is, “what is my specialization within my field going to be in 5 years?”
Specialization within any field is what will make someone special, and ultimately an indispensable resource to any company. With a specialization, a person has more knowledge on any one subject than other people. Within the world of software development, this could be a specialization in AWS, Scala, Machine learning techniques, or other. However, while specialization is a great thing, there is also a time when strict specialization to one topic, and not enough background in other topics can make someone overly-specialized. In this position, one will not have enough knowledge on other subjects within the company to make themselves a resource for many different roles. As Ilana Gershon states in her book, Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today, job applicants must have a “basic structure of the genre” and have a “reasonably competent … range” of skills (Gershon). In this way, a well rounded candidate from multiple backgrounds with a couple specialities are the most ideal candidates for the workplace. It is this balance between solid foundations in other disciplines AND the specialization in one or two areas that make a person stand out in their career path.
I believe that I stand out from my peers because as a graduating senior this semester, I have a plethora of internship experience in fields ranging from technology and big data, to the fields of politics and healthcare. My major choice allows me an application and historical perspective of the field of Media & Communications, as well as the ways that we can use Statistics to quantitatively measure those fields. With backgrounds in two growing fields today, media and statistic analysis, I think that I can bring a lot to the table. In addition, I am “concise [with my] answers in a job interview” which allows me to portray my ideas in a calm, efficient fashion (Gershon). With that however, I do mix in a “glimmer of humor” to keep the interview on a lighter note (Gershon). On the other hand however, I think that I blend in with many candidates because I have not had a full-time position, and that I have still yet to be able to apply the great about of knowledge from the classroom, to the workplace. I still do not yet have a defined speciality, and neither do my peers as we are just starting our careers.
In order for me to continue to strengthen and diversify my skills, I am always looking to take on independent projects and pursue opportunities outside of my classes. Over the past couple years, I have almost always had an internship of some sort in addition to my classes in order to keep developing and applying what I know, and finding out where I need to improve in order to keep myself competitive within today’s market. In addition, I enjoy challenging myself with independent projects, mining data, and learning different statistical softwares.
For my weaknesses, I try to identify a select few that I know I can work on immediately, and a couple that I want to work on long-term. For the ones I can work on immediately, I make a plan that outlines how I will go about working on those weaknesses, and revisit that plan every couple weeks to measure my progress. I do the same as well for my longerm goals, but every half a year I will revisit.
Self improvement is vital in today’s world to keep the competitive edge within the workplace. It is important to always keep yourself well-rounded and well versed with today’s markets, as well as to continue learning new skills and technologies that are being used today to propel our world forward.
