How I landed two jobs before graduation
After I failed to get an internship with a 90% placement rate.
“What scares you the most about graduation?” is one of the most common questions I hear upper-year students asking each other. And the answer always seems to be some variation of “leaving the school bubble”.
School and the real world tend to be viewed as two entirely different realms with a distinct boundary, and it is the jumping from one to the other that scares the bejesus out of undergraduates like me.
Some of us, however, don’t seem to be phased by this jump. Having a tendency to surround myself with other anxious minds, I only occasionally chance upon another confident student. But it is the odd confident people I encountered who inspired me to shed my “I just don’t have what they have” mentality and take a totally different route through undergraduate.
How did they get to be that way? I wanted to know.
What I found was that, for them, they were already graduated. From day one, these students were engaged — applying classroom learning in a real world setting as soon as possible (co-ops, volunteering, family businesses, personal projects), seeing what skills effectively transferred over between the two, adjusting course work, and repeating the cycle. Come graduation, they already knew exactly what awaited them.
When I hit third year, I wanted to follow in their footsteps and began my journey to eliminate this barrier separating school from the real world.
First stop — my school’s internship program.
I paid the $200 enrolment fee for the internship program, attended all required councillor meetings and workshops, and was sending out resumes and cover letters like it was my day job. I was told most internships were secured by the end of March and the rest by mid-May. Despite a couple of interviews, the end of March arrived and I had heard nothing. May came and went. When the June sunshine arrived, I knew I had missed the boat.
Despite a 90% placement rate, I had failed to secure an internship.
My journey to post-grad confidence started with a huge failure.
It absolutely sucked. But after a week or two of “poor me” grieving and listening to moody hip hop instrumentals, I looked more closely at what had happened. I obviously didn’t have the skills needed by these employers.
I then recalled an interview for a Communications Internship with Canada’s largest power company. Part of the interview consisted of planning a two-month Twitter campaign that included media and related content marketing.
Not wanting to appear incompetent, I sat up straight, nodded and smiled (probably too much).
It was only after the interviewers left me alone that I dropped the facade. I had absolutely no idea what “content marketing” was, let alone how to plan a two month social media campaign. I spent the hour writing and erasing hypothetical tweets and trying to ignore the relentless ticking of the clock.
They didn’t call me back.
I put my pride aside and tried again.
I returned to my school’s non-internship school board to look for more opportunities. I came across a listing looking for a “Student Writer”. The job responsibilities included the phrase “Content Marketing”, which conjured flashbacks to that grey room at the power company. I applied, surprisingly got an interview, and was offered the position a week later. Based out of my school’s marketing department, my job was to create content for high school students as potential applicants and first-year students getting the hang of things. I still find it ironic that a student as lost as I was writing advice pieces, but maybe that’s what made them so successful — the readers could smell the anxiety and relate to it.
As it turned out, I was able to develop every skill I learned I was missing after the interview at the power company. I think I was able to do this through clear communication with my boss. From the initial interview, I made clear what I hoped to learn and my boss was supportive enough to help me achieve those things. How exactly I went about that:
- Learn how to effectively use content marketing: Writing two or three articles a week for the student blog.
- Improve my understanding of social media campaigns: Creating social media posts to go with articles; tracking engagement and traffic with tools like Google Analytics.
- Strengthen video & image-based marketing skills: Filming, photographing, editing, and creating soundtracks for school campaigns.
An internship isn’t the only way to develop skills. I can find other means to develop the skills I’m missing.
Inspired by my comeback, I decided to try my hand at balancing work and school at the same time.
By the end of my third Winter term, I could balance both my part-time job and school. I did this by taking a cue from my seniors: taking courses that I could easily apply to my job. Courses like “Organizing Social Movements” and “Organizational Business Communication” provided projects like organizing and executing a four-month long campaign to raise awareness for increasing Ontario’s minimum wage. Homework was just like work. I could craft physical and digital marketing materials, host in-person and online Q&A events, and collaborate with community partners.
The consistency of going to work every day began to work its magic.
I also learned to ask for more. Come the summer, I asked my boss if I could work more hours. She said yes. But I didn’t just work — I enrolled in relevant summer classes as well to learn the concepts that could inform my work. By combining work and school, my identification as a “just a student” began to slowly fade.
Then, I moved. I found the apartment equivalent of Harry Potter’s broom closet above a Chinese restaurant in downtown Toronto. The scenery of students with backpacks walking to school was replaced with a whirlwind of all sorts of people. My previous walking commute was replaced with a hellish hour and a half subway ride.
Just by placing myself somewhere I wasn’t seen as a student first — just one of many city commuters — helped disintegrate the school/life barrier. Before I moved, I virtually never left my campus, and it undoubtedly contributed to my anxiety. Graduation isn’t just finishing school. It comes with new routines, new environments, new people — and that’s why it would be a new chapter of my life. The thought of your post-grad environment isn’t so scary when you’ve already had a sneak peek.
I needed to see that there are other ways of life outside of being a student.
Graduation now seems more like an checkbox waiting to be marked off.
When employers rejected me because I didn’t have the skills they were looking for, I found a means to develop those skills while simultaneously breaking down the barrier between school and the “real world”. Now, almost two years after failing to secure a near-guaranteed internship placement, I’ve managed to secure two positions in content marketing and social media marketing.
Better a tedious checkbox than a source of terror.
I may not be as sure as those students I talked to a few years back, but I certainly have a more clear idea of what awaits me out there in the post-grad netherworld, and I know now that I have at least enough of a skill set to get my foot in the door of my industry. That’s all I really need right now.
