The Professional Forum: Recruiting Tomorrow's Leaders Today

The College of Liberal Art Professional Forum is coming Beering this coming November 3rd. Here is an explanation of what this event entails: The Liberal Arts Student Council and the College of Liberal Arts Career Development Center hosts an annual graduate/professional school, career and internship fair called The Professional Forum .

The day includes company presentations, panel discussions lead by Purdue alumni, company representatives, and graduate school recruiters, and a traditional career/internship and graduate school fair in the afternoon. The day is topped off with a formal networking social event that evening. The Professional Forum will be held on Tuesday, November 3, 2009, in the Purdue Memorial Union Ballrooms.

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/students/careers/events/career_fair.html
This exciting event is a great way to Network with potential companies, graduate schools, as well as, internships. Its important in these hard economic times to network because you never know who will be able to help you land the job. The Key is to network, network, network!

Media and Communication Careers

I found this interesting website that helps college students find careers in fields they might seem interested in.

Check it out: Media and Communication Careers, Jobs and Training Information Media and Communication is a multibillion dollar industry that offers dedicated professionals a myriad of exciting and lucrative career opportunities. This pages provides a list of links to information on popular media and communication careers. To find detailed information on job opportunities, training requirements, earning and career descriptions for a specific media or communications field make your selection from the list below. Take your time to read through all of the information we provide and we're confident you find just what you're looking for.

TV, Radio and Sports Announcers, Broadcast and Sound Engineering Technicians, and Radio Operators, Language Interpreters, and Translators, News Analysts, Reporters, and Correspondents, Photography, Public Relations Specialists, Television, Video, and Motion Picture Camera Operators, and Editors: Writing and Editing

I hope everyone is familiar with Twitter. And if you aren't then you just aren't technology savy. I first heard about twitter a little over a year ago. I was working with my cousin to help her launch her new line a beauty products: Glory Dead Sea http://www.deadseaglory-us.com/index.php. She asked me to try to get the company on twitter so that they could start accomodating to a new crowd. After working on this project for my cousin, i found this article that discussed Twitter as an opening for Communication Degrees as a Career for companies. http://www.newsweek.com/id/184656


Dr. Pamela Rutledge wrote this following article to discuss the ideas presented in the above link:

This article underscores the importance of looking at new media with an open-mind. Too many people I know, when faced with media that is not indigenous to their technological coming of age, spend way too long explaining why something isn’t important (or worse, is dangerous) without trying to their outside their initial reaction and looking to see how the technology is being used and experienced. As a media psychologist, I’m kind of fixated on that experience thing. Piles of psychological research shows that humans are social animals that need to be connected to others, and, among other things, that interpersonal connections are essential for mental and physical health, and that different people have different connection styles. A lot of people fretted and tried to prove that Web 2.0 technology was going to isolate people and deprive them of their social skill repertoire. With interpersonal connections such a big theme in human lives, why are so many people surprised to find out that social networks, like Twitter and Facebook, become real connections, even 140 characters at a time? These social connections have enormous impact on how information is passed along and how trust and credibility is established, but by entirely new routes and rules. The Newsweek article says:While some microbloggers are who they say they are, plenty of celeb feeds (Ryan Seacrest’s, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s, Barack Obama’s) are actually being penned by folks like the one Spears sought out. And the skills she required—experience launching online communities, addiction to MySpace and Facebook, graphic design experience, and a love for “creating relationships”—are the same ones companies need as they venture onto Twitter. That explains why, on the corporate side, business are relying on in-house publicists, marketing managers and new professional blogging firms like Twit4hire to helm their accounts.The article excerpt show how how professions will emerge in response to technological innovation. (Twit4Hire may be the best name of all time.) Parents need to embrace the idea that when kids say they don’t know what they want to be when they grow up, they mean it; they don’t even know what the choices will be.
http://mprcenter.org/blog/2009/02/14/new-communication-rules-bring-new-communication-careers/

Catching Up Sunday, Life after college

Since last weekend was October break i haven't gotten the chance to catch up on my blog postings to here it goes! Today i want to talk about how schools are preparing communication majors for the "real world" compared to other majors, especially at Purdue. Last Friday, i had a meeting with my advisor to discuss my final semester of my college career here at Purdue University. At this meeting, after we had finalized the credits I needed to graduate, we began a discussion on the topic of preparation for the real world. This conversation emphasised the need for the College of Liberal Arts to put more emphasis on students finding information for internships in order to gain experience in a specific field, since a communications degree is such a broad option. Also, to make it more clear to the students in courses, what to expect in the real world. My advisor is quoted saying "The college of liberal arts can not expect every student to come out of the program to become either a advisor for the department, a researcher for the department or a professor. We as a department need to prepare the students for the real world outside of academia." I think she is right. If you look at other schools here at Purdue, you see much more emphasis put on finding experience through internships, or research aids, as well as, work studies, in order to prepare their students for what is most important life after college. For example, one of my roommates is a management major. In the Krannert School of Management, academic advisers, as well as department heads and professors pushes the concept of competition not only in the academic setting, but also in the idea of the real world job search and maintaining positions in these jobs. Another example, is my current boyfriend just graduated from Purdue with a degree in Nuclear Engineering. In the engineering field, where most of the school puts it focus on, they encourage internships, research participation and have one of the largest career fairs in the Midwest. Overall, I am just trying to emphasis the point that, the College of Liberal Arts, as much as they try to prepare you for your future through courses relevant to communication research, they do a poor job of preparing students for the reality of life after college.

Sail your boat towards your lighthouse made up of dreams.

After going to a conference presentation by Rusty Rueff ( He is a really intelligent man, who worked his way to the top from graduating with a com degree to becoming CEO of a company...his website is www.rustyrueff.com), I realized that sometimes even though you pick a specific field, a lot of times your dream job will waver down a different path awhile. Rusty used to analogy: Your dream is like a lighthouse, and you want to sail yourself toward this dream, but as most people know with a sailboat, you must waver back and forth in order to make a direct path. This wavering can be considered the different experiences you have in your careers, that lead your towards that dream, or maybe even change it a little. So, remember even though you might have a specific field and goal in mind for your communication degree, sometimes life experiences alter that goal, but its all about how you sail your boat.