Career Center Assignment 3: Industry Professionals

Your readings may develop new questions and interests for you. You will need to explore your options more thoroughly before starting classes. The Whitman Career Center encourages you to actively seek opportunities to speak with professionals in your career area of interest prior to starting your masters program. Business professionals are eager to act as mentors, and welcome the opportunity to discuss with you career transitions and paths. As part of this requirement, the Whitman Career Center will be holding Alumni On-Line Chats over the summer with alumni from a variety of industries and various functional backgrounds. If you have contacts who are business professionals in your intended career industry or functional area and wish to set up appointments with them, you may do so instead of attending one of the on-line chats.

As soon as you have completed the Vault assignment, and no later than the assignment deadline, decide which on-line chats you will attend and/or make appointments and meet with professionals in your career interest area. When you have completed the assignment, please prepare a one-page summary of your actions including the persons you had your communication with, the aspects of career path you communicated about, and anything new or different that you did not know before this communication. Send your report in either a Word document (DOC), a PDF, or plain text (TXT) file to Steve Hoskins, Associate Director of the Career Center.

Special Career Center Alumni Chat Sessions

The Career Center staff will join the Monday, June 2, 2008 (3:00p - 4:00p) scheduled chat session to explain how the special alumni chat sessions will be conducted. If you do not have your own industry professional contacts, make sure to join us for one of the following special Career Center alumni chat sessions.

Times and dates are subject to change to accommodate our alumni. Alumni many be substituted without notice due to any unforeseen technology or work-related issues.

For those students using their own contacts, you are strongly encouraged to keep track of who you contact, their company, their position, the date of initial contact, date(s) of discussion and/or any communication, and some notes regarding what the communication entailed. This will be very important should you want/need to contact these individuals again once you begin your program.