Studying Abroad Part II: Neva Barker Weighs In

This blog post was originally posted at Beyond the Elms, a career planning and networking blog for students, on April 20, 2011.

In one of my posts, I tried to address the question of whether or not studying abroad helps you land internships or jobs. I mentioned how my study abroad experience wasn’t working out, though I wasn’t too concerned — I’m finding internships already, and I can always study abroad in the summer. For many, however, studying abroad is a huge part of their undergraduate career, a high point in their four years at Scripps College. The experience can help define them as a woman, a student, and a person.

A few days ago I received an email from Neva Barker, the Director of Off-Campus Study at Scripps. She’d read my post and wanted to weigh in on how helpful studying abroad can be to the job and internship application process. She wrote:

Does studying abroad help you get a job or an internship?  My answer to that would be – only as much as any other experience you may add to your resume might.  There is nothing magical about listing any one thing on your resume, really.  What is important is being able to articulate what skills you acquired that you can put to good use in helping the company or organization accomplish its goals. That is what employers are looking for, and matching your skills to what the company needs is the key to getting that internship placement or the job of your dreams.

The hard part about job and internship interviews is being able to think on your feet and come up with smart, succinct answers to the questions thrown your way. Neva was right: there is nothing magical about listing one thing on your resume (though I’d imagine that saying you competed in the Olympics, or something as equally surprising to an interviewer, might work in your favor!). The important part is whether or not you can articulate how an experience, job, or internship can help you in your future job, or how it helped you grow as a viable individual for the position. Neva stressed just how important this was in her email. After all, what good is an entirely life-changing experience abroad if you can’t say just how it changed your life?

Surprisingly, not that many applicants are very good at answering my question: “So tell me about your time in X country.  What did you learn from that experience?” Often students will talk about how amazing their time abroad was, how great it was to see the world and meet new people.  That does nothing to move them on to the next round of interviews. They may talk about their personal growth — and while that is nice for them and is a slightly better answer, it is not what I care about as a potential employer. However, the students who will grab my attention are the ones who reply something like this, “To be honest, it was quite challenging and I learned to think on my feet and how to problem solve when confronted with a situation I had never faced before.  I am confident that these skills and strengths that I honed while studying abroad are qualities that I can use to help your company adapt to the rapid changes that are occurring in this industry.”  Students should illustrate the development of analytical skills, the ability to work as part of a team and with diverse populations, to communicate cross-culturally and show a familiarity with local customs in a different cultural context, etc.  Those are the responses that will get my attention.

I can already hear people thinking it: “But I can come up with a response like that from my experiences on Scripps’ campus!” Well, that could very well be true. I know that I have personally been in situations during my time at Scripps where the outcome was similar to the ones listed above. I have certainly developed my analytical skills, I’ve learned how to work as part of a team on various clubs and athletic teams, and my communication skills have certainly seen a jump, too.  Neva and I discussed this:

Learning to think critically and write well are the crucial skills to master in an undergraduate education.  One can do that without ever leaving campus, but I think studying abroad can certainly offer such experiences. By taking oneself out of the familiar, perhaps those opportunities are more easily recognized.

Eventually, she and I circled around to the topic of perfectionism, which, as many Scripps students know, is quite common on our campus. We’re driven students, no doubt about that! Studying abroad certainly opens doors to the possibility of failure. One might make a mistake in the language and have a misunderstanding with a native speaker, one might get lost in their city on the way to university and have to explain why they’re late — the list could go on and on. Is failure necessarily a bad thing, though? Neva and I agreed that failure is ultimately a learning process. After all, what is that saying from William Hickson? Oh, right: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” As long as you pick yourself up after a failure and learn from your mistakes, it can be an incredibly successful experience. What better conversation topic could there be for a job or internship interview?

Studying abroad offers many opportunities for risk-taking and failure. Ultimately, students learn that it is okay to fail, and they find the courage to pick themselves up and try again. Study abroad is not the only way these things can happen, but if a goal for studying abroad is to make oneself a more attractive applicant for an internship or a job, it can certainly be a significant factor. If you talk to most people who are happy in their jobs today, they will probably tell of a career path that was not linear, that did not happen without some fits and starts, some failures and disappointments that, in retrospect, just turned out to be just another opportunity trying to get their attention.

So, can studying abroad help you land an internship or job? It certainly can. While it may not be right for everyone, it probably won’t harm your chances at getting a job or an internship. At the very least, it will be a memorable growing experience, one that employers will always be able to talk about with you in an interview — just make sure you have a great response for them about how it helped you grow as an individual, and makes you just right for the job.

By the end of our discussion, Neva had come up with a new personal motto: “Failure is just a new opportunity trying to get my attention.” I think that’s a darn good motto to live by…don’t you?

Studying Abroad: Does it help you land internships or jobs?

 

This blog post was originally posted on Beyond the Elms, a career planning and networking blog for college students, on March 15, 2011.

Thanks to a myriad of personal and health reasons, I’ve recently had to question whether or not I will be studying abroad in the fall. The decision process was long and complicated, made worse by emotional outbursts, questioning expectations of myself, and worrying about whether or not I was letting others down if I didn’t study abroad. In one of my long conversations with my parents and friends about studying abroad versus not studying abroad, the topic of jobs and internships came up. The questions we found ourselves asking was this: does studying abroad really help you land a future job or internship?

Our answers were split. Clearly, the study abroad experience is incredibly valuable in a lot of different ways. It allows students to see the world and experience culture. It opens doors to new opportunities and activities. You meet new people, grow as an individual, take fantastic pictures, broaden your horizons…but can any of this be put on a resume?

Of course, everyone’s situations are different. Personally, I have had the good fortune to have traveled with my family. Studying abroad wasn’t something that I ever felt I had to do as a Scripps student. The perception is that resumes will always shine brighter if you have traveled abroad, explored the world, and taken a few classes while doing so. Studying abroad helps with problem-solving in almost any situation (language barrier, anyone?), and future employers will certainly acknowledge the fact that you have grown as a person. But does the entire study abroad experience prepare you for a job?

It depends on what specific job field you would like to enter. Personally, I hope to work in the tech sector, and there are very few institutions abroad that will actively help me toward that goal. One of the few people I know who studied abroad for a specific field is my boss – she attended the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, and took post-graduate classes in information management. Clearly, her experience was specifically tailored for her field, as she now works in community management at a tech start-up in San Francisco. Another example of tailoring a study abroad experience for your field would be attending the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome if you’re a classics major. What better choice could there be? On the same note, many institutions offer accompanying internship opportunities for eligible students. Obviously, these are fantastic opportunities to work abroad at an accredited company in your field – that will definitely stand out to your future employers!

However, many study abroad institutions are not quite as specialized as those listed above. In that case, the experience of traveling and living abroad – and the skills acquired by doing so – will have to be enough to shine through in your interview with a potential employer. The name of a school on your resume can only take you so far. For me, studying abroad was not conducive to my self-designed major and wasn’t specifically tailored to the field I want to pursue after graduation. On top of that, it was just falling at an awful time because of personal reasons. I was forced to consider whether studying abroad was a crucial aspect of my college experience, and I eventually decided it wasn’t. Would I have liked to? Sure, at a different time, without having to worry about classes not counting toward my major, and maybe at an institution that applies directly toward my desired job field. Meanwhile, I am already looking into abroad opportunities for next summer. Just because I chose not to study abroad during the school year doesn’t mean I can’t get just as wonderful of an experience at another time. As long as it’s something I’m passionate about doing, a future employer will certainly see that in my resume, and during any interview.

Interested in reading more about the impact study abroad has on your future job search? Kim Gradel’s article, Using Your International Experience to Get a Job, is a good place to start. Click here to read an article about the positives of studying abroad containing statistics conducted by Global HR News.

Study Abroad: Applications, Part II

The Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England. I won't be too far from this puppy next fall!

Well, the paperwork is complete for now. For now? Yes, for now. I spent the better part of my time between classes today struggling to understand the conversion of credits between the University of Sussex and Scripps, whether or not I need to take the September term + the autumn term to earn enough credits to complete a semester abroad, and which classes will help me do so…oh, and whether or not my 4-year academic plan will all line up in time for graduation.

Yeah.

At the moment, I have more credits than is required for graduation. A normal major (read: rather meager, in Scripps terms) requires 8 credits to go towards the major, with 4 electives. My unofficial adviser informed me that most creative writing majors have 12-15 credits. At the moment, I have 19.

Again: yeah.

This came about for a few different reasons. First of all, petitioning the Committee on Academic Review (CAR) requires you to put together a huge list of possible courses you will take for your major, more or less to ensure that, if one class isn’t offered one semester, it won’t kill you and you will have alternatives. Fair enough. Not surprisingly, the list that got sent off to CAR with my petition is quite long. The study abroad paperwork requires that you prove you won’t delay your graduation by going abroad, so you plan out your four years for them to prove you’ll survive. Including a senior seminar and thesis (yes, I’ll be doing both for my major, at least tentatively), my course load for my major is HUGE.

Am I going to cut down on it? Of course. I’m also plotting out my schedule so I can definitely take courses from a favorite professor of mine, the great Kathleen Fitzpatrick. I had the pleasure of taking my Intro to Digital Media course from her, and it’s held strong in its place as one of the best classes I’ve taken in my entire academic career. Professor Fitzpatrick is currently on sabbatical doing some fantastic work at NYU. If you’re interested, enjoy exploring her current project, MediaCommons, a digital scholarly network for peer review, and her first book, The Anxiety of Obsolescence. I obviously don’t have to tell you to this: she rocks, hard.

But I digress. Despite drilling a gaping hole in my time for work (writing this blog post isn’t helping, I can assure you of that), the amount of emails I’ve written, sent, and received, as well as the phone calls I’ve made today have been extraordinary. By the end of it, though, my application is sitting in a quiet little pile, restrained by a light blue paperclip, just waiting to be signed by my adviser. We’ve already scheduled a meeting at 4:15 for tomorrow, squeezed in between an interview, dinner, and my 7:00 creative non-fiction workshop.

(I’ll write more about that interview later.)

Wednesday morning I’ll head on down to the OCS office–which is actually quite nice; they have bowls of candy everywhere–get my picture taken for their records, and hand in the application. I’ll find out by January whether or not I’m accepted into the Scripps Study Abroad Program, from which I can move onto the actual University of Sussex application, getting my passport renewed (a minor detail, yes?), obtaining a student visa, and so much more. I’m pretty excited.

Oh–those 19 classes I have down for my major? Even if I chop it down to 15, that means I get to take more electives. Tentatively, my classes at Sussex will be Business and Management Studies, Tragedy in Literature, Questioning the Media, and Popular Literature in English: Children’s Literature. Some of those classes are bound to change, but it’s an interesting assortment. Plus, I get to explore the beauty of Brighton and Hove. Just look at the header image up there. How can you not be excited about that?

Study Abroad: Applications, Part I

At Scripps, it’s basically assumed that, unless there’s some circumstance that chains your trembling wrists to a desk and forces you study on-campus all four years, you’ll study abroad. The Off-Campus Study (OCS) office draws students in with its descriptions of romantic locations around the globe, the fantastic learning opportunities offered, and the bounty of experience waiting to be delved into by yours truly.

Of course, they don’t mention the paperwork.

At the moment, I’m surrounded by it: it’s on either side of my laptop, strewn about in piles of relevance, difficulty, and whether or not it requires a teacher recommendation, approval by an adviser (or two, or three, or…), and so on and so forth. There’s more in my second drawer down. Would you like to see it?

I kid. Scripps College breaks study abroad applications into chunks: first you fill out the application to the OCS office, which basically proves that you’re a competent human being able to fill out forms and say why you want to study in another country, and then you fill out the specific program application to the school of your choice. Currently, I’m working on the first application, which sounds like it should be done in a snap. It should be, I swear. I just so happened to think about writing a blog post about filling out the forms, and then…well, you can see where that got me.

To be honest, I was a bit bored, and more than a bit annoyed. The paperwork isn’t hard – it just so happens that the information I have to put down is in all in flux. Permanent address? Nope, my parents just moved and are renting a house, so they have no idea what our permanent address is, where we’ll eventually end up, and whether or not our information will be accurate by the time the OCS office reviews my paperwork. Major? Well, sort of. I’m in the middle of petitioning the Committee on Academic Review (CAR) to let me self-design my major. They’re being awfully pushy about it, too. Four year plan? Well, that’s in the works. I can’t really plan out the rest of my academic career at Scripps until I hear back from CAR, and they won’t get back to me until after this paperwork is due.

Problems, I tell you. If it all works out as it should (and will, since Scripps is teaching me how to be a strong, independent woman – I repeat, this will work out), I’ll be studying at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England in the fall. I’m still puzzling over how Scripps wants me to “describe yourself (personality, strengths, accomplishments, and hobbies)” in precisely three lines of space. I can’t do that, but perhaps that’s the challenge. Studying abroad is supposed to scare the shit out of you, force you out into the world, and face it all with wide-open eyes.

Maybe the application is just the first step.