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personal professional website

Your Career Column: Building Your Personal Professional Website

First of all, what is a personal professional website? It’s basically a website about your professional goals and accomplishments. This could include a portfolio of your work, whether that’s descriptions of your teaching philosophies and classroom experiences, links to articles or poetry you’ve written, descriptions of career-related projects you’ve developed and completed, or collections of your artwork or photography. Your personal professional site could also double as a blog if you want to write regularly about a certain topic.

If you’re worried that you don’t have enough to show off, your personal professional website can just be a more detailed version of your resume or LinkedIn profile. For example, when I created my first professional website, I made pages for each section you’d put on a resume: skills, education, work experiences and more. On each page, I went into detail about projects I’d worked on, what I learned from my classes, etc. I also included links to samples of my work, such as blog posts I’d written and social media accounts I had started. My goal was to show future employers what I was passionate about and show them how my education and experiences made me a great candidate to work with.Read More »Your Career Column: Building Your Personal Professional Website

studying abroad is great for your future career

Why Studying Abroad Is Great for Your Future Career

If I’m being honest, classroom time was one of the least valuable experiences I had while studying abroad.

I know, I know; that’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true: It’s the experiences that take you outside the classroom that make studying abroad…well, studying abroad. You can take classes anywhere in the world, but it’s going out and exploring new place that you’re in that makes studying abroad such a rewarding experience.

But that also means that the experiences you have outside the classroom while you’re studying abroad are hard to quantify. It’s easy to show how your internship or classes line up with specific skills employers are looking for, such as proofreading, implementing a nutrition plan or entering data into a spreadsheet. Figuring out how to include study abroad on your resume is harder because the skills you develop while studying abroad are soft skills.Read More »Why Studying Abroad Is Great for Your Future Career

career advice column

Why I’m Starting a Career Advice Column for My Alma Mater’s Campus Newspaper

Now that I’ve graduated from Concordia and left my two-year run as an editor of its campus newspaper, The Sower, I’m going to end up writing more for it as an alumna than I ever did as a student worker.

I will write a twice-monthly career advice column for Concordia students. It’s an idea I toyed with while I was managing editor of The Sower last year—I wanted to share my strategies and stories of how I built up my resume and prepared to jump headfirst into a career postgraduation. But last year was crazy for me, mostly because I was doing too much to prepare for my career instead of enjoying my last year of college. I didn’t utilize my opportunity to write for The Sower beyond a heartfelt explanation of why The Sower exists and a few Buzzfeed-esque listicles.Read More »Why I’m Starting a Career Advice Column for My Alma Mater’s Campus Newspaper