making connections
SMU career counselors emphasize internship opportunities and career development starting with first-year students – exploring who they are and what they want to do, says Ford at the Hegi Career Center. “We challenge them to learn
through their courses, campus involvement, community service and internships,” he says.
The early work pays off during students’ junior and senior years, Ford says, when the process intensifies with applications for second or even third internships, along with résumé building, career fairs, and job or graduate school applications.
The Hegi Career Center and Cox Career Services also offer students numerous online resources and campus workshops on job skills, including a new “Careers In …” series featuring employers and alumni in specific fields. “Students make those crucial contacts at these events and learn to think more broadly about what they can do with their majors,” Kerr says.
Kyle Snyder ’07, a strategy analyst for American Airlines, has represented the Fort Worth, Texas, company at the Hegi Career Center’s fall and spring career fairs, which have attracted up to 700 students and 90 employers. He also participated in this fall’s career fair prep day, where he advised students on speed networking.
“Students have only one or two minutes to make a good impression with company representatives at a career fair,” says Snyder, who earned a B.B.A. degree in finance from the Cox School. During his junior and senior years at SMU, he obtained two internships with American Airlines through the Hegi Career Center’s online postings.
new opportunities
In an initiative to expand internship opportunities, this year the Hegi Career Center joined the University Career Action Network, an internship exchange among more than 20 universities and colleges across the country, including Harvard, Duke and the University of Chicago. The shared database gives SMU students access to more than 1,500 internships nationwide and supplements Hegi’s MustangTrak, an online database featuring hundreds of internships and jobs open to SMU students and alumni. Counselors evaluate postings on MustangTrak, more than 90 percent of which are paid.
“We do not want our students to be “go-fors,’” Ford says. “These internships are about real work related to academic pursuits.”
Jack London, a senior from Birmingham, Alabama, found his summer internship through a MustangTrak posting about a company information session on campus. The marketing major in Cox was among dozens of students who attended the meeting and left a résumé with Coca-Cola Enterprises for one of a few spots in the company’s new University Talent Program.
After a challenging interview and an invitation to the final round, London turned to Cox Career Services for guidance. “They walked me through everything – my résumé, questions to ask, the thank-you note,” he says. “This was really competitive, and I wanted to get it right.”
London landed a sales associate internship. He and about 50 interns and new graduates from across the country started their summer at corporate headquarters in Atlanta, where they met Coca-Cola Enterprises’ CEO and leadership team. Then he headed to the Austin office to learn what goes into selling the global bottling company’s products – from territory development to computer programs to distribution and delivery.
“Before this internship, I wasn’t clear where my career path would take me,” says London, who has been accepted to the company’s two-year training program for next year. “Now I’m incredibly focused. It was an amazing summer of working and learning and meeting people.”
Those are the right experiences to take from an internship, says Kerr at Cox Career Services. “Interns who make the most of their opportunity do two things: They are willing to work really hard, and they begin to build long-standing relationships,” she says. “In any economy, it’s about what you’ve done and who you know.”
– Sarah Hanan
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