Try @ TXST

Giselle Kowalski (00:04):
Hi everybody, my name is Giselle Kowalski and I'm the digital marketing strategist here at Texas State University. You're listening to Try at Texas State, and this week we're talking to Career Services. Whenever I was in college, I never really got the chance to explore all that Career Services had. Now I get to see it from a completely different perspective being an alumni. And both Adrianna and Ray gave me all the inside scoop that I needed to know about the Career Services here at Texas State. It's located on the fifth floor of LBJ. It's very quiet, calm, cool, and collected, and they have a new space. But yeah, please enjoy listening to both Ray and Adrianna, explain all that there is to career services. So, hey Ray, what's up? How are you?

Ray Rogers (00:55):
I'm doing well. Awesome.

Giselle Kowalski (00:57):
So for our listeners, can you please introduce yourself, your name, your role, and what you're doing at Career Services?

Ray Rogers (01:03):
Yeah. I'm Ray Rogers. I'm the director of Career Services. Basically run our centralized career center supporting all of our students and our alumni.

Giselle Kowalski (01:11):
What kind of services for those that don't know, do you guys provide and to whom as well?

Ray Rogers (01:16):
Great question. And it's pretty much everything that you can think of related to supporting students pursuing career and their post-graduation goals. So that is everything from coming in as a first-year student saying, I don't know what I wanna do when I graduate. I may or may not know what I want my major to be, but I need some help figuring that out. Uh, we also support students who are just looking for on-campus employment or part-time jobs off campus. That is really where we connect with most of our first-year students. We also will support students if they're looking for internships, to preparing them for applying for full-time jobs, getting ready for graduation. I also just wanna say here though, that the journey doesn't end there. We know that students continue after graduation and developing their career plans. Sometimes they get into a job that may not exactly be what they thought. It doesn't fit. There's, we provide free career services for life. So Once a Bobcat, Always a Bobcat. So we have a fair number of alumni who come back and utilize our services.

Giselle Kowalski (02:25):
Yeah, that's amazing. I didn't know that about you all whenever I visited, and I was impressed with your Career Closet and the fact that that's, isn't that also available to alumni?

Ray Rogers (02:35):
Right? So any student or alumni who comes in and needs professional attire to go do an interview or go to a job fair, we will suit you up and see what we've got in store for you.

Giselle Kowalski (02:48):
Moving on to career fairs. Can alumni also go to those?

Ray Rogers (02:51):
Right, so the general rule is, is anything we offer a student, we will offer an alumni at no charge as well. So that includes coming to our in-person fairs. We also have a couple of virtual fairs throughout the year that alumni sometimes can more easily attend because alumni may not be in San Marcos anymore.

Giselle Kowalski (03:12):
Amazing. And so what are those career fairs like? Can you walk me through what a day would be if I went to a career fair?

Ray Rogers (03:19):
Yeah, I think that intimidates students a lot. The idea of walking into a big ballroom, we'll have between maybe 60 to 130 employers there at an event. So it can feel very overwhelming, and I get it. We try to prepare students for that, and the employers are very easy to go up and talk to. But in general, we just want our students to come in and meet with those employers, go to different tables. I always recommend doing a little research ahead of time, figuring out maybe who the top five employers are you really wanna meet with. Do a little research about what they're hiring for, what their company is. Maybe even prepare a resume just for that employer and then go up and make introductions. But also just if you see a recruiter sitting at a table, go up and chat with them and learn about it. A lot of this can be by chance and haphazard chance always favors the prepared mind, but I wouldn't avoid some of those opportunities as they happen to show up in front of you at a job fair.

Giselle Kowalski (04:21):
Yeah, and it's also a great networking opportunity with career fairs in general. Do you guys split them up by industry or how does that work? Is it a general group of people from different places?

Ray Rogers (04:32):
Our career fairs are pretty much broken up by hiring industry. So for example, our teacher fair, which is probably the biggest fair we have each year. We have a lot of students who show up who are not education majors who just want to go into the teaching profession. Same thing for our business and technology. That could be all majors showing up to that because there's opportunities for all types. So it's really not as much about your major as much as what you wanna do and maybe what some of your experience and skills are. Many times you've developed those in relation to your major, but that's certainly not always true.

Adrianna Elias (05:09):
I am Adrianna Elias. I'm a digital media innovation major and I'm a career associate at Career Services.

Giselle Kowalski (05:14):
What do you find most helpful about career services?

Adrianna Elias (05:17):
Honestly, the relationships you build with the career educators are really important. My career educator, I've gotten to know a lot, and he's helped me like find jobs and everything like that.

Giselle Kowalski (05:27):
So do career educators, are they based on the college that you're in? Some of 'em.

Adrianna Elias (05:31):
Yeah, some of them.

Giselle Kowalski (05:32):
There's the educators that are like your liaison that are for your college, and then there's Advisors.

Adrianna Elias (05:36):
Yeah, career advisors. They're more general. So if you need help with career exploration or just general help, there's them.

Giselle Kowalski (05:44):
mm-hmm. .

Adrianna Elias (05:44):
Yeah, they do.

Giselle Kowalski (05:45):
Okay, cool. And so what was your major again? Your DMI?

Adrianna Elias (05:48):
Yeah.

Giselle Kowalski (05:49):
So they have one for mass comm and journalism?

Adrianna Elias (05:51):
Yeah, his name's Adam.

Giselle Kowalski (05:52):
Okay, cool. And so how did he help you? Like what did he exactly do to help you out?

Adrianna Elias (05:56):
He helped build my resume, so I could talk about my like social presence more. I didn't know how to write about that. And he was like, "You have personal social media that you could talk about." And I didn't know I could do that, so he helped me with that.

Giselle Kowalski (06:05):
Have you been to any of those career fairs?

Adrianna Elias (06:07):
I have.

Giselle Kowalski (06:07):
Okay. What do you think about them? What are they like?

Adrianna Elias (06:09):
So they're a little intimidating at first, but honestly going in and focusing on like a couple employers you know you wanna talk to is the best way to go.

Giselle Kowalski (06:17):
What if a student has absolutely no clue what to do after college and they go to the career services office, where do they even start?

Adrianna Elias (06:23):
Career exploration, but if they wanna go with their degree, then with their liaison, they could just start there. We have like different tests and things for like career guidance, so they could start there as well.

Giselle Kowalski (06:33):
I know also we haven't talked about this yet, that there's a place that you can get a headshot. Have you taken your headshot there?

Adrianna Elias (06:38):
Yeah, I have with Shelby.

Giselle Kowalski (06:39):
Really?

Adrianna Elias (06:40):
She's so awesome. Yeah.

Giselle Kowalski (06:40):
And you can take as many as you ask for. Like if I don't like a photo, then she'll take it again.

Adrianna Elias (06:45):
Definitely.

Giselle Kowalski (06:46):
Perfect. Where have you used that headshot?

Adrianna Elias (06:48):
On my LinkedIn and my Handshake actually.

Giselle Kowalski (06:51):
Nice.

Adrianna Elias (06:52):
Mm-hmm. .

Giselle Kowalski (06:52):
Super cool. Awesome.

Giselle Kowalski (06:53):
When would be the best time for a student to come and visit the Career Services office?

Ray Rogers (06:58):
Quick answer is early and often. I would suggest that first-year students need to meet with a career counselor. Even if you think you know for sure what your plan and your trajectory is, there's ways that we can help you now prepare and plan for that. They can come back many times and do career exploration. That's not just for first-year students. I've even got some alumni coming back, doing some career exploration. But, um, we encourage them to come in multiple times, uh, to meet with their career advisor or career educator, but also maybe if they're preparing for a job interview, come in and let us do a practice interview or at least go through some questions that we think are real likely you're gonna need to be prepared to answer. Let us take a look at your resume before you submit it for a job or a scholarship or graduate school, and try to help tailor that to what you're looking for. We review thousands of resumes a year and we've gotten pretty good at it. So there's some ways that I think we can always help a good resume become even better.

Giselle Kowalski (08:03):
What is the number one tip you could give to a student that's writing out their resume right now and doesn't really know where to start?

Ray Rogers (08:11):
Well, there's a couple of things with that. So the first first thing is always have someone look at your resume. When I applied for this job, I had my colleagues review my resume. I can get so close to it and have looked at it so much that I would completely ignore the fact that maybe there was a misspelling or I left out a job or maybe just my perspective was different. So it's very helpful to have that happen. I would also say though, that the big thing is, is the goal now is not to write one resume and apply to multiple jobs with it. I always say it is far more worth your time to apply well to fewer jobs than to apply generically to multiple jobs.

Giselle Kowalski (08:54):
This is going more into what you wear and with the Career Closet and everything. But Ray, do you have a go-to interview outfit?

Ray Rogers (09:01):
I do. It needs to fit the position. And I hear a lot of times folks say, you know, you wanna look like you fit in, and you do, but you also need to take into account that you're a candidate and you're being interviewed and you wanna show and communicate respect. Like you're taking this seriously. We can kind of help address that and kind of help a student or an alumni figure out more exactly the right look would be, but in general, I suggest you wanna look a step above what the folks there do just to communicate respect and that you're taking this position seriously.

Giselle Kowalski (09:35):
Okay. And whenever you're in those interviews, after you've chosen your outfit, you've gotten your resume done and they're asking you, do you have any questions for us? What's the one that you ask?

Ray Rogers (09:45):
So I suggest preparing some questions, and they're usually about the company itself or about the position or maybe what's happening within the company. So it could be, "Hey, I read a press release that your organization just acquired XYZ organization, I'm just wondering if that would suggest y'all are moving into a different direction?" It may not be the question that I want the answer to the most at that point. I might really wanna know about salary or benefits or how many vacation days do I get or even, you know, when would you need me to be here to start work? But those questions can be asked and answered after there's an offer on the table. Right now your job is to show interest and knowledge. And so let those questions show that. Let them be your last good impression as you walk out the door so that they see this person's really interested in not just getting a job, but they're interested in this job.

Giselle Kowalski (10:44):
If you could give advice to a younger version of you that's going through the career exploration journey, what would you tell yourself?

Ray Rogers (10:52):
I think we focus a lot on the wrong decisions early in life. And what I've discovered is a lot of times it's these small decisions that sort of have a ripple effect that affect what we end up doing or where we end up going. Even as an undergrad, the student organizations I got involved in, if I hadn't joined my fraternity as an undergrad, I wouldn't be here. But when you join an organization or get involved as an undergrad, you're not thinking, "How is this gonna impact my career?" You're thinking about "does this seem like a fun thing"? But it absolutely led to me getting to know the dean of students, 'cause you know the dean of students real well when you're president of your fraternity. And he ended up liking me, giving me a job as a work-study in the dean of students office, which led to my understanding and knowledge of careers in higher education and why I am here. Had I not done that, I would've stuck with my initial major of accounting and probably been an accountant somewhere at this point. So some of those small decisions that you don't really think are gonna be real influential sometimes are the most influential ones. So, main advice is don't sweat the big or the small stuff, just enjoy it along the way.

Giselle Kowalski (12:00):
Nice. I love that. And then my last question is to those that are already in the job force or are right about to get into that first job of theirs, what would you tell them?

Ray Rogers (12:10):
I would say look for a mentor and look for guidance, not necessarily formally. When you go into those roles, it is sometimes one of the biggest transitions you're gonna make going from college to a job. So when you go into that first-time job, things shift a little bit and it can feel a little unsettling. That's why I think finding a mentor or someone that you can kind of process and talk through someone who's been through that first job before to kind of help you think through what is it about this job that you really like? And then to look for some opportunities as you're there. Not just to do the work that's put in front of you, but how do you volunteer for other things? How do you connect, how do you network? You need to continue to grow your career garden, as I will share sometimes and say, you know, always be looking for what that next step might be. Also, you don't know what opportunities might show up for you and how your career path might change as you're looking forward.

Giselle Kowalski (13:10):
Wow. I love the idea of a career garden, and I've never heard that term before. Well, thank you Ray. You've been a pleasure to talk to, and I hope that you have a wonderful day and good luck with the week thus far.

Ray Rogers (13:20):
I've enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

Giselle Kowalski (13:22):
Thank you.

Giselle Kowalski (13:26):
Thank you so much to both Ray and Adrianna for talking to me about Career Services and all that they have to offer. The resources that they have are crazy good, and I hope that the students listening will use them to their advantage. And thank you for listening to this episode of the Try at Texas State Podcast. Make sure to tune in next time to learn more about something else you can try on campus at Texas State. And also remember to follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube @TXST. This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communications at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State University Network represent the views of the hosts and guests, not of Texas State University. Again, I'm your host, Giselle Kowalski, and I'll see y'all next time. Bye y'all.