Choosing a Career

Don’t know what you want to do with your life after you graduate?

Have too many options and want to narrow things down to the right ones?

Wondering why you need to have a goal instead of just “seeing what’s out there”?

Why You Need to Set Career Goals

You can’t succeed in a job, internship or graduate school search if you don’t have career goals. There are two reasons for this – a short one and a longer one:

• You can’t find something if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

• Employers and educational institutions recruit individuals (like you) to fill specific positions that they have open, whether it’s a law school recruiting new students or a bank seeking interns. These organizations and institutions use recruiters to identify qualified candidates for their openings.

If you approach a recruiter and say “I don’t know what I want to do” or “I’m willing to do anything,” you’re actually creating a problem for them rather than moving yourself closer to an opportunity. Here’s why: recruiters simply don’t have the time to figure out where you might best fit into their organization or school, and it is not their job.

To be successful, you need to persuade recruiters that you are the best candidate to fill their open position, thus solving their problem and helping them do their job. This, of course, is only possible if you have specific career goals that you can effectively communicate to recruiters.

Career Services has excellent resources and advice to help you identify the right career path. Consider the following concepts as you begin this process:

• Take charge of your own destiny. No one will ever know you as well as you know yourself, and therefore you need to take the initiative and responsibility to identify what the best options are for you.

• Be patient - you won’t have all of the answers by tomorrow. However, following the steps outlined in this section will give you a simple but effective strategy for assessing your options.

• Focus as you move forward. Although you may start out with a long list of possible careers, narrowing your options as you proceed (to those few that are the best match) will help you achieve your goals.