Careerfest is the Week

A great education involves three things… it opens your mind to new possibilities, it helps you make good choices about your life, and it gives you the knowledge, skills and abilities to know that you can compete with anyone anywhere. Much of what we do in our co-curricular activities is designed to help you make good choices about what you do with your life. Careerfest, as you might guess, is designed to help you make good choices early in your career by learning from people who are ahead of you on that journey.

Many of our panelists are UCF alums. They will be talking about how to land the right internship, do well in the workplace, and issues of special importance to women in the workplace. Seats are filling up fast, you can sign up by clicking here.

IB might be our version of the Tampa Bay Rays

It’s no secret that I’m a big baseball fan. By far the most impressive franchise in baseball is the Tampa Bay Rays. If you watched them last night win the American League Championship, you had to be thinking, “Who are these guys?” With their small market budget, they have to repeatedly reinvent themselves every few years and yet they consistently play with the big boys. To do this, they do crazy things like start their closer, platoon almost their entire team and seemingly never make a bad trade. Dodgers or Braves beware. They are coming for you.

Last night I also received a note from Carlos Valdez letting me know a group of IB and Engineering students won the Best Business Solution prize at the HSI Battle of the Brains Competition. This competition showcases the top Latino/a/x talent at Hispanic Serving Institutions across the U.S. I believe it was the first time UCF was eligible to enter. I suspect the competition was thinking, “Who are these UCF students and what is IB?”

Well, Integrated Business students are winning competitions all over the place, and it’s great to see them partner with engineers to bring home another prize. They are proving the value of people who can think and work across functions to connect dots and get things done. They are also proving the value of the flipped classroom approach and the unique qualities of their professors who bring the real world into the classroom. For the record, these IB students are: Karen Ortiz, Armando Barrial, Maria Pacheco Naranjo and Tomas Daza. They were coached by Carlos and LeeAnn Roberts from Engineering.

Vamos Knights! Vamos IB!

Buddy, can you spare a Quarter?

I met virtually with a few of the college’s student senators this week. They are required to have a meeting with the dean once a semester. Over my time at UCF, the senators have come to take on more of an advocacy role for their constituents— a good thing. The meeting also gives me the opportunity to give some of our student leaders more context about why we do what we do and enlist their support in spreading awareness.

This semester the conversation was mostly around familiar challenges some students have in adapting to our culture in the college and helping the senators understand the resources we have available to help. One made me chuckle— the need to put a quarter in a locker if you need to store something before taking a test in our testing center. Understand that our testing center has strict policies on what you can take into the facility in order to reduce the likelihood of cheating. If you are coming from a class, you are going to need to store stuff, so you need a quarter. This came up a few years ago, and I chuckled because I honestly don’t remember why it still requires a quarter. I suspect the nominal charge is so we get the locker key back. It’s not a revenue generating thing.

What made it more salient to me is that over the past couple of years, my use of actual cash, let alone coins, has plummeted. Add in the Pandemic and the coin shortage and it is reasonable to ask— how many people are carrying quarters? My guess is very few and virtually no one under the age of 30. I can only imagine how annoying this is to a student hurrying to take an exam. It’s a needless friction point that we need eliminate. Surely there is an app or something for this? I’m not sure we even own the lockers, but getting into the 21st Century on this seems like a reasonable thing to do.

Stay tuned.

Look Who is being Ghosted Now

One of our very first podcast was on ghosting in the workplace. In 2008 the economy was booming. Students had so many opportunities they were ghosting employers who had offered them jobs! They either didn’t call the employer back or failed to show up on the first day. Much of that podcast was designed to help both employers and job candidates understand what they could do to reduce their chances of being ghosted. You can listen by clicking here.

I was reminded of that podcast this week when one of the college’s student senators reached out to me over concerns that students weren’t getting prompt replies to their applications for jobs on KNIGHTLINE, the college’s job platform. In a tough job market where the number of applicants far exceeds the number of jobs and uncertainty over the economy has made firms reluctant to hire quickly, the tables have turned and now employers are ghosting students.

So how do you reduce the chances this will happen to you? The best advice in that podcast comes from a student who ghosted a company. He notes that it is easier to ghost somebody when you don’t have much of a relationship with them. If you want to reduce ghosting from students, he goes on to say, the employer needs to make an effort get to get to know the student on a personal level.

That was great advice and it works in reverse, too. If you want to reduce the chances of being ghosted in this job market, you have to start early and build a relationship with the hiring official. Amanda, one of our PSP students a few years ago, offers some great advice on how to do this in our podcast on The Invitational. You can listen to her by clicking here.

Now getting to know a potential employer during a pandemic with everything being virtual adds an additional level of challenge to your task. Luckily, you have a secret weapon as a student in the College of Business— the career coaches. The Employer Relations team has built personal relationships with many of the employers on KNIGHTLINE. You should meet with a career coach and build a relationship with them so they can recommend you for a position that interests you. You still have to have the right experiences, do your homework, get to know the company, interview well and win the job. Building a relationship with a career coach isn’t the lazy way to land a job, but the hiring official is much less likely to ghost you if you have the backing of the career coach. This is because in ghosting you, they are essentially ghosting a career coach with whom they have developed an important professional relationship. If they ghost students, the career coach will pass on this negative information to students, and the company will lose good candidates. This dynamic doesn’t ensure you will get the job, but it does ensure you will get feedback to help you better position yourself for the next opportunity if they don’t choose you.

Don’t know about our Employer Relations team and how to reach out to them? Click here to learn more.