While you’re in college, summer break is a great time to relax, reset, reflect and to invest in your career growth. Every summer is a chance to grow outside of school. It doesn’t have to be a huge time commitment – a few hours a week is better than no time dedicated at all.
Here are three ideas to make the most of your summer.
1. Connect
The summer offers a chance to reconnect with established connections as well as build new relationships. Networking doesn’t have to be transactional; it can be a real investment in the community you’re building. Here are some ways to connect this summer:
- Host 2-3 informational interviews. Whether you’re doing an internship or not, informational interviews are a valuable way to learn and connect with folks who are in a career, industry, or company of interest. There’s so much valuable information that can come from lessons of other’s lived experiences.
- Find a mentor. The summer is a great time to find and connect with a mentor – someone who has more experience than you. Mentors are great for guidance, direction, and advice; and like any relationship, as opportunities arise, you might get a chance to support them.
- Put yourself out there. Finding spaces to network is easier than you might think. Attending a community event, alumni celebration, volunteering, participating in a program, chatting with someone at a coffee shop – you never know who you might meet. Keep yourself open to meeting new people.
Remember, connecting with folks can happen in a variety of settings, and most times, the only thing in your way is you!
2. Learn
Summer is also a great time to learn. Whether you’re investing in yourself by learning in a formal setting, or on your own, dedicating yourself to learning something new every summer is always worth the effort. Here are some ways to learn:
- Learn online. There are tons of free and affordable online courses that offer a wide variety of topics and skills to learn about. Coursera, Udemy, edX, MIT Open Course Ware, Open Yale, Harvard, Stanford all have free, self-paced courses. Some even offer whole certificates that you can add to your resume and LinkedIn.
- Learn with hands-on experience. There are a few ways to learn by doing – internships, volunteer work, and completing a passion project offer different hands-on opportunities to learn. Set a learning objective for yourself and figure out the best way to leverage opportunities to complete your objective.
For example, my learning objective for the summer is to strengthen my skills in social media marketing because I’m interested in roles that list “social media content creation” as a required qualification. Some options to facilitate hands-on learning could be offering collaborate at my internship with their marketing team to create content, to do content creation for a local nonprofit that doesn’t have a strong social media presence, making content for my own personal brand.
Career development is all about continuous learning. Take advantage of and be proactive seeking learning opportunities.
3. Build
There are many ways to invest in your career growth and continue building your skills, knowledge, and resume. Internships, free online courses, passion project, volunteer, etc. Reflect on your career goals and determine ways to invest in yourself now to make yourself competitive for what’s next. Here are some tips:
- If you’re not sure how to start, look at internships and job descriptions that excite you. Notice any skills or experiences that are included that you could strengthen or gain. Check out our Job and Internship Board for job descriptions.
- Get creative with how you invest in your career growth. Internships might be the most straight forward way, but passion projects, and volunteer for project based or skill-based opportunities could also be a great investment of time. Identify a need at a local nonprofit and see how you might help them with that need while also aligning it to your career growth.
- Structure can be key. When you figure out how you’re going to invest your time this summer, be sure to determine a schedule – this can help with consistency and ensure you fulfill your goals for the summer!
The time you dedicate now can be a game changer for the future. If you’re a Wave Maker and you need some help determining the best way to invest your time this summer, schedule a call with the Early Career & Alumni Team!
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