Education
So many options, so little time. Learn how to avoid experiential indigestion as a first-year student on this episode of Zoom Out–The Career Center Podcast. [00:00:07] My name is Nathan Wilson, Assistant Director with the Duke University Career Center, here listening to the career center podcast. Imagine if you will a little boy with big eyes and a tiny stomach at all you can eat buffet and he looks over and he sees on one side the dessert station and then he's got the omelet station, and the pasta station and the grill, and the Pizza Bar and everything that could possibly imagine. And he's got one plate and he's huge eyes and this tiny little stomach and he wants a piece of everything and what's the problem with that. He's got one plate. If he piles everything onto one plate. What does he end up with a little bit of everything or one huge formless pile of mush. I imagine it's going to be the latter. Well this is a pretty good analogy for what it's like as a first-year student coming into a place like Duke. This is the experience buffet. The high school model which for a lot of people is how you got here is load up on everything you can. All the clubs, sports, AP classes, everything that you can imagine and you just pad that resume like there's no tomorrow. Well guess what. The high school business model that got a lot of people here is the same thing that could cause you to fail–because it's not sustainable at the college level. And here's why. First things first: burnout if you overcommit at the college level you're not going to be able to get enough sleep. [00:01:32] You're not going to be able to take care of yourself if you're in way too many clubs, if you're in a difficult degree program. Well, all of that piling on can backfire if you start letting people down or let's say you get mono or you fall apart. You end up worse off than you would have if you hadn't committed to anything. It sounds cynical but I hate to say that there are some students at the high school level that will attend one or two meanings of a club and then they put that they're a member of that club on their resumé. Well that's unethical. And employers and graduate schools will all know that there aren't enough hours in the day for you to actually commit to seven different organizations at once on top of 19 credit hours. It just can't happen. And they weren't born yesterday because they've seen people that try to pad their resumes and you can spot it from a mile away. It doesn't look good for you. There's another issue too. More specifically with your resumé. OK. In most fields you're gonna submit a traditional resumé which is one page and if you spent all this time and energy on student clubs and you're only a member in nine different clubs. Well guess what? No employer has ever said we want the employee–we want the applicant that was in the most student organizations. That's not to say that they don't carry any value. They carry tremendous value but just membership doesn't mean anything compared to what you take out of it–which is leadership experience and all those transferable skills that make student organizations worth pursuing. [00:03:02] And let's go back to that buffet image if you take a tiny taste of a few things you may find yourself still hungry at the end. If you know going in there what kind of foods you like, get the foods you like. It's the same thing with getting experience and getting involved with things now that you're here at the university level. If you know what you're interested in–pursue it. Even if it's not about your degree program it may not even be directly related to your career. Employers want to see people that are well-rounded but they also want to see authenticity. If you have an applicant who is genuinely interested in some things that will come through in your interview and it will stand out. It's a tale as old as time for med schools for example to try to sniff out the students that only di