Job & Internship Search: A Strategy Workshop for All Students

Well, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Matt Casey. I am the Associate Director of Graduate Career Services here at Tufts University. And we are thrilled to have you here at today's workshop around job and internship strategies. This is actually really exciting for us, obviously, for obvious reasons. I think this is a novel time, especially at the beginning of the spring semester, where many of you are thinking about summer internships or fellowships or other opportunities. So this is a conversation today about a variety of strategies to think about how you manage what you're searching for and the proper or thoughtful ways to create a customized strategy to seek out new opportunities. So let's get started. With every presentation delivered on topics, we just want to make sure everyone realizes that career planning is most definitely a process. And it's a process that we all can enjoy and understand that we all fall along the continuum. So as a career service professional in our career services team, we are here to help you wherever you are in your career process. So for those of you who are interested in discovering who you are and what you might want to think strategically, or how to figure out what you're looking for, or today, when we're talking about how do you find what you're looking for, but also the documents you need or the relationships you want to build or preparation for interviews and negotiations, all of which are skills. So we are here to provide advice, service, and partnership to you so you can be and maximize your opportunities for your career. So today's job and internship and fellowship or just general opportunities is how do we think strategically and creatively about it. So I imagine many of you, if not all of you, at some point in your careers have searched for opportunities. For instance, if you look for a job or career opportunity in a Google search and put data analyst job or engineering jobs or museum curator jobs, whatever those titles are, you are going to get likely a list of these large aggregating job boards. So these or these job boards are huge. They are SEO optimized, and they're well funded. So what ends up happening is most people are spending most of their jobs looking for professional opportunities on these sites because they're the first things that come up. Aggregating job boards can be very helpful to see what's out in the marketplace, but one of the challenges is they aren't always necessarily up to date. So if you could see positions that have existed that may not have may have closed months before. And the other thing is most people are spending most of their opportunities oftentimes if they're looking using exclusively looking for online opportunities or using online technology to search for opportunities. But here's the thing with online, with some of these job boards, is that we estimate, and I think this number might actually be high, that about 20% of all jobs and internships and opportunities fall or are in an aggregated job board. So what that's telling us is that most people are spending most of their time competing for one in five jobs. What we want to be able to help you do is how do you think about where the other 80% are? Every one of you will have a customized search strategy based on the targets you're pursuing. Now, target could be the type of job you're looking for. And you don't have to necessarily be applying, focusing on one specific target. You could have multiple ones. But if you are looking for an analyst job versus a consultant job versus a researcher job versus a faculty job, your search strategy will be different because the hiring practices of recruiters and hiring managers are different based on the targets. And the audiences they're seeking. So what we want to help people to do is realize here are the variety of options available to you. So large aggregating job boards are great. We are, and across job boards or opportunity boards in general, automating your searches can be helpful. So what we don't want people to do ideally is not spend eight hours a day scouring job boards all the time. It is helpful for aggregated job boards as you are allowed or you can set up multiple alerts on these technologies. So when you find the titles of the roles of the areas that you're focusing on, you can set up alerts that will send you a message daily or weekly or whatever timeframe that works for you that lets you know new opportunities that present themselves. So you're not, you don't have to actively seek. So knowing the titles of the roles and putting them into these search strategies can be very helpful. So job boards are certainly the big aggregating are useful. You can upload a resume to those places and recruiters can passively search so they can log into their accounts and they can see potential opportunities. But I would say if you're uploading resumes to targeted job boards or big job boards, just keep a list or track of where you upload your documents because those will stay active until you turn that feature off. So if you forget about it and you change jobs a few times, the old resume may exist. So just keeping track of where those might be. So there's large aggregated job boards. Then there's targeted job boards. So think of targeted job boards are industry or sector or topic or functionally specific job boards. And when you think about recruiters and hiring managers that are trying to fill roles and source talent is that it is expensive and time consuming in a lot of ways. So when we speak about target job boards, they're all over the place. And we have a curated list of more than 30 different sectors or areas or special areas that are all hyperlinked. So you don't have to necessarily find these for yourself. We can certainly offer to you and I can attach that file at the end of the presentation. So you may be interested in leveraging one of your skills. So you can have an aggregated job boards of people who are looking for data scientists or analytics or big data. So it could be a competency that could work across a number of different industries or sectors. But you might be interested in an industry or a marketplace or a style. In these spaces, you may be interested in a discipline. So for many of you, you know where your degree aligns very oftentimes very specifically with the type of work that's being done. But there's also skills that don't necessarily line up directly with a degree or program. You could be of any discipline. You could be a humanities major or something else. But a skill you acquire could be writing or publishing or marketing or promotion. So recognizing also having outlets of like, all right, how do I think about particular skills and what types of jobs are out there that might be valuable to me? We also have a curated list of internships and co-op pages. So this is a helpful slide to think about or remember is that when we talk about hiring for full-time jobs, organizations are going to be promoting in different ways. For internships, it is likely that organizations aren't going to spend as much time or energy or resources on targeted job boards. It doesn't mean they're not doing it, but they will if they're looking for trying to find internship or co-op talent. Have curated lists. They're all very, they're all on this list are all functional. I mean, I've personally hired off four of these for graduate students and staff in these places, so knowing that they work. So recognizing is if you're looking for a role this summer and recognizing when the job search process, people will ask, you know, am I too early or too late? And my answer to that is neither. Is that if you're if you care to start your search now or have already started, that's great. If you haven't, that is totally fine. Organizations, when you think about hiring, don't typically or mostly hire on academic calendars, so they hire off fiscal calendars. So a lot of times when financial years for companies and in December or end of the end of June in July or January, you see budgets open and organizations start trying to source talent. So you start seeing some spikes at the end of January and February, March and April. But there are plenty of organizations that are that are interested in hiring talent by the time you graduate that are going to start promoting jobs in a couple months because not because they're not interested or don't have a plan or not prepared. They just are focusing on their energy and on other things and recognizing that organizations hire all year round. Because the thing with an organization, if there is a need to be filled and usually if it's paid, there's money to pay for it. So you will see internships that are available year round. You might see something in the middle of March because there's something an organization might might want. So they're not focused on the semester framework. So this is for those of you who are sort of seeking these opportunities. These resources can be helpful. Also recognizing how flexible work is and the type of things you want to do. So it could be remote work or freelance or you might be interested. You may not be interested in a full full time in-person opportunity. You might be thinking about having a supplemental role or a side hustle or you're looking for something that's contract based. Or you have a skill set you might want to monetize. So something you're good at and somebody can pay you for like being a consultant. So this is just a variety, but not an exhausted list of types of roles or like you might be looking for. You might be a student and you might have you might need supplemental income or you might want a part time job. So you have targeted job boards on all of these disciplines. Setting up alerts and focuses, I think, can be a really good use of time. In addition to that, our resources offered by the Career Center and the most prominent one that we have is Handshake. So Handshake, and for those who probably have signed up for this or are familiar with it, is our Career Center student and alumni engagement platform. It is also a job or career opportunity board. It's the largest platform for schools for sourcing talent within universities. There are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of employers and thousands and thousands and thousands, if not millions of jobs within these spaces. So when you're doing searches, you can treat Handshake very much like you treat a large job aggregator or a targeted job board. The thing that's unique to Handshake is that in order for an organization to post opportunities, they have to ask to be part of that network. So it doesn't mean they aren't looking at other schools for opportunities. But what it means is that they are, in addition to whoever they are, looking for Tufts talent. So it's one less barrier to entry to potentially finding opportunities. And you can set up alerts just like you can on other places. So you're able to look at jobs, you're able to look at different categories, different frameworks. You can look at organizations and companies that may be on site or doing mock interviews or doing company overviews. So not just thinking about you may be looking specifically for jobs, but you just may want to be. You may see NASA is on campus like they were a week or two ago and you might want to attend that event. And it's not created to maybe meet something. And they may also be featuring jobs on this site. So Handshake has lots and lots and lots of opportunities. The other thing Handshake is helpful with, for those of you who may be international students seeking opportunities in CBT, OPT, even H1B to a certain degree. When an organization sets up a job or an internship or a fellowship or an opportunity on Handshake, they have the option to check off. One, are they willing to bring somebody in for CBT and OPT? And two, are they or would they consider sponsorship? It's an optional thing for organizations to check off, but it is nice because many of them do. So if you're doing your searches and looking for opportunities for people that might be interested as an international student, it's a nice added bonus that not typical online boards may not have. The one thing I want to be thoughtful about as people are using Handshake, which is a great tool, is that specificity of job titles becomes very helpful. One of the limitations, and it's a minor limitation, but for a lot, if you're doing a job search in a job board, you might tend to get a list of opportunities. So if you put in data analysis or data analyst into a job board, you might get jobs that have data in them. But what you're also getting is that usually those sites are looking at the job profiles and the type of skills that go into it. So you may get market analyst jobs, you might get business intelligence strategists. So it'll feed you back other examples of job titles, but have the skill set that is typical of that role, where Handshake doesn't necessarily work as efficiently. So if you put in data analysis in Handshake and what you're viewing is our view from career services, not the facing view that you'd see as a student or an alum, is that you're going to get, if you search for roles like data analysis, you are almost always, not exclusively, but oftentimes, going to have one of those words will be in the title of the job description. So it's not necessarily thinking about the types of roles that are consistent with that. So when you're setting up job alerts or looking for opportunities, recognizing that the breadth of titles that would align with what you're trying to do, and if those are things you're trying to seek out in career services, we can certainly help with that. There are resources of, you know, here are 20 different titles that might be consistent with this type of skill set. The other thing I want to mention about Handshake is that, and this is typical for job search, is that oftentimes we want to spend our time searching for job and career opportunities for novel or well-known brands. So we can often see really high applicant numbers for jobs, let's say, for Google or for Meta or for J.P. Morgan, something that is maybe a well-established, well-known organization. But the reality is most organizations are mid and small size. So when you're thinking about your career plan, making sure you're looking at the whole landscape and being open to opportunities, because what you're seeing in front of you is just an example of data analyst and data analyst-related jobs. And you can, for a lot of these, we have zero or one applicant for job or internship opportunities. That's not a failing on your end. This is just recognizing is that we want to be able to let you know that there are all these opportunities that might be available that your competitors aren't going for. Maybe classmates or people at other schools. You may be a singular applicant for a job just because you did a little bit more research. So just being aware of that, and I think the Career Service can help with that process and thinking about it. And the other thing I'll mention is the same thing with internships. We're often seeing a lot of times there are internships for organizations that may not be that familiar, but they have the pays the same, the opportunities extensive, the skill acquisition is fantastic. It's just maybe for someone you don't know. So be able to do some of those research. So just recognizing, just for being a little bit more diligent, you may be applying for roles and increasing your percentage chances of getting an interview and a potential opportunity. One more resource I want to mention, not exclusively for our international students or those looking to work, but the predominantly effective feature on InterStride, which is an exploration and job search research for international students, is that it has a Visa Insights database. And what that really is, is it's the first resource that took federal data, like actual, the full complement of federal data, because when you're applying for roles, it's international students that are working, that somebody's compiling this data or it has to be submitted under state or federal guidelines. So what this site is doing, it has an aggregating job board of seven or eight years of every employer and every role that's been that for a variety of those international students. So you can search by company, you can search by geography, you can search by CPT, you can search by OPT, you can search by H-1B and other visa status, you can see salary. It's an incredibly complex and thorough database. So what I think is helpful, it's a historical database. But what it's saying is that if you're starting your searches and looking for places that have consistently hired international students, it might be an effective way to start that process and where you might spend your energy with the likelihood of you, of those reaching out to you. It's not, you know, it doesn't take into consideration. You know, there are many companies that sponsor OPT. There are other opportunities out there, but this is the most concentrated document. Otherwise, historically, if you were looking to work for a role, there would just be these ad hoc websites that may or may not be vetted. So as individuals trying to coddle together information, this is actually measured factual historical data. So just something to keep in mind. But there are also information about if you're looking, if you're domestic and you want to look at international opportunities, you're international, want to look at other international opportunities. There are company profiles, country profiles. So what it's worked like and expectations, cultural considerations. So an interesting and useful tool. So then there are organization and company websites. So there are lots and lots of organizations that may not have the resources or the bandwidth or the capacity or the skill set to do their, their recruiting and hiring and sourcing talent in within their own company. So, so they might be using other sources. So a lot of times there are many organizations that may only feature their opportunities on their own websites or by word of mouth. This is helpful to understand when you're thinking about where you might want to work geographically, for instance. So understanding if you wanted to work in, you know, medical devices in Seattle. What is that compliment of opportunities that are in those spaces and not just the biggest ones. So the idea is we help people think about doing market research. So where are the smaller companies? Where are they being featured? For instance, if you were interested in biotech and life sciences in Massachusetts, MassBio is a resource. It's not a company site, but there's a resource that aggregates information about biotech, health care and life science companies, companies all throughout Massachusetts and has profiles of them. Plus, it has a job board. It has an education site, and it's also a place for networking and engagement. So thinking a little bit deeper or being able to look at marketplaces and other options, you're likely going to discover roles that your competitors aren't seeing. And that gives you a large advantage. So this might be a feature of the NEO. Fidelity happens to be a very large organization that recruits all over the place. But this is just an example that when you're thinking about these places, like if you can uncover opportunities, they may be featuring roles that may be of interest to you. So then there's LinkedIn. We are advocates for LinkedIn. The caveat is everyone has their own and should have their own preferences about how social media, how they invested it and how it works for them personally and professionally. So we're not saying LinkedIn is a directive, but we can say is why that tool is a valuable resource as part of your search strategy and relationship engagement. Because there are 700, 750 million people internationally on this predominantly free platform, 55, 60 million organizations, 20 to 30 million jobs and opportunities on that. It has a huge job search directory and opportunity. And it's also where 95 and I think this number is actually a lot higher than this of recruiters and hiring managers are either using LinkedIn to find talent, evaluate talent or to hire that talent. So just so having a profile and having it set up with information about you, you can have recruiters passively search for you. And the thing with LinkedIn I think is important to recognize it is, again, another amazing tool for a variety of reasons. Like all of these things we're talking about today, I wouldn't necessarily use any one element that we're discussing today exclusively. And there's a reason is that LinkedIn is an amazing resource, but it can be expensive like a number of other sites. So if you have multiple roles and are featuring over multiple months, that can be cost prohibitive to an organization. So they may not be promoting a job profile on LinkedIn, but their recruiters and hiring managers on the back end are building profiles and looking at potential candidates that might reach out. Which is why having an updated profile, should that be what you're looking for or be comfortable with, they can find you. So as you're building it, just like other job boards, you can look at job opportunities across a number of options and a number of titles. And as you see here is that you can look for jobs by titles and get profiles. Sometimes you can apply directly through LinkedIn. Sometimes it sends you to a third party site or their own organization website. But you can set up alerts and have information sent to you. And you can also customize the parameters of the roles you're looking for, just like other sites. So if you're looking for an internship, or you're looking for a certain industry, or certain locations, or functional areas, or how long the position's been uploaded, or how long it's been posted, or sometimes salary. So what it allows you to do is to curate very specifically the things that you are looking for. But what's also nice about it is you can also, if you're looking for opportunities, you can look up people as well. And we'll talk about relationships and engagement. Technology is an incredible way to get a job. It's ubiquitous. You can apply all over the place. But it estimates you're 10 times more likely to secure an opportunity with some measure of a relationship. It doesn't mean you have to. It just means, and that relationship could be anything. That could be just a quick referral, or somebody you met, and you submit an opportunity with a quick note through email. It could be somebody you met years ago who referred you. And recognizing, you know, this is also a place to look for alumni that may be working for organizations. You may want to learn more about them, and maybe a referral source later. Or just to look at types of job descriptions to see if this is the type of work you want to do. So a lot of different ways to sort of see how this might impact you as you're thinking about specific roles. On your LinkedIn page, and there are other workshops that focus on the best practices, when you are thinking about making yourself available to opportunities, on the profile page, you'll see something at the bottom of that, of the top of your page, saying open to work. And when you click into open to work, this is a place to tell recruiters and hiring managers, and potentially your whole network, that you are open to work, or open to opportunities. You can set preferences on, I think, up to five job titles. The locations may be of interest, when you might be available to work, the type of work you're looking for. And you can also set it up either exclusively for recruiters, so it just lets them know if they're using technology to try to find talent, you are going to, if they're looking for opportunities where you meet their criteria, you're going to come up on their dashboards. And this is very, very helpful to know, because they may be looking at profiles, and they may have a job profile, and they find 1,000 people that fit the description. Trying to engage directly with 1,000 people may not be the most efficient way to do this, or find what they're looking for. So I would say there may be 50 people that clicked on open to work and said they're open to talking to recruiters. So they're going to see that number. By just clicking on this opportunity and saying yes to recruiters, it's telling them that should they spend their time and energy to reach out to you, you are likely to respond to them, and that is effective and efficient on their end. So it can move you higher in the hierarchy of being a conversation just because you made it easier for somebody to do their job. There is also the feature that you can open up to your own network, and when you do that, in the same box, it puts sort of a half circle open to work box. So this is letting everybody know who you may be connected with or sees your profile that you're open to work. It doesn't mean you're not currently working. It means you could be. There was a belief that there was a stigma around putting open to work on a profile on LinkedIn because it was saying, well, if I'm not currently employed, is it harder for me to get a job? And I think there are, in some circumstances, there's some truth to that. But the pandemic changed the nature of behavior and the nature of the expectations of work. So much so that in LinkedIn, if you, when you're adding your professional experience, there's an entire section where you can put, like, out, like, not working, and, or, and a list of, like, 10 or 15 different options. You know, you might be taking care of an Asian family member. You might have taken a personal sabbatical. You might have been on vacation. You might have been working with, you know, an at-home caregiver or an educator. So just recognizing that the marketplace is recognizing that work dynamics have changed. People are taking time off and looking at their own wellness and their own needs. So that is helpful to understand. So this is a personal preference, but I think knowing the option on LinkedIn is very helpful. Social media is something that comes up relatively often. To date, there's, I would say LinkedIn does fall into this domain, but it's because it's sort of its own sort of unique platform. And it's, when you think of social media, maybe Twitter or Instagram or Snapchat, TikTok, it depends on those options. Is that organizations, especially in the job market, like it is now, is very strong. Yes, we're seeing these mass layoffs at a lot of technology companies, but those layoffs and market conditions are not reflective of the labor market at large. There's very specific reasons why a lot of these companies are laying off opportunities. So if you're interested in jobs for high profile tech companies, be sure that there are plenty of them that are doing, most, I would say, are doing very well as a sweeping generalization. So when we're thinking about social media, recognize is that recruiters and managing this profile, they're leveraging some of these platforms. So some recruiters in this box here is that about three quarters of recruiters are using LinkedIn in some form to find or source talent. Facebook has its own job platform too, so organizations are looking there. Twitter becomes a very, and I'll show an example in just a minute of why that becomes useful, because organizations are using multimodal techniques to find talent. They're using multiple resources to find the talent that they're looking for. Because in a lot of marketplaces, there are significantly higher number of job and fellowship and internship opportunities than there are people that do them. So being thoughtful and crafty and creative becomes advantageous to organizations. So some may be on Twitter, and some you could put in a profile like Finance Jobs Boston. And you will get a list of opportunities or a list of information or pieces. Usually, they may not be active, they may not be relevant, but knowing that this kind of possibility matters. And doing direct hires. NASA has its own internship page. So recognizing, you know, it does take some research in these pieces, but just knowing that, you know, there are going to be organizations and influencers. They're going to be promoting videos on TikTok or showcasing what they're looking for on Instagram, et cetera. So, and I think it can be dependent on the industry or the sector, but I think just recognizing that this is a possibility in your arsenal of looking at potential roles is useful. Conversely, when you are applying for jobs in your job search, actively managing your social media profiles becomes helpful. So just being thoughtful about the fact that what you promote and publish and showcase, be thoughtful about it because it is searchable. And recruiters and hiring managers are very, very, very good at doing this. There are platforms where you can look at the resume, you can look at the cover letter, if you still like that, there's a button for social media profiles, either you put them in or not. So we can look, we can go find your LinkedIn profile, or we might Google you, and we can do all of those things in about five minutes. So we can filter very, very quickly. So there's technology, there's organizations, there are platforms. Now, we talk about relationships and networking. So alumni networks and professional associations and communities. And we mentioned earlier about how effective having some measure of a connection or relationship can be helpful in finding an opportunity. In recognizing that you may be doing people a favor by letting them know that you're looking for opportunities. There are lots of organizations that pay referral bonuses to current employees that refer somebody for a potential job. So let's say somebody refers you for an opportunity, you're hired, you work there for 90 days, they get a bonus in their paycheck 90 days later. And some of these are 500, 1,000, 5,000, 10,000. So just recognize there's incentives all over the place to make it reasonable. So I think being thoughtful on relationship building is great, but also recognize it can be beneficial for all parties involved. So with networking, I agree with this wholeheartedly, is that everyone should build a network before they need it. But think about network is not as a transactional business relationship. A network is just the people we have come in contact with and are known to us. And we get to decide what those relationships are or how people want to relate to us. So one thing I want to say about building relationships and networking is that there's no one way to do it. And what I would say is whatever your style is for connecting with people and relating to them and building community is the right style. And it is perfectly effective to get what you want. So you don't have to be somebody looking for opportunities with a stack of business cards in your pocket going to a convention with 10,000 people and just talking to strangers. That may work for some folks who really enjoy that stuff. You may be somebody who likes to have independent or small or one-on-one intimate conversations, which is just as effective and oftentimes more effective. So just thinking about the fact that you already have a network. So when you're thinking about it, why have it? It's good for careers. It's great to get job advice. It's a great way to increase the number of people that know who you are. So there's a lot of reasons where we can network in relation to management, and it's its own topic and presentation. But for job search, it's useful. Social media, even if you're not physically in person, talking to someone through Zoom or writing an email or following somebody on a post or liking a post or connecting. So there's a lot of different flavors. So recognizing you're already in it, you're already making connections, and you're already doing it well. Specific rules or resources for search strategy, which is helpful. One is using your, not just Tufts, but you can look up your university that you go to. So you could look up Tufts as an organization and go to their alumni page. And if you see on this page, in this particular time, there's between 70 and 75,000 people now on the Tufts University alumni page. So it's a huge number. And what you can do is that you can look up by keywords a variety of topics. So you can look up chemical engineering interns or intern, and you can put up dates. It's not super sophisticated, but you will get a directory of people. You may see some names that are familiar. You may see names you've never seen before. You may see the titles of the roles they have. You may see the organizations that they interned at, which may let you know that it may be some organization you never thought offered it. So it may be another opportunity that you didn't know was available. And you can also reach out to people who build connections in LinkedIn. And I'll mention one thing with LinkedIn is people ask, you know, is it worth getting the LinkedIn premium, which I think is about after the first month free trial is $40 a month. There can be value in that. I think at least the first three months can be useful. And the reason why is that the free version of LinkedIn, the one you just sign up for, gives you access to five emails. Emails means you can mail five people outside of your network. So outside of your first and second degree connections. With the premium version, you get 25 emails, and sometimes more. So you can reach out to people directly that you don't currently know. So sort of cold email. It also allows you to look at examples of roles and positions and salary data. So you have access to a lot more data on that piece. So if you're interested in having, you know, more details, there are certainly more resources that people look at. For career services, setting up conversations, we can certainly discuss it. Or any one member of our team can talk about its effectiveness. So we talked about the impact of our connections. This is a visual map of my network in LinkedIn 10 years ago. Sadly, this tool no longer exists, because I think it was a great way to see how we envision our relationships and connections. This represents about 1,000 people across organizations that I've been connected with or worked at. So that means there's 1,000 people that I have a direct connection to in LinkedIn. I can reach out and talk to directly without an inmate. But then there are second degree connections. So those are I want to talk to somebody I don't know, but I can do that through a person I do know in LinkedIn. For those secondary connections at the time had access to about a half a million people. And LinkedIn opens it up to third degree connections. So there's two people that are unknown with a person, the first person being known to you. And that was about 11 million. We just want to illuminate through a free resource just how broadly you may have been able to connect with folks you hadn't even considered before, just by the number of people you're connected with in this platform. And this is just an example of one network. So it could be other facets. So just never underestimating the reach you already have and the possibilities that may be available to you. There is also the herd. The herd is our internal alumni and student mentorship and engagement platform. So there are thousands and thousands of alumni and you can set up a profile at your leisure to create information and its opportunity. You can search individuals or groups by topic. You can have introductions to folks. You can have informal or formal conversations. There's a zoom like platform. So you can have your virtual conversations or set up meetings. You can look up information by categories. You can find the type of mentors or maybe some of you work somewhere that's interesting. Or maybe you just want to learn something new or maybe you just want to talk to somebody else or another peer. Very, very helpful tool. And we are growing this and continuing to promote it. And we are in the process of hiring an assistant director of mentorship and career services in the coming weeks. There's also the Tufts University Career Network on LinkedIn. This is its own LinkedIn community page run by alumni career services in our team. And there are 16, I think, actually a little bit higher. It's closer to 20,000 people that are in this profile. So it's Tufts alums and students and faculty. There are employers in it. It is a platform for LinkedIn. Consider people who are thinking about careers and career information. There are job postings. There are people offering opportunities or looking for insights or looking for roles. So it's just a community of people with a shared experience, let's just say Tufts, that can be useful. And there's also a Tufts alumni directory managed through the Advancement Office that has more than 100,000 alumni in it. That's a searchable database. So just letting you know the common thread here is that the common connection is Tufts and how you can leverage Tufts community to see potential opportunities. And there are certainly other presentations around networking and relationship management speaking to some of these in more detail. Professional associations are a fantastic way to start thinking about careers. And when I mean networking through professional associations, this is another example where recruiters and hiring managers are going to search for places with the highest density of talent that aligns with what they're looking for. So you could have the American Association of Mechanical Engineers or any of these below. And a lot of these organizations are very inexpensive to current students, which is great, or you may already be a member. And a lot of these organizations have robust career, job, and mentorship platforms. So just recognizing the fact that building community of people with shared interests can be useful to you, but there's also going to be job boards and internships, fellowship opportunities in a lot of these sites. So just recognizing the places where like-minded individuals or similarly skilled folks are communing and trying to find and share resources for each other for everyone's benefit. Then there's recruiters and placement agencies. So we've talked about technology. We've talked about individual organizations. We've talked about relationship management. Now we're talking about recruitment. There are lots of organizations that, again, don't have the bandwidth and the resources and the time and the energy or just would rather have somebody else do it, but they hire recruiters and placement agencies to find talent for them. Typically, these two things were often considered separate, where recruiters were looking for sort of mid-career talent, professional talent, and placement agencies were looking for more part-time or contract and a larger and wider swath of skills being accessed. So a placement agency may find you a role for a month or three months, and it might be directly what you're looking for, or it might just be a month, a week at a time just for income. These are really just blending into similar forms. So it's just organizations trying to find you on behalf of companies or organizations trying to hire. That is helpful to understand is that there's no cost to you. These individuals are paid by organizations that find them talent. So if you are ever solicited for a situation where somebody will guarantee employment, if you're paying a fee to them, I would strongly caution you against pursuing that or vet it substantially because there aren't many forms where people are acting individually on behalf of organizations guaranteeing jobs, and you paying for it. So it shouldn't be any cost to you. I mean, there may be platforms you may pay for. So there are recruitment firms. We do not keep a directory of recruitment firms because there are just too many across all disciplines, all areas, medicine, health care, finance, sports, media, government, et cetera. So, you know, there are national ones. There are regional ones. So the reason to think about this and for opportunities, and I would say particularly graduate students but not exclusively and alums, is that the limiting factor of any search is you're an N of one. You're one person. If you have five to ten organizations or people working on your behalf, the opportunity scales. So and when you're building relationships with these organizations, they might interview you. They may not have a role now, but you go into their database. So if an opportunity presents itself in the future, they may reach out to you, and you can entertain that option. So just recognizing that these are available, they're no cost to you, and they can be helpful of having other people working on your behalf to find options. Placement agencies, again, temporary staffing, same type of folks. We do have this happens to be a directory of them. Most of these are national. Most of them actually have a presence in Boston and Cambridge. So these are places that are looking for full-time roles or part-time. So thinking about your current situation and what you're looking for, these can be valuable as well. And a lot of times they publish their information on directories. You know, if you're thinking about, like, healthcare biotech, Ronstadt is international, and they're a pretty significant feeder to a lot of large biotech firms in Cambridge, for instance. So lots of alternatives. We have specific job fairs, not just through Tufts, but job fairs exist all over the place. So there are going to be ones in Boston. There will be virtual ones. There are going to be ones that alumni from maybe your alma mater is somewhere else. So job fairs can be incredibly helpful. We have career fairs every semester. We usually have two to three large ones in the fall and the spring. We have two upcoming ones this Friday and the following Friday, which you can sign up for. The virtual, I think, has 50 to 75 employers. It might be larger than that. I know it's well over 100 for the in-person fair on the 10th. So just recognizing is that these are employers that are investing, and a lot of times paying, to come to our career fairs to find you or Tufts talent. And there's prep information in other spots. So just knowing that we are trying to provide direct connections, relationships with employers in these situations, but recognize that there are plenty of other external job fairs and recruitment fairs that you should be thinking about or considering as part of your strategy. And lastly, I'll say this is becoming incredibly common. It is entirely possible that the job you're the most qualified for and most interested in doesn't exist yet. And my hope is that that isn't a source of discouragement, is that the pace and the change of technology and solutions is changing work and maybe eliminating opportunities, but it's creating opportunities elsewhere. There are technologies that exist now where in 10 years ago, the team that I would be working with, it would take a team of five a week to do. Now, somebody can do with one software application in about five minutes. So the idea is like, you know, collapsing opportunities. So there are things like chat GPT, which we're just sort of understanding. That's, you know, using AI in career planning, and it's really sort of adapting the possibilities that people are using it to create job search strategies are using it to do interview prep. They're using it for the research companies. So just recognizing the fact that opportunities can scale. And the one thing with career services as a partner to two students is just making sure that you know, we are constantly talking with employers and understanding what their needs are. But also we do a lot of market research and intelligence to understand what the landscape looks like. So speaking thoughtfully about what emerging trends are. So if you, you know, what is it like an environmental policy in Boston? What kind of relations look like, you know, what's happening in music or what's happening in fashion or design or a certain type of skill set. So just recognizing it's not just about the tactics of execution, but also being thoughtful about the world around us and how you might fit into it. So from career services, we offer a host of opportunities and sources, individual appointments and discovery resources and tools to learn about ourselves. We have to resume critiques and search strategies like this and customize them, mock interviews and negotiation prep. We have programs all the time, almost always featured in Handshake. So and points being set up on appointments being set up in Handshake as well. So, you know, we hope to be a resource for you directly or provide tools and resources that you can be able to use on your own time. We welcome the conversation should that be of interest whenever it's interesting. And letting you know is that you don't have to have a reason to set up an appointment for it to be valuable. You can come in and say, I don't know what I want to do or I don't know how to start. This is a great way to start a conversation with us because we we know how to have that start that conversation with you. And we're excited to do so. I'd like to thank everyone for their for their time today.