Campus Life & Future Careers

I am no stranger to stress and anxiety. In fact, neither are my classmates.  I have seen my colleagues crack under the pressure of having to balance the many different responsibilities in life while trying to maintain good academic standing.

A friend of mine once ran out of class mid-sentence during a presentation. We found her crying and hyperventilating in another room down the hall. She explained that she had been at work all weekend, she lost sleep because she used the remaining time she had to prepare for her presentation, and she simply became overwhelmed with pressure by the time she was up at the front of the class. Luckily, our professor was understanding of the situation and gave her a second chance.

Situations like this are completely unnecessary to experience, and completely avoidable. It simply takes personal commitment to achieve the work-school balance that we all so desperately need to master.

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Few university students haven’t heard of LinkedIn, pleasantly deemed the Facebook equivalent of young professionals and job seekers. Although underdeveloped, many students have started a budding profile on LinkedIn. Typical experiences highlight experiences in faculty and departmental organizations as well as research skills and summer internships.

Nonetheless, not everyone is convinced to invest time into creating a LinkedIn profile. It’s too much effort to create another social media profile and it’s intimidating to jump into a platform where you start afresh with 0 followers. If you already have a strong résumé, why bother with LinkedIn?

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Have you ever wondered what it’s like to work as a flyer distributor or a fundraising canvasser? I know that most often than not, my first reaction when I see a canvasser is to avoid them. For these workers, rejection is a daily reality inherent to their work, and finding a healthy way to manage rejection also becomes crucial to their work and their well-being. For the rest of us. rejection is a fact of life that we will all face at one point or another, in life or in work. The past two weekends, I worked as a flyer distributor on a busy downtown street. I’d like to share my experiences with a focus on how it has helped me find a more balanced and healthy perspective on rejection.

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A few years ago, I applied to work as the head coordinator of a summer day camp. I had worked at day camps since the age of 13 years old, and I was 23 at the time. I woke up early, got ready, put on my good pair of pants, threw on my genuine smile, and headed out the door. I sat in the waiting room for a good twenty minutes until a nice woman wearing a red dress, approximately 5’6, 40-years-old, escorted me to a tiny office room in the back of the first floor.

At first she left me in the room and closed the door. Paranoia sparked the neurons in my brain and I looked up and down at the grey, old walls in front of me. My nerves excited themselves as I waited, and waited, for the interview process to commence. (more…)

Life is full of negotiations and compromises. However, when we think about negotiating a job offer, the stereotypes of greedy, bossy and uncommitted people quickly surface. Many people fear that negotiating a job offer will lead to tension in the workplace, or even cause them to lose an offer*. Consequently, many people shy away from negotiating and from asking for a better work experience for themselves. To help us navigate the complexities of negotiating a job offer, McGill’s Career Planning Services (CaPS) hosted a workshop called “Negotiating Your Academic Job Offer” on March 30th, presented by Dr. Niem Huynh, as part of the Academic Career Week. Here, I summarize the main strategies for negotiating a job offer.

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It’s hard to believe that only a little more than a week ago, I was slaving over my notes, studying and cramming like every other student preparing for their final exams.

I am so glad those few weeks are finally over. Fast forward (more…)