Bradley’s Smith Career Center specializes in exploring job opportunities, from part time on-campus jobs to careers after graduating.
Not only will the career center offer help with searching for these opportunities, but they will also give students skills and resources to actually get the job.
On Wednesday, the Smith Career Center put on an interview skills workshop. The goal was for students to leave this workshop not only with better skills, but also with higher hopes for successful interviewing in the future.
“We want our students to be prepared to interview as effectively as we can,” said Ken Harding, the leader of the event and director of employer testing services. “Sometimes, we get feedback from employers that students have lots of things going for them, but their interview wasn’t quite as strong as their technical skills might be, so we’re trying to boost up some of those communications skills so that they have that initial career success.”
Harding works with students to help figure out what kind of career they would like to pursue, and works to put on a wide variety of career preparation activities for students at Bradley. With the career fair and graduation coming up, he said now is a very important time for students to start getting ready for the job search.
Mamakwame Kamkam, a senior electrical engineering major, said he came to the workshop knowing he needed a better way to conduct himself during interviews, and left feeling as if he learned just that.
“This gave me a different perspective on how to talk out the questions I’m asked and the questions that I should expect,” Kamkam said.
Keerthi Sree, a graduate student of computer science, came to the event in hopes of feeling more prepared for an interview, and said she left feeling much more relaxed about future interviews.
“We were actually given an opportunity to sit down and answer a couple of questions,” Sree said. “That was a good exercise. It was like a mock interview.”
Many tips were offered during this workshop, but Kamkam had a few favorites.
“Now I know I have to work on my elevator speech, I know I have to send a thank you email afterwards, which I didn’t know about before,” Kamkam said. “I definitely feel this was helpful for me.”
