Dream Jobs Start Here
The University of New Hampshire offers a wide-range of programs and resources to help you achieve your professional, academic and personal goals. This means you’ll be supported in becoming the best student you can be – and the best person. Most of all these resources are included in your tuition and fees, so you are welcome to use them as you please. A resource I feel every student should use throughout their UNH experience is Career and Professional Success. CaPS is there for your professional development. They will help you work on your resume, cover letter, interview skills and other areas of professionalism so that you are the best applicant when looking for jobs upon graduation. Additionally, each college division (i.e. The College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, the College of Health and Human Services, the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, the College of Liberal Arts and Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics) has their own CaPS center, meaning that a student in COLSA is getting advice unique to their field, which may be different than for someone in COLA. Rather than re-explain information you can find on the Career and Professional Development page, I am going to explain how they have helped me personally.
The first time I used Career and Professional Success was my first year of college. I am a Business Administration major at UNH, and as a part of Paul College, I took part in the FIRE, or First-Year Innovation and Research Experience. In this program, you are taught by an upperclassman Paul College student about the transition to college, how to do research at the college level, give presentations and improve your professionalism. Regarding professionalism, one assignment was to construct my resume. While I heard about the importance of a resume in high school, I had never taken the time to construct one based on my previous experiences. The idea of doing one then scared me because I felt I did not have adequate experience to construct a resume. So, after explaining that to my peer advisor (the upperclassman student who taught the class) he told me to set up an appointment with Career and Professional Success to help me get my experiences down on paper. During this meeting, the CaPS advisor asked me about what work and volunteer experiences I had done. From there, she helped me word the tasks I had done with each experience in a professional manner. After that, she showed me templates specific to my major on how to format the resume, as well as additional online resources to help with any wording issues I had. After leaving that meeting, I felt very confident in my ability to write and format a resume properly. Once I submitted my resume and my peer advisor looked it over, he was very impressed with how professional it was and how I had taken the time to go get help from CaPS.
Another experience I had with CaPS was preparing for my first Career and Internship Fair during the spring semester of my first year. During this event, representatives from businesses and organizations around the country come on campus and try to recruit current UNH students of all majors for various jobs and internships. For me, I wanted to get a taste of what a fair like that was and try giving a 30-second elevator pitch to employers in fields that interested me. The first thing I did to prepare was go to the resume review day that CaPS hosted a few weeks prior to the career fair. During this event, students can work directly with some of the employers who attend the career fair to fine-tune their resumes.
Once again, I was praised for how professional my resume was for a first-year student and reminded that I would develop more experience over time. After that, I set up another session with CaPS to refine my elevator pitch. During the meeting, they gave me feedback on my current elevator pitch, including what to emphasize and cut out, and connected me to more online resources so that I could keep improving it. After some additional preparation, I felt ready for the fair.
As soon as I arrived at the Whittemore Center where the Career and Internship Fair was being held, I was overwhelmed by the volume of students attending. I was worried that I would not be able to find and interact with my desired companies. To my luck, CaPS was there to help students navigate the event and make sure that we were dressed for success in business professional attire. Once I got my bearings, I went into the fair and met with some of the companies that interested me, practiced my elevator pitch and presented them with my resume. They were very impressed with how prepared I was and gave me further feedback on what I could do to improve for future fairs.
While these are just a few of the many instances where I have used Career and Professional Success, I do want to emphasize using them at least a few times throughout your time at UNH. They are here for you and want to make sure you are the best professional you can be and that you have a job waiting for you upon graduation. Their success lies in your success.
