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Internships, Resumes, and Success
There are no guarantees for success in careers (as in life). The best advice for young people who are preparing themselves to make a satisfying living is to build an impressive resume. When you apply for a job or for admission to medical school, you apply not in person but on paper. The papers that describe you are called your resume. Your resume must make a strong case that you are smart, hard-working, sensible and caring-and a winning candidate.
Although outstanding achievements in high school might carry all the way to your first job or professional-school applications, generally your resume starts with college. You should take every opportunity to build this resume.
Good grades are important. Inform yourself what sort of grades you should achieve and maintain for the professional goal you have. Relevant and required courses are also critical. Visit websites to learn which courses you should take.
Service projects count. The longer the time you devote to a project, the better. Choose something valuable and stick to it.
Jobs count. Try to work as much as you can and seek diverse experiences where your punctuality and sense of responsibility can be made evident.
Internships count. Internships are the "experience" that everyone wants young people to have. An internship might be in a pharmacy, in a hospital, in a scientific lab, in a physician's office, in a factory or a company office.
You will often see posted notices on the science building walls that advertise summer internships. However, above all you should aggressively seek internships on the World Wide Web. You might search under "biotechnology + internship" or "chemistry + internship."
An internship need not be exactly in your field of interest. It is the experience itself not the specific training that counts.
Wesleyan has a full-time adviser who will help you, B. Morrissette and of course you can turn to your teachers.
Letters of recommendation count. You will soon ask your teachers to write you letters to assist your application for a job or for an admission to a graduate or professional program. What do teachers want to know about you in order to assist you? They want to know your grades, your service projects, your jobs and your internships. Your letters of recommendation are a sort of resume in themselves.
The National Science Foundation
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