 "Photo: Jonathan Resendez")
Whether it’s post-grads looking for a career or freshman looking for a part-time job, career services offers help.
Career services has more than 350 potential student employers, including local namesakes like Alcon Laboratories and Northwestern Mutual, on file sorted by major.
Sherri Mata, director of career services, said plenty of the companies or organizations the department is currently working with would sit down and interview a student at once.
“They’d be 100 percent willing to come in and talk to or schedule a meeting with the students,” she said.
This was not always the case.
Mata came to Wesleyan in 2004 when her career services office wasn’t much more than a desk and a computer.
After reviewing the national standards for university career services, Mata asked, “What is supposed to be happening?”
Mata said her first priority was getting employers on board. Dr. Harold Jeffcoat, Wesleyan president, agrees.
“When career services starts to have employers visiting our campus wanting to recruit the top of our students to go to work,” Jeffcoat said, “that’s when I know career services is really doing well.” Jeffcoat said career services’ current location, in the SUB, is an improvement over the old offices in the library. “They have more overall space,” he said. “They aren’t encapsulated in the library.”
Apart from locating possible positions, career services also helps with resumes, conducts mock interviews and helps unsure students find their calling. This is done through the use of various tests which can rank the top 10 most ideal positions for a student.
“Research shows that if you get into a career you get into and actually like, you’re automatically going to be more successful because you’re going to do a good job,” said Mata, referring to students who pick the more lucrative degrees.
Coridon Laws, biology student scheduled to graduate in December, utilized career services throughout her time at Wesleyan.
“When I first came, I was in desperate need of money,” she said. “I did the career assessment to see what jobs would be good.”
Laws eventually asked career services to e-mail her alerts for part-time jobs in the area that related to her field.
Laws was able to land a job with TALEM as a wet chemistry analyst. She learned about Talem, a local environmental testing company, through the career services e-mail alerts.
“I credit career services 100 percent,” she said. “They have helped me throughout my entire career.”
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