Claire is the Associate Director of Virginia Tech’s Career and Professional Development Center. She leads a team of advisors made up of grad assistants and support staff that handles all of the STEM college career networks. Claire and her team’s focus is in four main areas: career exploration, gaining experience, developing job skills, and launching careers. Find out the education and experience needed to become a career advisor!
Transcript
My name is Claire Childress, and I'm an associate director in the Virginia Tech Career Center, where I lead a team of advisors, a graduate assistant and support staff. I lead our STEM College Career Network, where we work with students in engineering and science. We help students in four key ways. We help students do some exploration if they're unsure what they want to do with their lives, whether it's self-exploration or exploring careers that are out there. We help them gain experience, whether it's through an internship through our cooperative education program, or through undergraduate research, or taking on leadership positions, and we help them find those opportunities. Third, we help them develop the skills that we know employers want them to have, like professionalism, communication, leadership. If we don't help them develop them, we help them articulate those better in resumes, cover letters, or in interviews. And fourth, we are here to help them launch their career plans, whether that's going on to graduate or professional school, or whether that's their first full time job. Our busiest month of the year is September. That's when a lot of career fairs, really large career fairs... We have one fair that has over 300 employers who come for the engineering exposition career fair, and it goes on for several days, and they are held very early in September, and so right when the semester starts at the end of August, we hit the ground running to help get students get ready for those career fairs. And then we are also very busy... We have on-campus interviewing, we are very busy getting students ready for the busy interview season as well. So a typical day for me... Like earlier this morning, I was in a mock interview with a student, and then I met with Uffert, he's getting ready to go for a full-time job interview. And then I met with a student who's a first year student who was required to come here to get her resume reviewed, and found out she's interested in health professions and pointed her to resources that we have that our housed in our office for someone interested in the health professions. Later on this afternoon I'm meeting with a student who's following up, who's doing some of that exploration. She's doing some self-assessment to talk about her assessment results. And then a lot of times, another piece that might be added to my typical day is going to a class or student organization to make presentations, which I really enjoy.
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