Observations from a student workshop on marketing an immersive learning experience

Today, my game design students took part in a workshop given by the BSU Career Center. The workshop was designed to help students market their immersive learning experience when they are seeking jobs and internships. Sitting in the back of the room and observing my students was a great experience. I gained some new insight into the kinds of questions they have and the struggles they face in seeking employment.

The workshop was led by Stephanie Wilson, and she opened by asking the students to write down what kinds of questions they had generally about the job hunt. I decided to capture them in my notebook as the students shared them as a way of describing the how students see the problem. Note that, while this course can be taken by any major, most of the students in the class—and I think all of them present today—are Computer Science majors. This is in part because CS majors can earn elective credit for taking the course.

Here are the questions the students shared:

• Is it more difficult to find a job out of state?
• Is there a best way to organize a portfolio, particularly a web site?
• How do you prioritize what goes onto a one-page résumé?
• Is there something special to go on a CS résumé vs. others?
• If I see a job listing that I want, and it includes a list of skills, only some of which I have, should I still apply, knowing that I want to build those other skills?
• What do you do if you have multiple job offers? How do you fairly evaluate them?
• How do you deal with "entry-level" positions that require 3+ years of experience vs. positions that are basically unpaid internships?*
• If a job involves working with a specific system or platform, and I don't know it, should I still apply?
• Should I put old projects on my résumé to show how I have improved?

She collected the questions, but they were not individually addressed, except for the one about unpaid internships. Her response to this was, "You are Computer Science Majors from Ball State University. Do not take unpaid internships." The rest of them she saved for future use at the Career Center, although several were mentioned during the remainder of the workshop.

Wilson talked briefly about "networking." She explained how, when she was younger, she thought it was essentially an exchange of business cards. As she worked, she realized it was not transactional at all. Instead, she said, it is relationship, and specifically, doing what you say you'll do when you say you'll do it. I thought this was great, and I could tell that the students were attentive and thinking about this. During the workshop's closing feedback session, it came up as one of the three most important things she shared.

We spent some time in small groups to discuss how we had each already thought about framing the course experience on a résumé. I didn't expect this, but it turned out really interesting. I joined the under-populated group as an extra discussant, and it was interesting to hear the students talk about their perspective on what had been going on in class. We brought the results of these discussions back to the whole group, and Wilson helped frame the results in terms of her "Four P's": price, promotion, product, and place. I can't say I'm much for the mnemonic, but it was a useful lens through which to look at the problem.

One concrete piece of advice she shared was how to frame any experience on a resume: with an action verb, a description, and a business outcome. One of the students wisely asked what she meant by "business outcome," and Wilson responded that it's the "so what?" of the work. We worked through some examples, and it was clear that students quickly caught on to the value of this idea. What struck me is that this format is not so different from how we talk about user story articulation and commit messages. 

There were several other tips she shared for résumé constructor that I want to mention here so I can find them later. One was not to list your physical address nor the university's location on your résumé, and also not to use more than one vertical line to list the title, location, and dates of a job. For odds and ends like club memberships, she recommended a catchall portion of the résumé whose name, unfortunately, I cannot remember and I did not write down. She advised strongly against fancy templates, tables, and images as being difficult for automated, AI-driven systems to process. She also mentioned that a résumé has a shelf-life of one: each one should be tailored to each job you apply for, using the language expressed in the job ad. Finally, she mentioned that traditional wisdom was for students or recent grads to put their education first, but that more recent feedback from businesses has been that they want to see experiences first. 

As alluded to earlier, she concluded the session with a quick feedback session. She asked the students about the best parts of the workshop, to which they responded: don't undersell yourself; articulating the good things they had done this semester was helpful in thinking about it; the importance of LinkedIn; and the action-description-outcome format for résumé bullet points.

I am glad I decided to do something a bit out of the ordinary and bring in this speaker. Tuesday before Thanksgiving was an odd day out on the schedule. We have Group A presenting on Tuesdays and Group B on Thursdays, so what was I to do with a short week? I haven't actually hosted a Career Center speaker like this in several years, but it was clearly valuable to the students while also giving me a refresher on how I can help students think about these problems. It was fun to sit in the back of the room and hear how my students talk about what we've been doing, and of course, it's always nice to have someone else show up and tell the students that what they are doing is important and interesting—because it is!