Go to Your Career Center Before You Need It
You don’t need to know what you want before you walk in. Here’s why going early gives you a head start.
Daniel V Pack
10/13/20263 min read
The sooner you walk into your career center, the better off you’ll be.
Most students, domestic ones included, don’t think about the career center much at all. International students tend to put their energy into the academic side, which is great. Nothing wrong with that. But you also have to understand how the American labor market works, and that’s one of the things your career center can teach you.
It isn’t a job placement office
Your career center isn’t a job placement office. It can help with everything from getting your first resume together to career exploration and major exploration. It can also work with your academic advisor on which courses will get you where you want to go.
You don’t need to know what you want before you walk in. “I don’t know what to do” is the reason to go. You’re paying a lot of money to go to school and get an education, and one of the services schools provide is a career center. Why not take advantage of it?
What you learn when you go
Go in early and you start to learn how hiring works in this country. A lot of the time, referrals and connections have an outsized influence on getting internships, interviews, jobs and sponsorship. Your domestic classmates may have grown up with a built-in network, like a cousin at one company or an aunt who runs another. You have to build yours, and the career center is where you learn how to lay the foundation your career development will stand on. Someone there may even talk you out of treating LinkedIn like social media.
They’ll help you put together a strong resume and show you how to put your experiences on it. They can also help you figure out how to get experience in the first place.
If you’re an international student, you can also learn to handle the things outside the classroom that’ll affect your job opportunities, like connecting with alumni, going to networking events, immersion trips, internships and group projects.
One step at a time
In NACE’s 2022 survey of graduating seniors, students who used at least one career center service averaged 1.24 job offers. Students who used none averaged 1.0, and each extra service a student used added a little more.
A 2023 Strada Education Foundation report found that 70 percent of first-year students expect to do an internship. Only 48 percent of seniors say they’ve had one.
When I worked in career services, the students who came in early got a head start on what they needed to do. By the time the internship or job search came around, they’d been doing those things for a while, one step at a time, piece by piece. They didn’t have a Mount Everest list of tasks in front of them.
What I heard from master’s students
During my master’s program, I was a one-on-one English conversation partner for my fellow master’s students. When they found out I was doing my practicum hours in a career center, the conversation would turn to careers: how the job market works here in the U.S., why networking isn’t a superficial numbers game of building as many connections as you can, and how to get the experience that makes you an attractive candidate for the roles you want.
And they’d say, “Ah, I wish I had known about this before.”
It’s one of the reasons I’ve done work outside a career center, like writing books and starting this website. I wanted to share my experiences with international students who hadn’t been to their career center yet, or who weren’t sure what to expect, and to show how the students I worked with benefited from career centers and from working with me. My books and this website came out of that. I wanted to reach you and let you know what your career center can do for you.
This is general guidance, not legal advice. Immigration rules change and depend on your situation. Confirm anything about work authorization or sponsorship with your DSO and official USCIS sources before you act on it.
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