February: career

Remember my themes for 2013?  Well, when I put together my themes for each month, I broke each one down into more specific goals.  I also threw in some inspirational phrases & a quote to keep me going.

My big goal for February is to find a summer internship. In my effort to do this, I've met with an adviser to critique my resume, attended a career fair, updated my LinkedIn, created an about.me profile and brainstormed some pretty big career goals. Yep, it's been a busy week.

Not only have I been working on my career goals, but I've spent hours looking at resumes and cover letters for my job on campus.  I helped hire a new office assistant, filed resident assistant resumes and reviewed cover letters and resumes for building director candidates.  I've seen quite a few resumes in the past couple of weeks (we had over 500 candidates for resident assistants!).

Here's a couple of tips I've picked up on:

Visit Career Services | Your campus has some kind of career services, I promise.  The advisors are there to help you & in just thirty minutes you will walk out with great advice.

Follow K.I.S.S. | K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, sweetheart) is key!  If you're a college student, your resume should never exceed more than one page!! This is a major pet peeve of mine.  It's better to keep things conservative than using some crazy design.

Features & Benefits | Change your perspective writing your résumé. Take your experiences and "features" and relate them to how you will benefit the company you're applying to. Everything on your résumé should be relevant to the field you are pursuing.

Use Levo League | If you haven't checked out Levo League yet, you need to, right now.  There are so many great resources!  I've been known to spend hours on end browsing through articles and watching old office hours.


What are your favorite career/job search tips?

Dance the Night Away

Today's post is dedicated to a group of women I am honored to call my sisters; the Beta Gamma chapter of Alpha Omicron Pi.

Photo Credit: Caitlin Kelly

This weekend has been AOII filled!  I spent 12 hours (standing) Saturday at Dance Marathon for our Greek Week competition.  Then we had chapter yesterday evening, as usual.  I've spent a lot of time with my sisters and I couldn't be happier about it!  This weekend has reminded me how wonderful they all are and how much I love them.  I know it's cheesy, but it's completely true.

Saturday morning I woke up bright & early to get ready for Dance Marathon. I had never been to a Dance Marathon & no one was really quite sure what we were walking into!  I'll be honest, I had the image of Rory & Lorelai's dance marathon from Gilmore Girls in my head. The general concept is you stand for 12 hours, representing the battle kids face with cancer.  We played games, danced & bonded!  Overall, it was an absolute blast.  I'm really glad I had the opportunity to go and represent AOII.  (Sidenote: Team AOII, EX & KE won Dance Marathon!! #dreamteam)

AOIIs & KEs at Dance Marathon!

Not only was Dance Marathon a ton of fun, it was for a great cause!  The money we raised went to the Cassie Hines foundation, to help send young adults 16-30 to cancer camp to help them connect with others their age with cancer.  It provides them a support group of other individuals facing the same challenges they are.  Cassie Hines unfortunately lost her battle with cancer, but her memory lives on through MSU's Dance Marathon & the foundation in her name.  Dance Marathon raised over $25,000 this year!

If I didn't get enough sorority time on Saturday, I had brunch and a chapter meeting on Sunday.  I mean, who doesn't love brunch?  Brunch at AOII always involves lots of stories and laughs, not to mention the good food!  Then, Sunday evening we held ritual and a chapter meeting.  The important piece of this was our chapter development workshop.  First, shout out to Morgan, our VP of Chapter Development, your workshop was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.

For the workshop, Stand Up for Your Sister, everyone was given a series of statements, some positive, some negative and you marked next to each statement that applied to you.  Some of the statements included: "I think we have a stronger sisterhood than other chapters on campus" and "I wish my sisters were more supportive".  Our VPCD collected all the papers and redistributed them, so all the responses were completely anonymous.  She read out each statement and if it was marked on the paper you had, you stood up.  This was so powerful and truly eye-opening.  When we had gotten through all 25 statements, we had an honest, open conversation about our chapter and our sisterhood.

To anyone who is not a part of greek life: it's not always amazing.  I'll be completely honest, there was more than one negative statement on the list I agreed with.  However, sitting in a room with over 50 other sisters and being able to be completely honest about how you feel shows you one of the best parts of being greek.  My chapter has a really great sisterhood (in my opinion, at least).  Of course there is room for improvement, but we're pretty darn great.  This was one of the longest workshops we've done as a chapter and we talked for a good 45 minutes.  During that 45 minutes we laughed, we cried, and most importantly, we realized that we all feel the same way about a lot of things.  We all have struggles and we don't always show everyone else what a hard time we're going through.

Spring Bid Day 2013 

No chapter is perfect, no matter what you may think.  I also encourage you not to judge an entire chapter by one member.  Greek life is one of the best choices I've ever made.  Despite it's ups and downs, I know AOII has helped me become a better person and I know it will continue to help me for years to come.

I am absolutely blessed to be a part of such an amazing sisterhood.  I love these girls to the moon and back and I will always be there for each and every one of them. I don't know what I would do without them.

Alpha love & all of mine,


p.s. I most definitely shed a tear or two while writing this!