This site was made to decrease stress for undergraduate engineering students regarding learning to navigate LinkedIn, networking, writing resume and cover letters, and professional development by combining resources into one succinct place for students to visit.
Many engineering students, particularly underclassmen, face overwhelming challenges when trying to navigate job/internship applications, resume writing, and professional development. We aim to decrease this stress by combining resources into one succinct place for students to visit and gain help. This site will attempt to solve the lack of cohesive and easy to navigate professional resources for obtaining internships or jobs as engineering underclassmen at Cornell University.
The current state of undergraduate - and specifically underclassmen - professional development resources from Cornell’s Engineering Career Services office is concentrated around their website. The main tool they provide is the Career Development Tool, a Canvas-based course (enrollment link) that aims to provide resources in the form of modules; these modules include topics such as “networking,” “job search”, “interviewing”, and “letters”. The problem we have identified here, however, is that these modules tend to be cumbersome to navigate, off-putting to explore, and hidden behind too many barriers to interaction. A student has to find the website, land on the page that links to the “Career Development Tool”, sign-up for that Canvas class after signing into Canvas and explore the Canvas modules, which can be highly confusing. This sentiment was confirmed by our survey, where ⅓ of respondents that tried “finding engineering-specific job resources through Cornell Career Services or the Engineering Career Center” reported having trouble.
More specifically, we believe that resources like this should be as visible and clear to navigate as possible. For example, practical and directly useful resources such as resume or cover letter templates should be the easiest to access. In this case, we would like to draw on this study that suggests that providing examples of strong and weaker resumes is the best way to impart genuine knowledge of what is desired and valued from an employer's perspective (e.g. quantitative actions verbs, concise powerful descriptions, clear flow, etc.) according to Berdanier.
As an undergraduate student with little to no experience, it is difficult to find jobs. Research has shown that internships work as a "conveyor-belt" into full-time entry level jobs. One’s early career success (or lack thereof) often has an impact on one’s long-term economic success. As a result, resources that help students attain internships can have lasting positive impact for students.
Each team member of our group contributed an equal amount to each of the assignments and the project as a whole. Each member has different strengths, and we utilized these forces by having specific people work on distinct areas of the document. Over the past Spring 2021 semester, we have worked to develop this site through proposals, research, meetings, and developing content.
This Github site has organized pages of various content since it is a one-stop-shop for underclassmen engineering students looking for internship or job resources. This content includes: