-: 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.