-: My name is Dakota Serafin.
I am a career counselor at the USC Career Center.
My job is a little bit of everything.
I work with students who have no idea
what they want to do with their lives
all the way to the ones that know exactly
what they want to do and every step in between.
I help students with career exploration,
with coordinating their application materials
from resume, cover letter,
interview prep, all of that stuff.
We just sit down, we have a casual conversation
about their likes, their dislikes,
maybe past experiences, work experiences,
that they either loved or they hated,
because sometimes the things that you hate doing
is just as important as the things that you like to do.
And then we go through discussing their major,
why they chose it, different things like that,
as well as looking at different resources on connectSC,
several resources, one of them being
What Can I Do With My Major,
just to kind of broaden their horizons
and get them thinking about all the different career paths
they can have with that specific major
or with a completely different one.
If you know what you want to do
and you know which industry you want to be in,
our discussions are going to be a little bit more focused
on finding alumni that are in that particular industry
at the company that you want to work at
or in that position that you hope to be in one day.
We walk them through LinkedIn, Candid Careers,
just to get them familiar with,
let's find out what the job actually is.
Let's network, let's do informational interviews.
Let's find out is that somewhere you really want to be?
We help students in terms of reviewing resumes,
so they can bring in a resume to have reviewed.
Same thing with a cover letter.
We can through it step by step.
If a student is ready to apply for a job
and they know exactly which one they want to apply for,
they can bring in a job description
and I'll go through with them
the resume and the cover letter and the job description
just to make sure they're meeting all the criteria
and they're writing their experience in a way
that is applicable to that job description.
Our busiest time is during the fall semester
when we do all-team drop in.
Basically, what that looks like is
every day from 11:30 to 3:20,
I'm meeting with students every 10, 15 minutes.
On the tail ends of those, from about 8:30 to 11:30,
is typically when I'm meeting with Interns
strategizing how we're going to execute
the marketing strategies, the campaigns,
the outreach with employers, and do more of that stuff.
And then in the afternoons, from the 3:30 to five,
that's when I'm actually on the phones with employers
trying to get them to come to our events.