Does anyone have summer jobs any more, or do the learning opportunities, résumé-building bullet points, key letters of recommendation, and invaluable experience of the summer internship far outweigh table-waiting wages? Summer’s half over; if you’re in the midst of your own personal interning adventure, here are some beneficial words of wisdom to assist you in milking your internship for all it’s worth:

Top 10 Tips for Interns
Tips to Make the Most of Summer Internships
Summer Internships—Making the Most
Internships Are More Important Than Ever
Inside an Ad Agency Summer Internship

And if this summer’s internship wasn’t all you had hoped it would be, you can start dreaming immediately of landing one of the most coveted internships next summer.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Medical billing and coding is quite the burgeoning career choice. According to my favorite information site ever (is it weird to be enamored of a statistics website?), it’s currently growing as a professions and shows no signs of stopping.

We are all aware that the Baby Boomers are starting to hit retirement age and will soon begin their collective physical decline. They are a fairly healthy generation, and I’m not trying to be negative, but everyone’s body starts to deteriorate at some point, there’s no way around it. And, to be career-oriented and blunt, a larger-than-average cohort of people who will soon be requiring medical attention is not a fact to ignore when considering career possibilities.

All Allied Health Schools has a pretty thorough section on their site explaining everything you need to know about a medical billing and coding career: education, certification, training, salary, the courses a student can expect to take, what the job entails, online program options, and why it’s a good career choice.

Almost as important as the above items is the debunked myths section of the site. If you Google ‘medical billing and coding,’ several sketchy ads will appear claiming how easy it is to set up your own business, as well as several equally cheesy ads for medical billing and coding software. Go here for the article explaining what’s actually required to set up your own business, and go here to read the billing and coding software article.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Online colleges have increased in popularity and ease of use over the past decade. A lot of that probably has to do with the convenience factor of online courses—no travel time, no sitting in class, no moving to another city, etc. In addition, the fact that the technology has improved on both ends—the school/instructor end and the student end—makes the whole concept more feasible for anyone who might be considering online education as an option. There are pros and cons to an online education, but for an increasing number of students, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

As far as online course options go, there are two: you can take online courses from a fully online college, which would enable you to earn an entire degree online; or you can take online courses from a traditional brick-and-mortar college that offers online courses in addition to their regular in-classroom courses.

Online college resources:

All Online Schools
The Open University (in the UK, but a good resource nonetheless)

Taking online courses from a known brick-and-mortar college makes the question of accreditation a little less sketchy. Because anyone can pretty much do and say whatever they want online, if you’re looking into a fully online education at a fully online college, you owe it to yourself to check their accreditation status. Fake diplomas from diploma mills don’t tend to look stellar on the résumé.

Here are some good accreditation resources:

Council for Higher Education Accreditation
U.S. Dept. of Education

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Along the lines of volunteering to gain beneficial job experience, corporate employees are using volunteering for non-profits as a way to increase their job skills. Corporations have realized that it’s financially efficient to lend out their employees to non-profits so those employees can gain experience and increase their skill set while helping to improve the lives of others. After their stint learning lots in the non-profit sector, the corporate employees are more valuable to the company. I believe the technical term for this is symbiosis.

Further Reading:

Corporate Philanthropy 2.0
What Corporate Employees Can Learn From the Non-Profit World
Corporate Caring
No Experience? Volunteer. Even After Being Hired.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Leonard Witt, Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University and Rob Curley, new media guru at The Washington Post are having an interesting back and forth about journalism degrees and journalism schools, and what exactly, is expected of a young journalist at a time when the industry is struggling to keep its head above water.

Witt, in a recent post wrote, “there are a flood of new posts and speeches coming from the likes of Rob Curley, Doug Fisher, Brian Murley. Paul Conley, and Howard Owens, which almost disparage young graduates who say they really only want to be writers….

My advice to the journalism student who wants to be a great writer above all else is to then concentrate your energies in that area. Get some exposure to the other mediums media, but don’t let them turn you into another cog in the machine. Seek your passion. Do all that is necessary to become a great literary journalist, our democracy for sure, and maybe our trade, needs you as much and probably more than we do need all the jacks of all trades.”

Rob Curley responded by saying that it’s not about being an expert in every medium, but about knowing and understanding what each medium is about, and when it is valuable to use video over print, or print over audio, and so on.

“…let’s get back to the post on PJNet that started this ramble: I’m not really sure today’s journalists have to pitch and catch. I honestly don’t know.

My biggest question to J-Schools now is why are your students so dang close-minded? Where was that instilled, and what are you going to do to help them graduate with a degree and a mindset that will keep them employed as long as they want to be members of the Fourth Estate?”

Draw your own conclusions.

Posted By Sindya Bhanoo

The New York Times did a story on the growing trend of public universities charging higher tuition for degrees in lucrative fields such as business and engineering. This practice brings up many issues including price sensitivity for poor students who may stay away from majoring in business. Some worry that students who are charged more for their major will stick to the courses in their field to feel that they are getting their money’s worth. Many are concerned that public universities have disregarded the premise that a well-rounded higher education is for the common good of society. Private universities who are not faced with the same budget constraints are avoiding differential pricing.

Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates. The University of Nebraska last year began charging engineering students a $40 premium for each hour of class credit.

And Arizona State University this fall will phase in for upperclassmen in the journalism school a $250 per semester charge above the basic $2,411 tuition for in-state students.

Such moves are being driven by the high salaries commanded by professors in certain fields, the expense of specialized equipment and the difficulties of getting state legislatures to approve general tuition increases, university officials say.

“It is something of a trend,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

Even as they embrace such pricing, many officials acknowledge they are queasy about a practice that appears to value one discipline over another or that could result in lower-income students clustering in less expensive fields.

“This is not the preferred way to do this,” said Patrick V. Farrell, provost at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “If we were able to raise resources uniformly across the campus, that would be a preferred move. But with our current situation, it doesn’t seem to us that that’s possible.”

Recent graduates who are now job hunting are probably inundated with advice from friends and family. Some of the classic advice: Get a haircut; buy interview clothes; tell everyone you’re looking for a job; get an internship; go on informational interviews. Other advice is geared toward protecting your online reputation: Google yourself to make sure nothing incriminating shows up (e.g. your MySpace page that displays photos of you guzzling beers); consider how professional your email will sound to a prospective employer (fuzzybear @ gmail .com?).

It’s all sound advice, but the good old fashioned résumé is the major cornerstone to getting a job. Even if you’ve never had a “real” job outside serving beer at the student union or being an RA, you can create a résumé that will catch the eye of a prospective employer.

Here are a few of the best résumé advice sites:

The Wall Street Journal’s Career Journal has a whole section of their site devoted to Résumé Advice. Recent articles cover sneaky job hunter tips, tips for writing broad résumés, why lying is hard to cover up, and writing thank you notes.

Purdue University has many résumé writing articles in addition to articles about writing great cover letters, writing a Curriculum Vitae and business writing.

All Career Schools has a section on résumé tips that includes résumé strategies and online networking resources for creating a great résumé.

Career Builder’s resume advice by Robert Half International emphasizes the importance of keywords, concise résumés, and video résumés.

career | work

Top Chef and the Food Network have fueled the rise of the celebrity chef and it’s been very good for cooking schools. Students are filling culinary schools are unprecedented rates. Professional training can help cooks move up quickly through the kitchen ranks. And culinary schools have produced many of the nation’s finest chefs.

From All Culinary Schools - Top Chefs Who Attended Cooking School:

Emeril Lagasse – The Food Network personality and owner of many restaurants has made quite a fortune from cooking. He attended cooking school at Johnson and Wales after turning down a full scholarship to study music at the New England Conservatory of Music. Talk about talent! Lagasse also supports a number of charities through the Emeril Lagasse Foundation.

Ann Cooper – She calls herself the “Renegade Lunch Lady.” A former celebrity chef, who once cooked for the Grateful Dead, Chef Ann is now giving public school cafeterias around the country a major facelift. She’s currently Director of Nutrition at Berkeley Public Schools where she has replaced all canned and processed foods with fresh meat and vegetables and baked goods from local bakeries. Cooper studied at the Culinary Institute of America.

Erika Bruce – Bruce is a test cook on America’s Test Kitchen, public television’s most popular cooking show. On the show, test cooks like Bruce experiment with recipes and tinker with cooking tools to find out what works and what doesn’t. Bruce attended the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts.

Walter Scheib –As the executive chef at the White House for 11 years, Scheib was in charge of preparing meals for the First Family. Scheib’s book about his experiences White House Chef: Eleven Years, Two Presidents, One Kitchen came out in January, 2007. He graduated with highest honors from the Culinary Institute of America in New York in 1979.

Julia Child – She’s the queen mother of the culinary industry. In 1948, while her husband, an officer for a federal government agency, was posted in Paris, Child enrolled in the world famous Cordon Bleu cooking school. There was no turning back. After just six months of training, Child and two of her classmates opened up a cooking school of their own called L’Ecole de Trois Gourmandes. They also published a book together called Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Child promoted the book in the US and one Boston public broadcasting station found her so charismatic they gave her a cooking show of her own. The show was an immense hit – it was syndicated all over the country and won many awards, including an Emmy.

Although no one disputes that culinary training is essential to become a chef, attending a pricey culinary school can put you in the hole for years. The New York Times reported in May 2007 that culinary school graduates are defaulting on federal student loans at alarmingly high rates. The article advises culinary students to be very careful about how they pay for school and to exhaust federal and state loans before looking for alternative funding.

From the New York Times:

Top Chef Dreams Crushed by Student Debt

But would-be top chefs face a challenge that most lawyers, engineers or nurses do not: few jobs in their chosen field pay enough for them to retire their student loans. As a result, as many as 11 percent of graduates at some culinary schools are defaulting on federal student loans. The national average for all students last year was roughly half that, at 5.1 percent.

“The problem isn’t getting a job, the problem is getting a high-paying job,” said Susan Sykes Hendee, a dean at Baltimore International College and a member of the American Culinary Federation Foundation Accrediting Commission, which accredits many culinary schools.

Many of the schools offer two-year programs where the total tuition and supply costs can reach $48,000. Only a slice of that is covered by low-interest federal loans. For example, the most that students in two-year programs can currently borrow in federal loans is $14,125.

culinary school |
college