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

The bad news is this story about tenured faculty positions being slowly made extinct. Not a shocking bit of info as it’s been going on for quite some time, but distressing nonetheless. Colleges and universities have been steadily decreasing their tenured-professor numbers for the past few decades, all in the name of budget cuts, saving money, and lots of other super important reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the pursuit of knowledge.

Back in the day, if you were teaching at a college or a university it was pretty much a given that you were a professor and that at some point in your career you would walk through the golden gates of tenure and into the light of academic freedom. Now, sadly, landing a full-time, long-term teaching position at a college or a university is difficult enough; actually achieving tenured faculty status is an incredibly big deal. Full professors are like the rock stars of academia.

If one were to be all Pollyanna-ish and find the silver lining, one might point out that having a higher population of non-tenured professors on campus would mean less publish-or-perish stress and politics, which would leave more time and energy to focus on the students. It would also mean less research, less article writing, and less freedom to say, think and teach whatever a tenured professor might want. Focusing on the students is great; less deep thinking and fewer new questions raised and answered isn’t.

To make everything black-and-white and to oversimplify to a ridiculous extent, institutions of higher learning are here for two reasons: the education of the students, and for the pursuit of lots of new, in-depth knowledge. Spending an entire career pondering, questioning and answering one piece of the universe is how mankind figures s**t out.

A university is the environment where that questioning, researching and thinking can occur. If faculty are increasingly hired only as part-time instructors or are given two-year contracts, and are only lecturing and not writing or conducting some form of research, then colleges and universities will exist only for teaching and turning a profit. No more higher thought. No more academic freedom.

Further Reading:

The Evolving (Eroding?) Faculty Job
‘The Academics’ Handbook’
‘The Last Professors’

Posted by Alexa Harrington

In the Unconventional Career Advice category, I’m putting Steve Martin’s memoir Born Standing Up. I’m a big fan of Martin’s writing, so it was a given that I would read his recent book about his stand-up comedy career.

I was expecting a well-written description of what happened in the 1970s, when he’d already made a name for himself and was selling out gigantic arenas. He does cover that, but the main focus of the book is everything leading up to that point, all of which turns out to be much more interesting.

Obviously, if you’re planning on becoming a stand-up comedian when you grow up, you could do worse than take advice from Steve Martin. But while I was reading the book, I kept seeing how solid and telling and honest and thorough Martin’s ‘advice’ is, and therefore how relevant that makes it for any other endeavor. He doesn’t even necessarily intend for it to be an advisory, how-to volume; his main intent is to explain how and why he made such an all-consuming journey.

Cal Newport, over at Study Hacks, was also struck by how well the book works as advice on more than just becoming a comedian. You should read the excellent post he has about how to become famous using ‘the Steve Martin method,’ which he outlines perfectly in the post.

Gary Woodill at Brandon Hall Research uses Martin’s memoir, along with Jerry Seinfeld’s documentary, Comedian, as examples of deep learning, which is the type of learning that takes “years to acquire, engaged immersion in the world, and lots of hard work.” Surface learning, on the other hand, requires much less time and effort. Surface learning is just the memorization of (and not the full-on learning of) the material or the process.

There is nothing ‘surface’ about Steve Martin’s comedic process; he swims in it, lives it, and breathes it for eighteen years until he burns out and walks away. It’s exhausting to read about, but it’s also pretty damned riveting to follow someone’s intense and incredibly focused journey to success. He doesn’t let up, he’s constantly learning and revising and thinking about the details and trying to grok the bigger picture. I think if you have that much focus and energy and depth of thought to put into something, you’re going to be okay.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

For any recent college graduates who might be heading off to their first year of teaching, this post on Ephblog lays out with severe honesty what a first-year teacher might expect. I’m not a teacher, but I’ve learned from scores of them, and I found it interesting to read about what it’s like for a new teacher to jump into the breach for the first time. The post is the first in a summer-long series about teaching through the eyes of Williams College graduates and should be worth checking out.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Again I say: there but for the grace of All Things Holy go I. A phone call to my parental units might be in order so I can thank them excessively for bringing me into this world at a time when computers took up entire rooms, tiny technology was available only in science fiction books, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook hadn’t yet been conceived of.

By no means was I an over-the-top party girl in high school or college, but I feel confident that had the technology been in place, I could have certainly captured some detrimental moments for posterity. Any number of which, I can guarantee, would somehow, somewhere, have been unearthed by a prospective employer.

Bowling Green’s online newspaper has an article up about the increasingly standard use employers make of sites like Facebook and MySpace to screen job applicants. I don’t agree with the practice, and part of me feels like it’s an invasion of privacy for employers to go digging around online for information. Which brings me around to the impossible-to-refute point that nothing posted online where the whole world can see it can be considered personal or private.

It sucks that teens and twenty-somethings have to work harder that any other generation since the Victorian age to mind their reputations, but all this technology is probably here to stay. Don’t put s**t out there that you don’t want people to see. Like all things logical, it’s elegant in its simplicity. So either keep your proverbial pants on or mark the “friends only” box on your chosen social networking site. Good luck.

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

This may have been particular only to my high school career, but from what I’ve seen, I think most kids leave high school with the feeling that they are destined to be amazing and have only to be unleashed on the world and this innate stupendousness will become apparent.

I grew up in a small, one-high-school town where the weekly paper was all of twelve pages and four of those were devoted to the kids in the community. Suffice it to say, it was almost impossible to be a nobody and most of us graduated feeling like awesomely special big fish in a small, safe pond where all adults thought we were wonderful.

You can imagine the shock we felt upon entering college and discovering an ocean of bigger and much more special fish. Leaving our small town and going to college was somewhat hard on our fragile egos, but graduating from college and moving into the real world was crushing, to say the least.

We had erroneously believed that high school was going to be the hardest four years of our lives; the real world, we were dismayed to discover, is harder. My ten-year high school reunion was a roomful of twenty-somethings who were bummed about admitting to everyone that they had not, as it turned out, blossomed into the superheroes we had all assumed was our due. I realize (now, as a far wiser thirty-something) that it would have been impossible for reality to live up to our skewed, hormone-fueled ideal future.

The party picked up once we all took a good look around and realized that not a single one of us was anything more than just plain old normal. Just getting through the week in the real world without caving in is heroic enough. I was a little sad for myself and for the now-adults I’d spent thirteen years of my childhood with—we’d all expected so much more from ourselves and from the world. We were all happy and healthy and were making our ways through the world just fine. But none of us were famous and the learning of crap was still occurring. Reality is one long, drawn-out learning process. It’s so disappointing! When does the learning stop?!

And there you have it: life is hard and is one sucky life-lesson after another. On the upside, almost everyone else on the planet is living some version of The Learning Life that you are. There’s an article in BusinessWeek about recent college grad Max Leiber who takes a temp job and learns about the harsh realities of outsourcing: How I Helped Move a Factory to Mexico. Every job, temporary, super, or otherwise, is a new learning opportunity and it’s interesting to read about Leiber’s experience.

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