The best decision I ever made at the University came at the request of my mother. “Sarah,” she said about a week after I’d settled into my new home on the top floor of Allen Residence Hall, a small room situated over the blacktop roof, “if you want a job, you have to go to The Career Center. You don’t know how to write a resume. You don’t know how to write a cover letter. They do.” So I went. 

And I got two jobs as a freshman, one with Campus Recreation and the other with Assembly Hall.

The Career Center offers a wide range of services to all types of students, whether you’re the new freshman on campus looking to learn how to construct her first resume and cover letter, or the senior looking to build the perfect personal essay for graduate school applications. They also offer career counseling, where you attend one-on-one sessions with a specific counselor who helps you to organize yourself for what comes after college.

Now maybe as a freshman just arriving in Champaign-Urbana, you don’t want to think about what comes after college. But you should, and that’s where The Career Center can help.

I would advise you to take advantage of as many services at The Career Center as is possible. If you go in for a resume review, they will help you create a resume that not only shows what you have done and how that experience is relevant to the job you currently desire, but also how to craft each bullet point so that it has that bit of flair that highlights your leadership, your tenacity and your drive. You didn’t just mop floors at McDonald’s; you cultivated a positive customer experience. You didn’t clean out the cabinets at the local movie theater; you overhauled the entire storage system. With a list of Career Center action words to guide you, your resume will shine above all the others because you did learn skills at those other jobs — even if it didn’t feel like it.

The Career Center also provides walk-in help with cover letters, so you can learn to structure and accent those experiences that best illustrate your qualities. The purpose of a resume is to list your past experience relevant to the current position, but a cover letter should look at a few specific experiences in more depth. They have a formula to follow, and samples of various kinds of cover letters for various career paths, from the general resume to the design resume to the journalist resume. Each has its own rules and quirks and The Career Center can help you figure it all out. Not only that, but they will review each new draft that you bring into them, so that the work you send out provides the best representation of you.

Once you’ve sent in your resume and cover letter and landed the interview, what then? The Career Center offers mock interviews, too. Though the interviews are incredibly intimidating — locked in a small room with the interviewer while the tape recorder rolls not-quite-silently on — the playback of the tape post-interview can help you spot where those pesky “ums” and “uhs” have a tendency to sneak in. You’ll learn how to ask questions in an interview, and the “behind the scenes” of why certain questions always appear in a standard interview.

After my mom told me to visit The Career Center, I became the family expert. I landed those two jobs my first semester on campus, got into a great graduate school, and have had interviews with a handful of large, highly competitive companies. And I get to pass along what I have learned from the gurus at the Career Center to my mother and my sister and friends, all of whom have gotten at least interviews with Career Center help passed along via the grapevine.

If you do nothing else in your first month on campus, go to see the lovely folks at The Career Center. They host job fairs, workshops and seminars, all to prepare you for the jobs ahead. Whether you’re prepping for the dream job or just the one that pays the bills, The Career Center has resources to get you ready. They will turn you into a resource.

Sarah is a graduate student. She can be reached at [email protected].