By Danielle Tucker, 2017 AgCareers.com Marketing Intern
How long has it been since you’ve used your resume? It could be a few weeks, it could be a few years and a lot has happened in your life between then and now. If you haven’t been consistently updating your resume, you might want to think about a few things before applying to the new job.
1. Contact information
This might be obvious, but there’s a good chance your email has changed and maybe your address as well, especially if you are in college! Make sure that your contact information is updated and you are reachable by the information you give. Be sure to include an appropriate email that you check often. Employers don’t want to see an email that says, “cutestuff@x.com”.
We’re all familiar with IQ, or Intelligence Quotient. For years people assumed that IQ was the source of a person’s success. However, studies indicated that people with the highest IQs outperform those with average IQs just 20% of the time, while people with average IQs outperform those with high IQs 70% of the time. Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves provides an in-depth look at this topic. They explain that the physical source of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is communication between your rational and emotional areas of the brain.
EQ is a person’s ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others. EQ allows you to handle yourself and relationships in challenging circumstances at work and home. It generally includes:
By Danielle Tucker, 2017 AgCareers.com Marketing Intern
As you start your summer internship, have you thought about what to ask your supervisor? Here are five questions to ask during your internship:
1. Can we talk about expectations?
One of the most important questions to ask during your internship: make sure you understand what your supervisor and coworkers expect from you. However, don’t forget about your personal goals as well. One major point of the internship is to make sure you get the most out of it. Use the experience for personal growth. If you ask this early on, it will help everyone establish a good idea of what all the expectations are so you don’t walk away from the internship down the road with it not meeting any of your own goals.
2. What are some areas I can improve on?
There’s a good chance your employer won’t fault you on your strengths, but will probably notice your weaknesses. Ask how you can improve! By asking your supervisor this, you are showing your willingness to learn. Feedback is the best way to figure out how you are doing as an intern. Being a coachable person makes for a great intern. Willingness to listen from the experts and use their advice to better your skills will not only benefit you now, but also later in life.
One of the nuggets of wisdom my dad shared with me often as a child had to do with controlling your attitude. He would tell me about a job he had committed to when he was a younger man, that involved a construction project out in the middle of the desert. Now he was a steamfitter, so he spent a lot of time welding pipe, and you can imagine how fun that was in the desert. He got to a point where he just hated the project. He was miserable in the heat, and he dreaded going to work each day with a crew that wasn’t motivated. It was obvious they didn’t want to be there any more than he did, and they put as little effort into the work as possible. But my dad was not a quitter, so when he committed to go to work on that project, he was bound to see it through. So one day, he just made up his mind that he was going to make the best of his situation. You see, when you drudge through a job (or life in general) being sour and bitter, the one that is hurt and suffers most is YOU.
I’ve always thought that one of the hardest (but also one of the most common) interview questions to answer is, “What are you most proud of?” Not everyone thinks of their accomplishments as anything major, but it’s important to share them with your interviewer for them to understand what you are capable of and what fulfills your pride (as they certainly want you to be proud of your work if you end up as their employee). Your interviewer will also be looking for an answer detailing the process of how you accomplished whatever it is that you are most proud of.
First of all, here’s how to NOT answer the question (as I did for my first real job interview): don’t give a short answer. There should be a story involved here with a beginning and an ending. You should lead the interview from how this accomplishment materialized through the end result and then why you are proud of it.
By Danielle Tucker, 2017 AgCareers.com Marketing Intern
You probably haven’t seen anyone out handpicking corn with a husking knife or a peg strapped to the palm of their hands. Why not? Because science, technology, engineering and mathematics have helped change agriculture. These fields are what are known as STEM careers.
Farmers cannot feed the world alone. If we solely rely on the diminishing number of farmers to meet the demand of food, there won’t be enough to go around. Pursuing a STEM degree will open a countless number of doors for you.
If you are wondering what kinds of opportunities there are, the designated STEM degree list has over 400 degree programs listed. If you were to glance over the list, you would find most of them relate to agriculture in more ways than you may realize. You can match these degrees to hundreds of job opportunities that exist within agriculture. Students pursuing degrees in STEM are carving new tools to find solutions to feeding the drastically rising demand for food.