No one goes into grad school thinking that they don’t want a job by the time they graduate. However, the recruiting process is competitive, intimidating, and confusing. Through the MMS program, though, we’ve received a lot of career advice to help us navigate the job search. We had workshops on networking, resume building, and even how to act during formal recruitment events, etc.

Everyone comes to this program from a different background and with different goals, needing individualized guidance, so one of the resources provided are career coaches. There are 3 professional career coaches: Ellen Baker, Helen Crompton, and Madra Britt who help us with elements of our job search. The coaching process started with 3 initial one-on-one sessions during the summer term. After that, we were able to keep in touch through additional appointments and email.

Some of the issues we can talk to career coaches about are:

• Career Path: The MMS program is extremely diverse in a lot of ways, and just one of those is that not everyone joins the program knowing exactly what they want out of it. There are students trying to figure out what field they want to work in, and our career coaches help by discussing options with us.

• Resume Building: Our career coaches worked closely with us when we built our Fuqua format resume, which goes into the Fuqua resume book for recruiters. They spent a lot of time helping us improve everything from the format to wording.

• Cover Letters: Writing cover letters is a big part of the recruitment process, and everyone has to write at least one at some point. My career coach worked with me to improve some of my cover letters. Needless to say, the final product was something I never could have done on my own.

• Interview Prep: We also worked on our interviewing skills. Fuqua gave us access to something called Interview Stream, which allows us to record ourselves in a mock interview. We went over these practice interviews with our career coaches, and they helped us improve our interviewing skills in every way, from our tone and posture to the way we answered questions.

Like most of the resources we’re offered at Fuqua, you get what you want out of it. Our career coaches are available to us as much as we need or want. They are a great source of information and have a lot of coaching experience.

When I joined the program, it felt like I was thrown into a sea of new information and before I knew it, fall recruiting season was approaching too quickly. You have to be prepared to jump into recruitment preparation as soon as you get to Fuqua, and that can be overwhelming, so having a career coach as a guide was a relief.