05-05-2023, 11:37 PM
If she thinks she wants to go into management one day, she'll have to get experience first. Even the high-powered companies that brag about how they hire Harvard's finest stick their new grads in jobs with titles like "Associate" and "Analyst" for 1-2 years until they actually become useful, sometimes in so-called "Management Development Programs". For less high powered roles you can get actual responsibilites out of the gate, albeit usually the ones no one wants to do, and getting into a managing role usually takes much longer (although in my opinion, those ones make much better managers.)
The tough part for any new grad in any subject is landing the first job after graduation. In my opinion, there are two ways to improve her odds: Summer internships and subject matter specialization. I'll give you my thoughts on these in two parts. Please remember that I am just some guy on a forum. I am not a professional career advisor or counselor. My qualifications are that I've gotten several office jobs, all unrelated to my undergrad major, and have seen how the process works.
Internships
Summer internships are powerful things! Not only do they get a student ins with the company they intern at, they also get the student experience that they can leverage when applying for full-time work in the future. Internships can also help people rule careers out. I've known more than one person who interned for a state senator and learned that they never want to go into politics professionally. Easier to learn that lesson over a summer than after getting a whole degree. Some summer internships are only a few weeks long, meaning she could even still get summer jobs if she wants. More and more internships are paying now too, although the majority (especially in non-technical business fields) are still unpaid.
Any traditional college worth their salt has a small army of career advisors that will tell students how to write resumes. Excelsior is not a traditional college. Most students at colleges like Excelsior are active military, veterans, people rejoining the workforce after kids or illness, or people stuck in their careers. They come into the degree with work experience. If she wants to come out with some internships under her belt (and she does, trust me), you'll have to be her career services office.
The specific ways you get summer internships are pretty similar across most fields, with some variation in the formalities here and there. Here is a bulleted list of advice for getting summer internships I received from the career counselor's office at my brick & mortar first degree:
Subject Matter Expertise
It is way, way easier to get your foot in the door somewhere if you have knowledge they can use. The best way to do this is through the degree, but Excelsior doesn't do double majors as far as I understand. She does have the option of their Healthcare Management or Technology Management degrees. Their technology management degree seems to have 5 sub-areas, so she could build subject matter expertise that way.
She can also build subject-matter knowledge outside of the degree through personal projects and extracurricular commitments. Say she's so pleased with her online degree that she gets very into the idea that everyone should have internet access. There are groups that set up free broadband internet, mostly in rural areas and poor urban areas, that take volunteers. I know that such groups exist in Vermont (sponsored by the state government) and Detroit (all-volunteer). She starts volunteering with them in her free time, learns the tech, maybe they even let her lead a project or two - suddenly once she graduates, she's experienced broadband tech with a management degree, and that means she's uniquely qualified to work in management-track roles for major internet service providers, with hands-on experience that the other people looking at that job don't have. I know a guy who did this track specifically and now manages a team for an ISP out in Rhode Island.
Your daughter should think about how the subject areas mesh with a business degree. Thankfully, pretty much every subject you can think of has at least one area where companies need someone that understands both the subject matter side of things and the business side of things. Chemistry and business? Pharmecutical companies! Communications and business? Marketing! Electrical technology and business? Power providers, electronics manufacturers, and more! Education and business? Professional training services!
If she doesn't learn a specific subject area she can also learn broad skills. I don't do anything related to Political Science, but I had hundreds of pages of readings a week and wrote a lot of papers. My professional communication is clearer and more effective than my STEM-degree colleagues as a result. Not that you can tell that from my forum posts. Likewise, the methods of technical thinking students learn in programs like Math and Physics translate across a whole host of domains. An old high school teacher, who started his career working for defense contractors, says that they usually hire physicists to lead their research teams because their specific method of analytical thinking works best for leading a team of researchers. Business degrees, in my experience, tend to make students very good at sales and convincing people verbally, but not as good as writing or technical thinking. She can learn these things outside of the classroom as well.
The possibilities are endless, and the beauty of the path she's choosing is that it's so flexible she can make it her own however she wants. It sounds like you've got a great kid on your hands, and I can tell her mom loves her and is doing everything she can to look out for her. I wish you all the luck in the world.
The tough part for any new grad in any subject is landing the first job after graduation. In my opinion, there are two ways to improve her odds: Summer internships and subject matter specialization. I'll give you my thoughts on these in two parts. Please remember that I am just some guy on a forum. I am not a professional career advisor or counselor. My qualifications are that I've gotten several office jobs, all unrelated to my undergrad major, and have seen how the process works.
Internships
Summer internships are powerful things! Not only do they get a student ins with the company they intern at, they also get the student experience that they can leverage when applying for full-time work in the future. Internships can also help people rule careers out. I've known more than one person who interned for a state senator and learned that they never want to go into politics professionally. Easier to learn that lesson over a summer than after getting a whole degree. Some summer internships are only a few weeks long, meaning she could even still get summer jobs if she wants. More and more internships are paying now too, although the majority (especially in non-technical business fields) are still unpaid.
Any traditional college worth their salt has a small army of career advisors that will tell students how to write resumes. Excelsior is not a traditional college. Most students at colleges like Excelsior are active military, veterans, people rejoining the workforce after kids or illness, or people stuck in their careers. They come into the degree with work experience. If she wants to come out with some internships under her belt (and she does, trust me), you'll have to be her career services office.
The specific ways you get summer internships are pretty similar across most fields, with some variation in the formalities here and there. Here is a bulleted list of advice for getting summer internships I received from the career counselor's office at my brick & mortar first degree:
- Use nepotism. Does she have any aunts or uncles whose company would take her on in an office role for the summer? Any close family friends? Neighbors? Most homeschoolers I've known attended some sort of group activity with other homeschoolers. Any parents from that group? Anybody at the same church, or same gym, same rec sports league, bridge club? They're her best internship leads. It doesn't have to be a company that your contact owns, because pretty much everywhere takes interns once in a while. It doesn't have to be a company at all! Hospitals, power plants, construction companies, banks, charities, you name it, they probably take interns. In polite society nepotism is called "leveraging your network", and when you call it that it's the good and smart thing to do.
- Set up a LinkedIn profile and make it look nice - a nice headshot (your phone camera's probably good enough), a 2-3 sentence summary, experience in something (since she's still a high schooler, extracurriculars are professionally acceptable under "experience" but that changes after she graduates), interests, etc. This matters more once she gets a year of full time experience, because it means jobs will start coming to her, but also matters for...
- Cold outreach! I got my first job this way. It's exactly what it sounds like. She can do this with both LinkedIn messages, which are better to schedule shorter, informal, informational conversations, and email, which is better to become a top candidate for an existing an open job posting. She can do this just to talk to people and get a feel for what they do, even. My first bachelor's career office recommends making the outreach more personal by establishing some sort of link between her and the person she's contacting - same hometown, Excelsior alumni (there are many, and many are in high places), etc. Here's a more detailed article on how to pull it off: https://hiddenfrontdoor.org/how-to-cold-...templates/
Subject Matter Expertise
It is way, way easier to get your foot in the door somewhere if you have knowledge they can use. The best way to do this is through the degree, but Excelsior doesn't do double majors as far as I understand. She does have the option of their Healthcare Management or Technology Management degrees. Their technology management degree seems to have 5 sub-areas, so she could build subject matter expertise that way.
She can also build subject-matter knowledge outside of the degree through personal projects and extracurricular commitments. Say she's so pleased with her online degree that she gets very into the idea that everyone should have internet access. There are groups that set up free broadband internet, mostly in rural areas and poor urban areas, that take volunteers. I know that such groups exist in Vermont (sponsored by the state government) and Detroit (all-volunteer). She starts volunteering with them in her free time, learns the tech, maybe they even let her lead a project or two - suddenly once she graduates, she's experienced broadband tech with a management degree, and that means she's uniquely qualified to work in management-track roles for major internet service providers, with hands-on experience that the other people looking at that job don't have. I know a guy who did this track specifically and now manages a team for an ISP out in Rhode Island.
Your daughter should think about how the subject areas mesh with a business degree. Thankfully, pretty much every subject you can think of has at least one area where companies need someone that understands both the subject matter side of things and the business side of things. Chemistry and business? Pharmecutical companies! Communications and business? Marketing! Electrical technology and business? Power providers, electronics manufacturers, and more! Education and business? Professional training services!
If she doesn't learn a specific subject area she can also learn broad skills. I don't do anything related to Political Science, but I had hundreds of pages of readings a week and wrote a lot of papers. My professional communication is clearer and more effective than my STEM-degree colleagues as a result. Not that you can tell that from my forum posts. Likewise, the methods of technical thinking students learn in programs like Math and Physics translate across a whole host of domains. An old high school teacher, who started his career working for defense contractors, says that they usually hire physicists to lead their research teams because their specific method of analytical thinking works best for leading a team of researchers. Business degrees, in my experience, tend to make students very good at sales and convincing people verbally, but not as good as writing or technical thinking. She can learn these things outside of the classroom as well.
The possibilities are endless, and the beauty of the path she's choosing is that it's so flexible she can make it her own however she wants. It sounds like you've got a great kid on your hands, and I can tell her mom loves her and is doing everything she can to look out for her. I wish you all the luck in the world.
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