‘busyness’ as an excuse for not dealing with the job search. As strange as it seems, it’s often easier to deal with the finance exam or the accounting project than the job search, telling everyone, “I’m soooo busy! I have two team projects and an exam this week and there is no way I can deal with my job search now…”
If you’re so busy doing schoolwork that you can’t spare a few measly hours a week for your job search, take a deep breath and drink a diet coke. Then, remind yourself why you are spending $(insert six figures here) to attend business school.
Now, about that job search….
Excuses, Excuses, Excuses…
Tell the truth: What excuses get in the way of your job search?
Check any that apply:
___ I’m too busy with school work
___ I’m too busy with extracurricular activities
___ Too many other responsibilities (kids, family)
___ Don’t know what I want to be when I grow up
___ Haven’t found any jobs I’m interested in applying for
___ I plan to win the lottery and never work a day past business school
So, what’s your excuse? We all have great reasons why we haven’t devoted the time, effort, and energy a job search requires. Personally, my excuses generally revolved around cleanliness (i.e., “Just let me clean my entire apartment from top to bottom – then I’ll start working on my resume.”)
If you’ve got ‘em, it’s time to write ‘em.
Your excuse list:
1._______________________________________________
2._______________________________________________
3._______________________________________________
Remember - there’s no shame in having an excuse – the key is to identify it, admit it, and then let it go.
The MBA Dilemma: What Do I Want to Be When I Grow Up?
“Ninety-eight out of every hundred people working for wages today are in the positions they hold because they lacked the definiteness of decision to plan a definite position…”
Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
Clueless on Campus: It Happens to the Best of Us!
You’d think that with the time, energy, effort, and money we invest in business school that we’d have a really clear idea of what we’d actually like to do with our MBA degree when we graduate. Nonsense! That would be far too easy….
The truth is that some of us enter school with only a vague notion of what “business” really means. In fact, most students enter business school with only a few years of work experience, and some have held this experience in fields far outside the MBA world. For international students who have never worked inside an American company (or an English-speaking one), things can become even murkier. The result: Far too many of us don’t really know what we want to do after graduation and we’re hoping that we’ll just figure it out along the way. Happens to the best of us.
“Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing”
Not having any kind of real answer to the ‘what do I want to be when I grow up?’ question can definitely get in the way of our job search. Since we’re not sure what we’re looking for, many of us cast a very wide net when we arrive on campus – seeking jobs in anything and everything that seems halfway decent. This approach makes us appear inconsistent and unfocused, with our ‘supply chain job today, marketing job tomorrow’ strategy, sending out resumes to any MBA job that comes along.
When we don’t have a ‘main thing,’ a concept initially set forth by the motivational speaker Les Brown above, we get off track, and waste precious time and energy applying to jobs we don’t really want or feel strongly about. By the time we’ve figured out what we want to do, our graduation date has long passed, and we’re frustrated with ourselves for not taking the time to figure out the answer to this question (or at least, the best answer we could come up with at that particular time) when we had the time to act on it. Your new mantra: Less is more. Repeat this anytime you feel the urge to send out your resume to anyone with a heartbeat.
Here’s the question: What is your main thing? What is the one job, the one main thing you’d really like to do after graduation?
What is your main thing?
On paper, we can all agree that the sooner we know what we want to do after graduation – knowing what we want to be when we grow up – the better. But emotionally, it’s a different story. We feel angst or uncertainty about what we really want to do with our hard-won MBA degree. Some of us, when asked, will not give an answer. It’s as if by answering the question, “What do you want to do after graduation?” you’ll be shot dead if you wind up doing something different. Force yourself to try to answer this question – it doesn’t have to be the perfect answer. Just give it a try.
Answer here:
What I really want to do after graduation is ____________________________________.
Keep the Focus on What You Love
The key is to focus on what you really want as soon as you arrive on campus, and target that while remaining flexible to other opportunities. Even better – focus on what you love to do. Anytime you find yourself applying to a job you only feel mildly enthusiastic about, ask yourself,” Why am I applying for this?” If you don’t love it, don’t do it. Now is the time to become the person you want to be and stop applying for jobs that you know, in your heart of hearts, you just don’t care about.
Still not sure?
If you find you’re struggling to find a focus for all of your fantastic talent, then consider following the Getting Focus System:
Step 1:
Stroll over to your campus Career Management Center (the one you’re paying for!) and use it. Any self-respecting career center on campus will offer its students, among other things, a myriad of self-assessment tests. (Many MBA programs offer the highly utilized “Career Leader’ self-assessment tool. If your school does not, consider taking the assessment online at http://www.careerdiscovery.com/.)
On occasion, these assessments can miss the mark and tell you, the budding tycoon, that you’d be better off working in a monastery. But typically, assessments are helpful self-awareness tools designed to give you a sense of where your talents rest – and (in the case of Career Leader) what careers or job functions would make best use of your talents.
One final point: Don’t get sucked in to pursuing a job/career just because you’re good at it. I happen to be good at flossing my teeth, but I don’t think I’d particularly enjoy being a dentist. Keep asking yourself, “What do I enjoy?” and see if the assessment results are consistent with that.
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