Senior Mitchel Lister shares insights and tips on how to build professional experiences while you’re a business student at DePaul.
When you’re a student, work experience is invaluable and gaining it can’t be prioritized enough. Work experience enables you to not only broaden your perspective, but deepen your understanding of what employers are looking for. As a senior in the School of Accountancy & MIS at DePaul, I’ve been fortunate to have an array of different internship experiences throughout my time as a student—six to be exact—from big companies to small, and from remote to in-person. Each of these experiences provided me something uniquely valuable.
Having multiple internships in three years may seem like an absurd amount of experience, but it is what made me stand out during application processes. I remember feeling worried about acquiring a summer internship going into my sophomore year. That first internship ended up creating a momentous domino effect for me to pursue more.
I am expected to graduate in June 2022 with a bachelor of science in management information systems and finance. Leading up to today, I had an uncertain path like many DePaul students. I transferred to DePaul from a community college, which I initially assumed put me at a disadvantage compared to my peers. That assumption was entirely false. DePaul gives students many resources to connect with companies all around the world and to prepare you for professional experiences.
There are many ways to build professional experiences while you’re a student. Looking back on my own journey to professional self-realization, here are some things I did to help me succeed:
- Utilize DePaul’s career resources and courses.
Handshake is a tool that DePaul offers and it’s considered one of the No. 1 ways students find employment. Like LinkedIn, Handshake enables you to apply to positions based on the profile criteria such as major, year and industry. I acquired two of my internships through Handshake, one of those being the internship that is leading me to my full-time position when I graduate.
You should also take advantage of the many career development courses DePaul offers that help tailor your résumé into a masterpiece. In the business college, most notably, there is FIN 250: Career Development & Professional Development or MIS 250: Career Management and Preparedness. These are arguably the most important courses that you can take. They assist you in getting in the head of the employer. My current résumé was influenced from the résumés I created in those classes.
- Network with your professors.
Many of the professors at DePaul have extensive industry experience so don’t be afraid to reach out for advice or a simple conversation. Some professors, like Dr. Delvin Grant, will even go to the extent of having former students give professional advice and job opportunity leads to current students. The opportunities are there, you just have to take the first step.
- Remember that your coursework counts as valuable experience, too.
Many companies would like to hear about what you’ve learned in classes, so make sure you remember those experiences. Whether it was my stock pick project with Professor James Valentine, the Harvard case studies with Professor Robert Gross, or the web design course with Professor Sal Barry, these were important projects and experiences that were all worth sharing. Even a paper you wrote could strike an interest with an interviewer. I wrote a paper for my introduction to business technology class, which was about the uses of blockchain technology for supply chain management, and it was a topic of interest during my interview with my current company.
- Don’t be afraid to be yourself in an interview.
Don’t be afraid to tell the interviewer about your day. No one wants a robot. If you had an amazing weekend in Chicago, why not tell them? Don’t be afraid to smile or laugh. Yes, work should remain a professional environment of productivity, but we are still humans. Looking back on all the internships I’ve had, I credit my getting hired to my ability to build professional relationships.
I currently work at an up-and-coming startup that has grown 250% since I have started here in July of 2021. The company is called Sandbox Banking, and they are an integration-building platform that connects FinTech to banking cores (accounting systems). The internship I applied for was originally a strategy intern position to do market research on competitors, but after the second interview they decided they wanted to bring me onboard their production support team.
That production support internship turned into a part-time role as a production support engineer, which I’m in now as a senior in college. Starting in July I will be a full-time specialist at the company. I like to describe my work environment as family, so when I interview, I want to get to know them and have them get to know me too. Work will be most of your life – so why not make the most of it?
By Mitchel Lister