If you are in your last two years of your undergraduate degree, you need to be thinking about your electives. They can be easy-A type classes (which is great if you want to raise your GPA), but did you know you can utilize these requirements to make yourself a more marketable commodity?
These are some tips and things to consider that I have learned along the (long, long) way to obtaining my degree. I think fellow liberal arts, humanities and social science students will find this most helpful, because it is an especially rough job market for us. We have lots of generalized skills and lots of competition, so any kind of small advantage that can put us ahead of the pack is helpful. Also we have the most access to cross-listed and interdisciplinary electives. Student in the hard sciences are usually not required to take any electives outside their field. However, I think any major in any college would find these tips applicable to their success.
Perhaps you have already thought about these tips and they seem like common sense. Now that I am completing my last semester and reflecting on my education though, I realize that no one in my undergrad career ever explicitly communicated these thing to me. Some students graduate without ever considering all the ways they could have made their undergraduate education more effective. So hopefully, I will reach some of the people who haven't put too much thought into how to make their electives work for them in the long run.
Professional Certifications and Job Experience - There are some electives that can give you the minimum requirements for a certain job just by taking the class. This means you get to kill 2 birds with one stone by getting job training while still earning school credit. For example, there is an upper-level elective course in my criminal justice department on Crime Scene Investigation. It is a guaranteed foot-in-the-door and the only prerequisite to getting an internship in the sheriff's department as a CSI tech intern. The way I understand it, many CSI departments differ on their minimum requirements to obtain employment, so perhaps this could be your foot-in-the door for a full-time job in your city's CSI. Look at the course syllabuses and scour the course descriptions, which will usually tell you if you stand to gain any credentials and such from the course.
Other Specialized Skills or Publication - Every elective imparts you with skills and knowledge, but it is a good idea to take classes that will give you a unique skill set (other than writing and thinking) that is in demand or that you can really market to future employers. For example I have taken a class that required me to make a mini-documentary, so now I know how to use a couple different movie-making programs and have a documentary under my belt. Where are those things going? Straight on my resume. Those are some unique things that not everyone can do. Any kind of class that lets you have a published or artistic work under your belt or will teach you specialized software will be making the most out of your tuition. I am taking an introductory GIS class right now which is another specialized skill.
But one of those classes wouldn't fit in my degree plan, or I am majoring in something totally different!
Auditing a Class - Say one of these classes doesn't fit into your degree plan or you can't/don't want to pay all of the tuition for a class that you think would be beneficial--You can consider auditing the course. I am doing doing this right now for a GIS class. The pros: for a very small fee ($10 at my university) and the instructor's approval, you can take a course and gain the skills. Since you aren't being graded there is less stress than if you were taking it for credit and you may get to pick and choose with the professor which parts of the class you want to participate in. Either way, no grade means more flexibility if more important assignments come up.The cons: you do not get any official credit or a grade to show for your work. Instead, you can probably ask your prof for a letter of recommendation, meaning you will have to demonstrate some competence if you want them to vouch for you). Also, space in the course might be limited if it's popular, if there are only a certain number of work stations, or if the instructor doesn't want to waste their time with a student that might be less likely to show up and participate.
Graduate Cross-listed Courses - I took a philosophy of law class last semester. It looked very challenging, interesting, and I had heard good things about the professor. I had been considering maybe going on to do a law degree, so it seemed like a good option. First day of class, I walked out feeling overwhelmed by the intensity and difficulty I naively didn't realize came with an advanced philosophy class! Everything ended up okay in the end though. Why? 1) I got a tiny taste of the thinking and ideas that are required in the study of law and even got to form my own arguments in a death penalty case, which is what I had hoped to gain. 2) It served as a brain boot camp. Any kind of intense philosophical or heavily theoretical course will likely assist you in your other studies because most of the ideas are trans-disciplinary and will help you think about your studies and topics of interest from different perspectives. This is super helpful if your are writing some kind mini-thesis, final paper, or just an analytically paper because you'll be able to approach it from different perspectives. Plus being able to think at a higher level is always rewarding, and if you want to continue to a graduate program, these theories may assist you in the development of your thesis. 3) Many graduate philosophy students were taking the class as well, so I was able to overhear how their studies were going, see what more was expected of them as opposed to the undergraduate requirements, and also see what taking a graduate level course would be like. Those people are all resources I can go to now if I want to hear more about what graduate school entails.
Service-learning, Mini-Thesis Components and Internship Classes - At my university the honors program has students do a graduation project of sorts that is like a mini-thesis. Some majors require an internship class as part of the degree. Otherwise, most students are not required to do in-depth research or graduate level thinking and projects. I recommend snatching up as many of these types of opportunities as possible. 1) In every one of these situations you will get to network with people in a field/industry you might want to go into. That means they could potentially employ you, you'll learn what that field entails on a day-to-day basis and about related fields you might like better, and connect with mentors 2) It's like job experience... but you don't get paid and you don't have to keep in contact if you totally dislike the work. Either way, your resume will show work experience (important if you have never worked, obviously) and potential employers will see that you gained the confidence of this other business, so you can't be all that bad. 3) If your service-learning or internship requires a final paper, write the hell out of that paper. If you write a complex final paper you could present it at a student conference or send it to be published (the material could be used for a shorter article in the school paper or other publication). This shows you have initiative and having your work published is prestigious. At the very least, if anyone asks for a sample of your writing, you'll have something very impressive and in-depth to give them. 4) If you go on to graduate school you will have something to show your potential faculty how well you can think and write. More importantly you are showing that you can apply your theoretical studies to real world experiences. This is especially important if you want to go into an applied program or want to apply your studies to the "real world" later on.
The coolest thing about being a liberal arts major is that we have the flexibility to study things that interest us, and we get to take classes for the hell of it, not because they are strictly required. All I'm saying is, make sure you don't completely squander that freedom without realizing that you could be getting more bang for your buck by providing you with skills, intellectual challenges, articles, publications, work experience, and quality samples of your work. Us liberal arts majors have to employ a good amount of entrepreneurship in finding jobs that fit us and selling ourselves, so make sure you are already setting yourself up for success before you graduate.
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