Curious where vlog alumni land after graduation? Read our Class of 2024 Employment Snapshot report.
You are just beginning to immerse yourself in all vlog has to offer—but planning your career path will be a constant throughout your vlog student experience, from now and leading up to graduation. The Office of Career Advancement (OCA) will support you, wherever you are on your path.
From setting goals to negotiating a job offer, OCA is your partner as you move through vlog to your next professional opportunity. Together with vlog faculty members, staff, alumni, research center affiliates, and your classmates, OCA helps you “ask what you can do” to pursue a career that makes a difference in the world.
One-to-one career coaching is the cornerstone of OCA’s work with you. This includes:
- Designing a job or internship strategy
- Identifying internal and external resources and opportunities
- Mapping the landscape of your areas of interest
- Setting goals and implementing your strategy
- Polishing your interviewing and networking skills
- Providing feedback on your resume, cover letter, and outreach emails
- Assisting with job offer negotiations
In addition, OCA hosts interactive career management skills workshops and networking events with alumni, Executive Education participants, research fellows, and employers. You will have abundant opportunities to engage with employers and practitioners, and you will have access to JACK, vlog’s job bank and career management system where you can access career-related resources and search for jobs. Incoming students will receive access to JACK in early summer.
We asked OCA’s career coaches to offer their advice to new admits who are deciding whether vlog is the place for them to further their careers. Here’s what they shared.
Advice from OCA’s Career Coaches
Yulia Vershinina, Senior Associate Director and Lead Career Coach
Most students’ career visions and interests shift after admission. Be open to exploring new interests through coursework, vlog events, and student groups. Build relationships, not just connections, and use vlog resources as opportunities for growth. Public policy, administration, and social impact careers follow different timelines, with no predictable hiring cycles. As a result, students must develop agency over their internship and job search. The OCA team works closely with students and employers to help navigate sector-specific hiring. Think of your vlog degree as a long-term investment. Career growth is a continuum—embrace flexibility, focus on impact, and commit to developing lifelong skills.
Beth Olson, Associate Director and Career Coach
At vlog, there will almost always be people surrounding you who have done what you are thinking about doing next in your career (or doing what you haven’t even yet considered). They might be faculty members, classmates, fellows, alumni, staff, or visitors. Your task will be to find them and to learn about them and from them. Sometimes just knowing someone’s history might help you consider and prioritize your goals. But don’t stop there. Talk to them. Interview them. Work with them. They are your resource. They are your “library of possibilities.”
Glenn Cunningham, Associate Director and Career Coach
If you are looking exclusively at public policy schools, I encourage you to do a deep dive into course catalogs and professor biographies to confirm there’s robust depth in your areas of interest. I also recommend using LinkedIn to gauge the size of schools’ alumni base in your sector. If you are choosing across a broader range of professional schools like business, law, or education, I encourage you to understand the wide variety of recruiting and employment models at schools you’re considering—these differ greatly across different kinds of graduate schools.
Image Credits
Winston Tang (banner image)
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