There are many names that you can call me, but promise-breaker is not one of them (and hopefully the rest are on the more positive side…).  A couple of posts back, I made a promise to be bolder in my networking practices.  This is a promise that I am proud to say I have kept, and to great results!  Let’s start from the beginning.

In the beginning was the word, and the word came from Mom.  She went to a family party where she talked to a cousin who said that her stepdaughter, C, worked for a great company and that I should get in contact with her about possible job opportunities.  I waited a couple of days to email C so that my aunt could make sure it was okay for me to contact her.

When I got the go-ahead I sent her an email saying that I was interested in learning more about where she worked and about the opportunities there.  C sent me a speedy reply that she would be happy to talk to me, but first I should look at the job listings on the company’s site.  She gave me a few departments to focus on because she said that they more frequently hire recent graduates.  The departments that she told me to look at were pretty specialized, ones that you would need a specific education for, say, a business or economics degree.  And let’s face it; unless a company is looking for a post Franco Spain-centric historian or someone with the ability to read (skim?) tons of books in a short period of time… my education doesn’t really point me to a specific department.  This isn’t to say that I didn’t learn anything useful in my years at Scripps.  In those four too-short years I learned a lot more important things than how to analyze numbers or the market, but the things that I did learn don’t really point to a particular career path.

So I took a look around the website at the other job listings and I found one that piqued my curiosity, an admin position.  My history/Hispanic studies major doesn’t really point me towards this job either, but I’ve had a lot of experience doing admin work.  In past summers I’ve worked as a personal assistant and have worked in admin positions at different organizations and businesses.  In other activities I’ve also gained a lot of organization and planning skills that I felt would help me as an admin at the company.  I felt that it would be a great job for me, so I emailed C and told her what I was thinking.  She emailed me back and said that she thought they might be looking for someone with a little more post-graduation experience, but that she would like to get together and talk in person.

We picked a day and I met her for lunch and an informational interview of sorts.  She told me about what it was like working for the company and a little bit about the position.  Then she asked me about my experience in the area of admin work, and I told her about my previous jobs and that I felt I was ready for the responsibilities of the position.  She said that after talking to me and hearing what I had to say that she felt that I could be a good candidate for the position and she would pass my resume on to the appropriate people.

The next day I got a call to set up an interview for the position.  Stay tuned for more.