Stage Directions: So, you’ve spent all of this time building a stellar academic management career at your institution of choice, but now it’s all about to go out of the window because graduation (and the daunting prospect of post-graduate employment) looms. Launching a professional management career can feel like a herculean task. There are so many questions to be addressed. Do I pursue an internship? How soon should I try to get my Equity card? How long can I defer these loans that I have to pay back? Fear not, I consulted three recent graduates to find out how they made the successful transition from students to professional managers.
2 comments:
I'm a freshman, and prospect of getting summer internships is even a rough bridge to gap. It seems so difficult sometimes to throw yourself out there and apply to everything. It's also scary to consider how many other people there are out there applying for these select jobs. It makes me happy to see stage managers doing what they love and being successful right out of college, and I hope that I'll also be afforded the opportunity to do what I want fairly soon out of college. It seems as though the best route is to look for fellowships, build connections working there, and then find a "true" position in a company not through a fellowship or apprenticeship. It seems a tad frustrating to have to go through the fellowship stage of one's career, but as this article attests (in two of the cases at least) it seems absolutely worth it. And, really, getting a job in stage management comes down to having enough experience, and just having the right luck to be in the right place at the right time and having old fashioned person to person connections and references. I don't close myself off to any experiences because I want to build as many connections as possible and know as much as I can before I too find myself a senior and applying for every single entry level position I can find.
Tayneshia!
But this article does make some very good points. What stuck out to me most was the obstacle of being a young manager and how to overcome that initial hurdle. The importance of asking questions and smiling cannot be stated enough. It's important that everyone around you feels like you are working together and not that you are trying to control them, which they may take as an even greater affront due to youth and age difference. That first impression is still the most important, and if you go in smiling and curious and ready to work, that goes a long way to overcome youth.
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