Work-Life Balance for a DePaul Alumnus: A Photo Essay

As college students, we will all be new to the world of full-time careers in a few short months or years. If you're going to lead a happy life, you're going to have to play with the balance between work and life. I found someone who has learned from experience the misery that an overly demanding job can induce: my older sister, a DePaul alumnus.



Meet Becky McConnell, 25, is the marketing department’s Local Events Coordinator for the family-owned grocery chain Meijer. After eight stressful years of 50-70 hour workweeks with her previous employer, she was anxious to make the switch to Meijer last February. She’s found that the environment and lifestyle at their St. Charles regional office is much more in tune with her work-life balance priorities. Her workweeks are closer to 40 hours now, not including the events she works.



“The perks that come with the job, like all the events I get to attend and the people I get to meet, make all the planning worth it,” she said. She also attributes her happiness at work to her flexible relationship with her boss, Regional Marketing Director Rita Spaccapaniccia. Here, Becky works a wine signing in one of Meijer’s stores with Rita and Chicago Blackhawks legend Bobby Hull.



Becky lives in suburban Lake in the Hills and works in St. Charles. This means spending about ten extra hours a week in the car commuting to and from work. “Compared to the 30 or so hours I spent in the car at my last job, it seems like a cake walk,” she says. What else helps her pass the time in traffic without developing road rage? She loves listening to music and talk shows on XM radio and her iPod.



Even though her job keeps her very busy during the week (and even some weekends), Becky emphasizes the importance that friends and family have in her life. “I’ve lost a lot of loved ones, so I think the relationships that I have now are even more precious,” she said. Here, she treads through snow with her mother at St. Adalbert’s cemetery in suburban Niles to visit her grandmother’s grave – she would have been 90 on Sunday.



Becky enjoys a bowl full of mushroom ravioli for dinner at Leona’s in the Old Irving neighborhood on Sunday evening. She loves having weekends off to wind down and rejuvenate for the next week of work. Her advice for students getting ready to head into the working world: “Sometimes you have to feel through a couple jobs before you find a good fit.”

Interviewing in the virtual world

How well you do in an interview can determine whether or not you land a job. It’s easy to get nervous, mostly due to the fact that interrogation isn’t exactly the most normal flow of conversation. But if you’re going to make the transition into the career world, you’ve got to know how to play the interview game.

If you feel like your interviewing skills could use some improvement (and I think we all probably have some room to gain), I found a free tutor for you. As a DePaul student, you have free access to Perfect Interview. Perfect Interview is a new web based software company that makes programs for interactive interviewing.

I created an account to give the program a try. It’s actually pretty cool. Once you log in, you answer a series of questions based on what type of interview you want to take. You can make selections for the number of questions, type of questions, and position you’re interviewing for. You can even record yourself with a webcam through the interface.

When the interview starts, a video starts with an interviewer asking you a question. You then either record in video or type in your reply to the question. If you don’t know how to answer it, you can select a button to view a sample answer or a mini coaching session on how you can approach the question. You can even do a partial interview and save it to come back to the next time you log in.

If you want to create an account, here’s the DePaul login page.

Winter Job and Internship Fair

I got an e-mail from Natalie Guerrero, Event Manager for the Career Center. Next month there's going to be a huge Winter Job and Internship Fair. A nice perk about the event is that it's FREE and only open to DePaul students and alumni - which means you'll have a better chance to actually speak and network with the recruiters on site.

Your experience level and major aren’t a pressing matter – there will be company representatives looking for students to fill all kinds of positions.

The fair will take place on Tuesday, February 17 from 11 a.m. – 3 p.m. in the Lincoln Park campus Student Center Room 120. You can pre-register on DePaul’s eRecruiting site under the Calendar section until February 15 or you can register onsite.

The biannual fair turned out a record number of 1,120 students in the fall.

Stay tuned for tips on how to get yourself prepared for a networking event or job fair!

Oh happy day!

I just wanted to wish everyone a happy inauguration day. I hate to admit how ecstatic I was about the gas leak on Jackson this morning... but it meant that I didn't have to go to my first two classes! Now I get to watch the inaugural coverage from home with my roommates, and I couldn't be happier.

Even if the 44th president-elect wasn't your personal choice, I hope you can be consoled by living through a historical moment. It's exciting to be a DePaul student in Chicago while a Chicagoan is taking the most powerful office in the nation. I guarantee this will be a day that we will talk to youths about as we age.

"There is not a Black America and a White America and a Latino America and an Asian America; there's the United States of America." - Barack Obama

No matter how many things are going wrong in our own country and the world at large, I'm taking the day off from pessimism and celebrating a small victory that our generation helped bring to fruition.

*Edit: I also wanted to note that I got the picture above from The New York Times' Facebook page. There is a TON of activity on that page with people posting their thoughts about the day.

Let your altruism shine

If you enjoy the feeling of helping people, you might want to consider a career in human or social services. Some jobs in the social service industry include advisors, counselors, social workers, and human resource assistants in both profit and nonprofit organizations.

As the Baby Boomers age, demands in the industry will continue to grow rapidly. People with honed communication and problem solving skills are ideal candidates for human and social services.

On Wednesday, January 21 DePaul will be hosting a networking event for students considering careers in human and social services. Professionals from the field will be holding discussions about the nature, rewards, and challenges of working in the social service industry.

If it’s a career path you’re pursuing, this is a great networking opportunity to meet professionals already working in the field. If it’s one that you’ve thought about, the event is a great opportunity to get a feel for what life in the human and social service industry is like.

The free event will be held in the Lincoln Park Student Center, Room 120 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. You can register online through Monday on DePaul’s Erecruiting page, or you can register onsite.

We have what now?

So I was doing some digging through search engines to find something interesting in DePaul news, and I came across the Career Center’s YouTube channel. There are only three videos up, the most recent of which is from two months ago. This was slightly disappointing to me because I figured the university had taken more initiative in branching out into web multimedia.

But I guess what was more disappointing was that it took me about 20 minutes of browsing through other material before I came across the page. If I didn’t go through several pages of search results to find it, I never would have known it was there. And there’s some useful content on there so far!

I feel as though the school needs to find a way of letting students know what new tools are made available to us, especially when those tools are free and easily accessible. Maybe we could get a monthly newsletter? Has anyone else had a similar sentiment, or do I need to stop whining?

Anyway, I found this video on the Career Center’s page titled Interview Preparation Tips. I think it’s actually an excellent condensed how-to guide if you’ve got an interview coming up (or to keep in mind for the next time you do). Check it out below:

Before you commit to that major...

Most of us only want to go through college once. The cost alone is a deterrent to return. It can be a daunting task to commit to a major. You might start asking yourself a lot of questions.

Are you going to be able to find a job after graduation? Are you going to be able to afford to live on that job’s salary? Are you going to need special training or certification for that job?

Although the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) can’t answer your questions personally in the ways a career advisor might, it is nonetheless a good source that you can use on your own. The BLS uses your tax dollars, so why not put some of the information to use?

I visited the BLS’ home page (www.bls.gov) myself and was able to find out a lot about the field I want to go into. You can enter any career title or general field into the search bar and the database gives you links to pages describing the nature of the work, earnings, job outlook, related occupations, and more. The data provided on the website compiles information from around the country.

If you want to see what the statistics show and what the outlook is for Illinois in particular, you can visit the Illinois Department of Employment Security’s Labor Market Information (LMI) site (http://lmi.ides.state.il.us/). Just a forewarning that LMI Source is not as easy to search on as is with the BLS; LMI posts their data and reports in document form (typically Excel or Zip files) that you have to work through on your own.

If you're in the job market, it's time to take another look

It has long been myth that the average employer spends only about ten to twenty seconds looking at a resume, but many employer surveys have proved that myth true. With the economy in a fragile state and the growing number of individuals looking for jobs, it would definitely help to make those few seconds count.

As a student, you may not have loads of experience. This makes you even more vulnerable when a potential employer is paging through 200 or so resumes.

If you're getting ready for employment after graduation or an internship while you're still in school, you might want to take another long, hard look at your resume if you haven’t updated it recently. You might even want to have someone else take a long, hard look at it for you. It often helps to have an impartial eye look at what you have to say about yourself.

If you’re looking for help, DePaul’s Career Center now offers a “Resume Drive Thru” every Tuesday and Wednesday between 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. and later in the day between 4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. During those hours, students can bring their resumes in for revision to either the Lincoln Park or Loop campus Career Centers.

If you’re looking to make a resume from scratch, the Career Center can help you get started during the Drive Thru hours as well.

And if you don’t like the idea of working with someone you don’t know, think about asking someone knowledgeable you know (or even just a stickler for grammar) for constructive criticism. A fresh set of eyes might see something you can’t that is hindering you from getting your foot in the door.