9 UNC CHARLOTTE | SOPHOMORE YEAR Branding Yourself BY CAITLIN CAREY, NEW STUDENT AND FAMILY SERVICES industry information. This website can generate potential employment opportunities and help you make connections with professionals. Review your Facebook, Instagram or other social media accounts. Look through photos and adjust privacy settings. If you don’t want your future employer seeing something, then it’s better to remove it. WRITE A RESUME AND COVER LETTER A resume summarizes your educational credentials, work/volunteer experience, skills and extracurricular activities. A resume is often the first impression that an employer has of you. You want to make sure it make the strongest statement about your assets and your value to a company or graduate school. It must reflect “you.” A cover letter often tells an employer or graduate school about what you can do, why you are interested and why you feel qualified for a career or a certain educational path. A well-planned cover letter is just as important as a resume and typically accommodates the resume. PURCHASE PROFESSIONAL ATTIRE Dress to impress. Always consider your interactions with future employers and contemplate their perspective. Who would they rather see: a future employee dressed for the role or a students in casual attire? CREATE AN ELEVATOR SPEECH When you attend a career fair, you only have about five minutes to convince recruiters to contact you for an interview. The better prepared you are for this initial conversation the better. Preparing a statement about yourself can help break the ice and lead the conversation into a good direction. How do you create a consistent and professional image that effectively showcases who you are? How do you communicate your value to employers and graduate schools? The simplest answer: branding yourself, or how you communicate your career readiness through your oral and written communication as well as professionalism. Branding yourself during your sophomore year of college sets you up for success. During freshman year, you may still be deciding on a major. As a sophomore, however, you have somewhat of a path you are leaning towards. Now is the time to start setting up for that career or admission to graduate school. Your Main Goals for Branding Yourself Include: MAXIMIZE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS Create a profile on LinkedIn, a professional networking site that hosts a digital copy of your resume and allows you to stay up-to-date with
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