Message for Undergraduates

We at the SMU Career Centre are dedicated to partnering and journeying with you in achieving your career success through these challenging times.

While many of you will be embarking on your first internship this summer, others will be receiving good news of a full-time employment offer upon successful conclusion of the same. Although more than half of a year’s graduates typically secure a permanent job offer at the end of their penultimate year’s internships, the depressed marketplace brought on by COVID-19 is experiencing a sharp fall in internship and full-time opportunities posted for undergraduates. The prevailing hiring landscape ups the ante on your employability preparation in 2021. Kickstart this investment by meeting your coach to align career aspirations and academic majors, fine-tune your target job and industry, and have your resume writing and interviewing skills critiqued with the aim of securing choice roles, especially in a leaner job market. Our latest profiling instrument, CliftonStrengths, lets you discover how best to tap on your top 10 of 34 themes to achieve professional and personal success.

Besides attending our employability clinics with small group interaction enduing participants with perspectives and critical insights from their peers, a series of seven career readiness workshops has also been specially curated to enhance your depth and reach of your job search strategies. The facilitators, as industry experts, will address higher-level strategies to be deployed during your job search and cultivate a mindset shift to unconventional possibilities such as starting your own business, becoming a freelancer and taking a gap year to travel or volunteer for a worthy cause.

Additionally, be on the lookout for our announcements alerting you to a myriad of employer engagements. Better yet, actively participate in the more than 100 career talks organised each term and our biannual career fairs, where over 120 employers attend in hopes of securing interns for the coming internship season, as well as final-year undergraduates for their full-time roles.

Above all, stay motivated, positive and tenacious as you make headway in your career choices during this brighter New Year.