Sciences. And prior to taking this job about six years ago, I worked in a public policy school for about seven years and specifically focused on government public policy types of jobs. So happy to be here. So a couple of little, I don't know, caveats disclaimers before we jump in and get started. One is that I am our public service careers coach. So if you are debating about government, not super sure. We can try and answer some other questions about related careers. We'll cover that today. And number two is that this is specifically about US government careers. So if you are thinking about working for another country's government, or if you are an international student, most US government jobs are only open to US citizens. So just wanted to put that out there and not waste anybody's time if you are not a citizen, there's a small handful of jobs open to you and the government, but not very many. So just wanted to put that out there before we got started. So today we are going to talk about a few different things. One is just the landscape. What should you consider? What options are out there? Different types of jobs and of course, lots of tools and resources to explore them. There is a lot of information that we could cover in a workshop like this. And there's just no away that we could cover all of it. So please know that this is not exhaustive, we'll give you some resources to continue looking at things. But yeah, this is not, certainly not all there is to know. Just an inspirational quote here, I think a lot of times people get intimidated about government jobs, worried that maybe there are really competitive or that how can I possibly have a chance? So I'm just a quote nerd, so I figured I'd throw that in. But I do want to give you a little bit of stats and kind of background about careers in government. So there are 2.8 million employees and the federal government. So that doesn't even include state and local government officials. So even more when you take that into consideration, we won't talk too much about local government today because it's much more similar to other types of jobs search processes, whereas federal is a little bit more unique. So we'll focus on mostly that today. And I put these stats in here just to give you a sense of what the the forecast is, so to speak, for government jobs. One is, I think a lot of people don't know that there's a lot of government jobs outside of DC. So certainly DC is a great place to be, especially depending on what you're looking to do. But I feel like I don't really want to live in DC. That doesn't mean that you can't work in government. So we can talk more about that. But really this is the big opportunity I see for you all is that 28% of federal employees are eligible to retire in the next five years. So that means there's going to be a lot of vacancies coming up within depending on what class year you are with anything. A few years after your graduation, there will be a lot of vacancies and the federal government. And there's an increased push to have younger folks working in federal government. So if you get any of my newsletters, you saw that I linked an article in there about that. But less than 7% of federal employees are under the age of 30 and they're looking to change that. So that is something where the current administration is trying to get more young people involved in government. So opportunity is abundant, I think, for you all about to graduate in the coming years. Okay, so a few different factors to consider. We'll go through each of these a little bit more specifically. These are just kind of shifting gears from what's the climate, what opportunities are there in government coming up? This is more, okay. I'm intrigued. What should I think about when I'm considering a career in government? So first is the setting or context that you'd be working in. So you can certainly work for the legislator. I think that that is probably one of the more commonly known or recognize, thought of careers, working for the legislature. But you can also work for a specific government agency, which is kind of like a fancy way of saying a department or office, kind of within government. Non-profits also often work alongside government or appeal to government for certain changes. So that's not a job necessarily in government, but can be very closely-related. Also think tanks kind of similar working adjacent to government, but not necessarily being a federal employee. Think tanks for those of you who haven't heard that term before, are essentially research agencies that think about the best ways to develop policy. So they do a lot of research to inform maybe what a proposed law or bill look like or what programs might be effective to reach goals of a certain administration. So if you're into research, think tanks could be a good option for you. We'll talk more about those. You can work for a union, whether that's, you know, if you're in the ILR school, labor unions, but there's lots of different types of unions you might work with. And consulting as another area where you can work, again, adjacent to government, where you might be helping them run things more smoothly, more operational, consulting, and in that regard. So lots of differing settings that you could do government related work in. But one of the big things I'd encourage you to think about is what issue or area of social change are you passionate about? So you could say, say you're passionate about criminal justice reform. You could address that passion in pretty much any of these settings are contexts. So those are related to one another but can be somewhat independent. I think for some people, they're more driven by the issue or topic that they're passionate about. And others have a certain context in mind and that's okay, just food for thought, things to consider. And last, I want to mention there's a few different types of skills or responsibilities that you might be using in your government career. So you could be analyzing any policy and making decisions about what's going to be effective. Research, kind of similar, related but also different. We'll talk more about these, but advocacy and lobbying is more about appealing for a certain change to be made. That's often where you'll see non-profits come into the equation. Government affairs. We'll talk about what that looks like working on behalf of a company and kind of liaising with the government, collaborating with them. You could be writing, doing journalism, mission work. There's lots of different ways that you can use your skill set depending on what you're good at to contribute to the public service or the greater good through government work. I'm going to move along, but I also want to, I have my chat window up. So if you have questions, feel free to interject. Because another factor you'll want to consider is your political affiliation. So we get a lot of questions about this. Or should I take whatever government job is potentially available to me? Or what if I live in a place where my political affiliation is different than my local representative, lot of questions about that. So we do really encourage you to work in alignment with your political beliefs. Whether that as your official declared a party or just kind of like issues and values that you work on. You. I think sometimes people think, Oh, I'll get some like insider knowledge about how the other side works and then I'll bring that over. But really what it tends to look like on a resume is lack of commitment or lack of certainty. It's not viewed positively. But if you're into bipartisan politics, maybe that's frustrating for you, but just something you'll want to know or maybe you'd want to work in a different setting. This is less relevant if you work for a government agency. Or I guess I'm trying to describe what I've what I've written here. If you're working in the legislature, this is going to be really important. Not all settings is as crucial, but essentially it boils down to once you've worked for one party, it probably wouldn't hired by the other. Jen, did you want to add something? I was going to say we have a question in the chat. What advice do you have for independents or moderates? And in this case, I think it is, you know, there are certainly some independents that are out there. And that would obviously be a great place to look. If you are thinking about going into more of the legislative side of things, think about working for committees. There are some committee appointments. So it could be the Judiciary Committee. Or Ways and Means, something along those lines where those tend to be a little bit more bipartisan. You can work for the committee rather than working for a representative or a member. It will also find in think tanks, some, some independent or moderate kind of think tanks. Namely the Bipartisan Policy Center is a really great one. And certainly if you're independent or a moderate than working in an agency would be a really great way to go because most of the time the agencies are going to be, they're not, they don't follow politics nearly as much. And most of government employees are going to be career people. They're not necessarily going to be political appointees except at the very, very top portion. But clarification. Thanks. Okay. And I'm actually going to pass the mic over to Jen and now she's gonna take us through the next couple of slides. So I wanted to cover, I know I get a lot of questions from students about what are different options in terms and what' what and what kind of opportunities are there. So I first wanted to cover political consulting. And so this is often a communications company, non-profit, but you're working for many different clients, not just working for one particular client on whatever it is they need. So it could be helping to market, helping with a really difficult situation that they might have negative press over. And so you have to help them to consult to say how are we going to fix this particular thing. And so you're assigned to essentially to a portfolio. Sometimes it's based upon topic, but not always. It can just be that you have a portfolio of different places. And so then what happens is you work typically with those individuals. This is a really hard place to enter into because almost always people who are in political consulting have worked on the Hill themselves and they require a certain level of experience in order to get there. So if this is something that you're really interested in, I highly recommend that you do an internship or have a job on the Hill or within a legislature. Legislature first, so that you can get the experience. You start to make a lot of the connections that are going to be necessary in order to advocate on behalf of the companies or nonprofits that you want. And there are several places that you can look, some places do offer internships again, knowing that you might have already worked on the Hill as an intern, but SDK and Knickerbocker is a really big one. And you can find a Parkside Group, J Strategies. And all of these links are going to be available to you. We'll send you this PowerPoint afterwards. And there is also the American Association of Political Consultants where you can find registered people from across the board for any company. So I talked a little bit about the Hill. And so that definitely is incorporative of the House and the Senate. And a really great place to get started if it's something that you're interested in going into government. Again, if you're thinking of anything that's going to be lobbying, political consulting, Government Affairs. This is a requirement for you in some way, shape, or form. It's also a really great place to get started as a student because internships abound, which is really nice. So and everybody has a local constituency area up or you're going to have a member of Congress, and you're going to have two senators that are going to represent your state. And again, it is important here to go based upon your own political beliefs. So if you live in a state where all of the people that represent you are not within your political beliefs, then you'll want to go and try to find somebody who does fall within some of the political beliefs that you have. Or if you have an issue area, you can look by issue area and find people who support that issue area or work on that specific committee. But most, most politicians do have a preference for people who are constituents of their local area or have experience with that particular area. Because a lot of times when constituents do come in and they talk about how the stoplights or we need to change this policy or this thing is not working within my area. It's always great to say, Oh, yeah, I know what you're talking about in this particular area of this town. And so this is always a really nice place to start. And for our early career students. So if you're a first year student or a sophomore. The DC based positions are going to be a little bit more competitive, but hometown positions are usually going to be an easier place to start. So most, most members of Congress are going to have at least one office within their constituents district, if not multiple offices. So that's a nice place to start. And even senators are going to have offices throughout the state. So for example, in New York State, there's offices, of course, in New York City, in Albany, but also in places like Buffalo, where it might be a little bit closer to home. And of course think tanks. So this is another great place to get in terms of internships and a really nice place to get started with lots and lots of issue areas that are available across the board. And again, based upon political beliefs and thoughts. Some of them, some think tanks are bipartisan. So Bipartisan Policy Center is certainly one of the best places to go bipartisan. But many of them do have political leanings. And again, it's, it's helpful to be able to look here and on. At each one of the think tanks, there are issue areas or topics that you are going to find. And the important to note here is that there are experts, are subject matter experts. They're hired most the time. They have long careers. They might have a PhD or they might have worked in government and now have gone over onto the private side and are doing independent research. So for example, Ben Bernanke, he was the Treasury Secretary for awhile, and so now he's working at a think tank. So what's important to note here is that you do have the opportunity to be doing research or you can be working more on the staff side. If you are going towards the research side, this is essentially think about it in relation to if you are a research assistant for a professor, this is not an opportunity for you to be able to conduct your own research. And we actually just host a panel last week where we had a couple people who had worked at think tanks. And one of the pieces of advice that they gave was about staying humble when you're working in a think tank and even know you might have really big interests in a particular area that you're still a student. You're not an expert in this area in comparison to where other people are. So you're doing the research, the background research on behalf of somebody else. You are not driving that research yourself. And in addition, there are just positions that are available. So if you're interested in some of the adjacent kind of positions of maybe you like working at a think tank or a political organization, but that's not the kind of work that you want to do. You can also find work that may be related to communications, media, social media, human resources. You can find finance positions or operations, event planning, all kinds of positions. And there's definitely things that you can look at. And one of the resources that we'll be getting later has a really nice way for you to be able to do searches. And UPenn has a think tank by category. So if you're interested, say for example, in environmental policy, you'd be able to find those resources there. And typically these internships, you'll find that the applications vary for internships usually are looking around this time of the year between January and March to be applying. If you're applying for full-time jobs, those are what we call just-in-time. Which means that you start most of the time searching for somebody when somebody has left and a lot of times people are leaving to go to further schooling. And so a lot of times those positions open in the summer. And that you also want to talk a little bit about somewhat related, not technically think tanks like GAO or Congressional Research Service. Yeah, absolutely. So if you are interested in working for a think tank, but still wanting to be working for the government. There's two really great organizations that are notable. One is the Congressional Research Service. So this is where essentially all of the background on policies and data analytics. Anytime that like, for example, if this bill was or a similar bill was being tried to be passed at a certain point in time in the past, then you are looking up and finding all of that information. So if you want to find how many people were admitted to the emergency room because an emergency room bill. That's the kind of background research that you might be doing and providing that to members of Congress so that they can be really making informed decisions. GAO is the Government Accountability Office. So a lot of times they're doing inspections and background research on what is happening within government and making sure that we are acting ethically in that instance. So lots of research positions are also available. And a lot of times you're going to hear some of these definitions that are thrown out and around. Sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly. But we wanted the chance to be able to clarify all of these for you. So lobbying is essentially working on behalf of a client or a number of clients. And again, you do need DC or Hill experience first before going into this area. So that's a great place to start. But usually it's on the behalf of several clients. And you're going to have your finger in a lot of different pots that you see. And typically at a non-profit union, or it could be a member association. So for example, the American Medical Association works on behalf of doctors. And it's a pretty popular one most people have heard of. And so what happens with them is that you're advocating on behalf of a specific population. So it may be the like the American Red Cross as an advocacy organization in order to advocate for emergency relief funds, emergency management, but also health care. Think of being able to pass bills about who can give blood and who can't. So things that are going to be pertinent to that operation of that particular organization and that organization alone. And then government affairs. This is a similar kind of thing to advocacy, but it's usually on behalf of a private company. So most big companies are going to have a policy arm. Walmart, Amazon, Google. I think of non-tech companies that would also have them. A lot of retail spaces would have something. Or like a Lowe's or Home Depot. I'm trying to think of brands that would also habit. Viacom, CBS would have somebody who just government affairs because all companies are regulated by government policies. And again, when things, when they're trying to put things out. So for example, if it's Viacom, CBS and they're putting something out on television, that's all regulated by the FCC, the Federal Communications Committee. I think as I say that out loud. But that is going to be an important portion where if there's a policy on the table or even if they want to advocate, have a policy change on behalf of the company. So knowing sort of which job to search for is a really important component here too. But I want to kinda break down through these different levels. Jen and I are going to kind of tag team this a little bit. So there's a lot of information on this slide, but there's lots of different federal jobs. So we wanted to give you a sense of the layout, what the options are. So the first category here is targeted programs. These are things for specific populations. So either you're a current student where you'd be looking at pathways, internships. You might be looking at position specifically labeled for recent graduates or the Presidential Management Fellows. If any of you are graduate students, that is another competitive program, but something to keep in mind if you're interested in working in government, the timeline for these is going to be widely varied. But for the recent graduates program, you can apply up to nine months before graduation. So if you're a senior, you'll probably want to start looking at the recent grad postings since you're pretty close to being ready to give out the door, but it feels that way or not. So the recent grads program will be the place for you to look. Partially. The reason we encourage the Pathways internships and the recent grads program because they have the possibility for what we call conversion. So that is when at the end of your position, if you have satisfactory performance in a Pathways Internship, then you'll automatically get converted to a full-time employee without having to reapply and re-compete with a pool of candidates. The recent graduates program is more of a way to tag entry-level positions that are going to be a little bit easier to get for those who don't have experience yet. The Presidential Management Fellows, that applications are usually only open for two weeks in late September. So that's something where you're going to want to do a lot of pre research. I thought something you're interested in. You're prepared a short window where the application is open. I think most of what I wanted to did you want to add anything else felt this category again? Competitive civil service. You'll see a lot of times at the top of a job posting. And we'll show you a USA jobs in a moment. That's where most federal jobs are posted. You'll see service. Competitive is the label that that is given. That doesn't necessarily mean that the job is super competitive. You won't see any labeled, I don't know, easy to get or sleeping. They they really use that term to say. It's open to the public. It's not a position where you need to already be a federal employee in order to apply. So sometimes it's good to just get your foot in the door with a position that's close to what you'd like to do because then there's a lot of internal postings that you're eligible to apply for, but these competitive positions that you see are open to anyone to apply. So that's why they call them that. It's a little bit confusing, but hopefully that helps explain. So that's going to be the bulk of them. But there's also excepted service jobs which are not on USA jobs. They're the exception to the rule where these are going to usually be posted on their own separate department websites. And they wouldn't be counted as years of service for the federal government because they're in these specific departments. So I'll let Jen talk a little bit more about these specific areas. She has a little more experience with these. Yes. So for many of these roles, you you are not applying on USA Jobs. You would be applying via a separate site for things that are intelligence related. You can probably guess why they don't want things on USA jobs is because they want to be able to have high levels of security for people who are applying into those roles. And if you are applying into a top Intelligence for lead it positions, it is really important that the CIA will actually tell, you, shouldn't be telling people that you're applying for CIA-based roles. And usually those kinds of intelligence roles are going to require a security clearance, which is going to be at least nine months in the making. So for many of these roles, it's going to be anywhere between nine to 12 or even sometimes even longer. I think the Office of the Director of National Intelligence or the Defense Intelligence Agency can be even longer than that, 18 months to two years in advance of some of the positions being posted because they do require that you're going to have a security clearance. You also can go through and check some places on the Department of Justice. I often find it's very confusing to look through the Department of Justice website because you go and look at the careers page, it will tell you, Oh, there's some internships. But as you delve in deeper to each one of the different agencies, look at some of the things on each one of the different pages for the Department of Justice. So it could be, you know, like the Office of Legislative Affairs is an example. So this would be there would be internships posted on their specific portion of the website of the Department of Justice. So making sure that you're being relatively thorough for some of these excepted service positions. Always if you're really interested in working for a particular organization, checking their page, their website, in addition to USA Jobs. And then of course, the legislative branch and the White House. So the legislative branch is almost always via the House, the Senate applying. The legislative branches, the House and the Senate both do have a resume banks, where you can drop your resume in. And I knew at least through Arts and Sciences, there's we send out a weekly bulletin that gets sent out from the House and the Senate. And so you can also sign up for those e-mail listservs if you want to know about job openings in your area. The White House, of course, can be very competitive to get into, but internships are available that you can apply for both through the White House very specifically. And you can work for the Office of the President, the Vice President, the First Ladies second or is it the second gentlemen? Is that right? Yeah. And so applying for each one of their offices. But if you're applying towards the executive offices of the precedence, which are different from White House positions. Then you'd be applying via USA Jobs. Did I cover everything? Yes, I think you did. That was very thorough, so thank you. Let me get us onto our next slide. And the CIA and FBI are such nuanced, very competitive roles that if you're interested in those, come meet with us. We could probably do a whole presentation about those. All right. So I did make allusion to this in the event description for this program, but wanted to tell you a little bit more about the general schedule, which you might be saying. What even is that? What does that mean? What is a general schedule? So this is really what they often abbreviate to the GS scale or GS levels. These are different salary bands, essentially different rates of pay that you can get. So we don't need to walk through every single you know. What's the word I'm looking for a salary point, I think on this chart, but you'll see this term locality pay is here. So what that means is the salary gets adjusted depending on where you are located or where you're living. So you'll see the DC salaries are naturally a little bit higher than the base salary. You can get all the different information on this. If you're looking to live in a certain city of what the locality pay would be for that specific place. Basically adjusted for cost of living. That most of you are going to be looking at these lower skill levels. You'll notice that they're all odd numbers because you enter the DS skill at odd numbers. And then as you get promotions and move up internally, you'll, you'll go through the 10 different steps within each level. You kinda get those natural promotions as you've been there longer and longer. But you also then will move up to the complete next level. So after being in 5 for X amount of time, going through all those ten steps, then you'll go to 6, but you would never enter at 6. So if you're wondering as you're looking on, on USA jobs, why am I only seeing certain numbers? That's why. So there are some definitions on the website about what honors is defined as. It's usually a certain GPA. There's lots of different ways that you can meet that qualification. But many of you would probably also qualify for, for honors depending on how you've been doing since being at Cornell. But you're obviously all very bright to get in here. So you might qualify for, for that GS. I guess the last thing I wanted to say about this pay scale is one, that the promotions come a little bit more naturally than in the corporate environment. So you are typically earning those so long as you have good performance and you've been there for the required amount of time. You tend to get that increase in pay. Whereas with private companies, you might be having to compete or earn those increases a little bit more. Whereas that's not really the case in government. So not to say that you've got to like slack off or anything, but I think when people are worried about oh, my entry level pay isn't as high as my friend who was working in finance or something like that. Your entry level pay is probably not going to be as much, but the promotions and lateral raises that come along as you continue working in government tend to start to even those things out a little bit as you go. Okay? So my application tips we wanted to share with the agenda and I have kind of alluded to some of these throughout, but we wanted to name them specifically. The first one is knowing your timeline. Jen explained just-in-time vacancies earlier. Essentially, that means, unlike, again, a large, say, consulting firm who knows they need 20 entry-level analysts pretty much every year and they're going to apply in and hire a big pool. That's usually not the case in government. They're only going to post an opening when someone is leaving their, their role. Security clearance can also impact your timeline like Jen was mentioning earlier. So be aware of what the expectations are and we'll, we'll talk about that a little bit more as well. You can look for clues about timeline in the USA jobs posting. So for example, usually you would be expected to start shortly after the closing date of the posting. Or if you're unsure about that, you can always reach out to the person who's listed on the pushing and contact them. They don't always line up with semesters. I think sometimes when people are looking for internships that vary in the semester frame of mind. And, and that's not always the case with government intervention. Gendered. You want to say anything else about timeline clearance, anything without utilizing your networks. We will show you this website Leadership Connect in a few minutes, but really harnessing the power of the network as well as websites and we'll see Leadership Connect, to try and understand more about the place you're applying to and honestly get yourself to the top of the pile. These can be competitive positions depending on where you're applying to both of the department and the physical location as Jen was mentioning earlier. So really using networking as a tool to at least make sure that your resume gets looked at or maybe get you an interview. The rest is up to you, of course, after that, but it can it can certainly help you get your name closer to the top of the list. Understanding security clearance. I've linked a couple of things here for you to help judge whether you will pass. But they will ask for every place you've ever lived. So keep track of your off-campus addresses, keep track of, you know, even short-term little summer jobs that you have. Jobs with rigorous security ignorance are going to ask for pretty much what's going to feel like your whole life story, so be prepared to provide a lot of information. Sometimes people can start collecting that as they go. It's definitely better to be honest than lie and be found out later. That's going to be much worse. I think the the key here, there's a marijuana update that I linked, particularly because very recently there was some change or shift and guidance about lenient see with marijuana use. Certainly not repeated use, but I think a lot of times people would would get worried. Oh, I I used marijuana once or twice, is that gonna rule me out of these more competitive clearance jobs. And in the past, the answer may have been yes. There's not necessarily anything in this new update saying go ahead. But it's it's allowing for a little bit more leniency and leaving it up to interpretation of the individual agencies that are hiring. So I guess I'd say there's wiggle room, but yeah, I certainly still wouldn't encourage use regardless of local laws. It's still illegal federally. Right? Okay. So we also encourage you to create jobs search alerts. So this is essentially a notification that you can set up on USA jobs or other sites that you're using to make sure that you get an email about new openings. This is a really helpful way to make sure that you don't miss jobs that have short windows of application period. Some jobs actually close once they reach a certain number of applications. So there's not a closing date on the posting, but they can only review so many. So sometimes I'll disclose at after X number of apps. Another tip is to search using job series numbers. There's a couple of links here that will be helpful for you. But essentially a job series is a cluster of similar occupations. So you might look at a bunch of HR related roles or research related roles, technology. There's lots of different job series, but those can sometimes be helpful when the keyword search of USA jobs isn't really giving you what you're looking for. Sometimes job series can be good way to find something a little more accurate. And we mentioned this before. The foot in the door strategy of you will be able to apply for more positions once you are a government employee, will get more postings. So not saying take a job you hate, but you might just want to take something that seems good, maybe not great, but it'll get you in the door and open up more opportunities for you in the future, both in terms of postings and certainly that networking piece as well. Creating your federal resume is really important. There's lot of detail involved. Usually. They are your level like two to five pages potentially. They are not a typical one-page resume like you would submit in a corporate environment. So you can include lots of details about the responsibilities you had. Sometimes postings will ask about specialized experience and you'll kind of prove and your resume where you've demonstrated that particular skill. So there's a resume builder on USA jobs. I highly recommend you use that. It allows you to upload your own resume if you want. But John and I both agree that Builder is kind of the way to go. What we would recommend. Yeah, there's my emphasis of don't upload a regular resume. Okay. So we have about 15 minutes left. We have some sites we'd like to demonstrate for you and also answer some questions as we go. There's a huge slide of resources here that will include for you when we send this out, certainly not going to go through all of these, but we want to just show you a few and purchase tumor. So Jen want to start with USA Jobs and then we'll do the difference. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Good luck. Darn. And I am now signed out of my account.  I'm going to try to log back in again. Give me two seconds. I probably need to stop, oh know, there it goe, love it.s Okay, so I do want to show just a couple of things about USA jobs. So first being that once you're logged in and you've created an account, you can have a nice job search agent here. You can have some saved jobs, that kind of thing. You'll be able to create a profile. But the documents section is one that makes it really, this is where it tells you upload or build. And again, it is really important for you to build. I did take a look, alright, did create a little resume. And what you'll be able to see is that there's stuff that's on here that you won't do otherwise. So what it'll do is it's going to tell you like things that you've added in or or things that I wouldn't include necessarily on a regular resume. So it has all kinds of information about classes I took when I graduated, which has happened before.  But you'll be able to see all of these kinds of things and it will walk you through a lot. And then if you really need it, always feel free to utilize some of these additional information. So if you do see a skill sets that is listed on a job, you should be putting that here into the additional information. And because what is important to know is that it is your, um they do use AI to go through and scan resumes at the very beginning, looking for that one to one direct kind of language that they have. So these are actual things that I took out of a job description to make sure that I would have my application slides. And to make sure that I actually have these things, It's not enough just to be able to say, I can use automated reporting software and systems. I have to have an example somewhere previously in one of my experiences that's actually talking about that. Certainly a skill in oral communication, that kind of thing. So it's really nice to be able to put a lot of this information and you can add so much stuff that's in here when we take a look at jobs. So again, you can begin to look through and take a look and as you're looking through USA jobs. So you can do a type in of students. Or one of the nice things is as you navigate over here, on this side, you'll be able to look at this students component here, and then you'll also see recent graduates. But we're going to go with the students one. And if you really need to, The other thing that you can do is looking based upon pay. And this is one of the things that we talked about with those great sales, is looking and trying to see some of the stuff that does this in with what I'm really interested in doing. So if I chose a GS three scale or a, or a five, that kinda thing, you'll be able to see some things that are in here. Now I'm going to go back because there was a job that I had selected. Okay. So one of the jobs I just wanted to be able to walk through and knowing every component about USA jobs is important. So it will always start with the summary about what the agency is and what they do. And this is a nice one because this one talks about opportunities are available in the summer of 2020 to so great. It's open to the public. And it will talk then about the responsibilities, what it is that you would be doing. And this is actually a really good job description where it has a lot of things in here. It's research, summaries, it's briefing. It's doing some policy things, analyzing trends. It'll tell you requirements that are necessary. This is a student volunteer, unpaid opportunity. The minimums that they're looking for, and I will say the minimums that most of the time people are looking for are very low. So don't worry about being qualified for a lot of these roles. You absolutely are. This one it looks like it's a virtual setting. And then some qualifications. And so you have to be a student and you can't volunteer what your education is going to look like. And then this is one of my pet peeves, is that it will start to cut things off when it becomes a little bit too much. Always take a look at this read more because sometimes you'll find really good nuggets of information in there that will be necessary. I would say, especially in terms of how you will be evaluated. And when you're taking a look at how you'll be evaluated, sometimes there's questions and these questions on this particular one are relatively standard It's nothing in here that's like, you know, it's how many hours can you work? What are the areas of interests that you have the most of? And you'll see that there's actually quite a bit of, of really different kinds of roles. So you might be interested in investigation and enforcement or statistics, or human capital work or legal work. Or IT. There again, we talked about some of the issue areas or what functions you may be doing within a job. And so those are really nice ones. It is important to make sure that you are addressing anything that they're talking about and skills in that how you'll be evaluated. And this one actually really isn't bad. They're looking for a cover letter, a resume, and a current transcript. Mia did I cover everything here? Do you want me to start to talk a little bit more about finding positions? I think that's probably good for now. I will note that in the slide deck we'll send out to all of you, there are links to a lot of different things, including the Office of Personnel Management, essentially like the HR of federal government. They host some really specific workshops, like separate topics of how to write your resume, a whole workshop on how to write your federal resume, an entire workshop on how to navigate USA jobs. So we're giving you like a bird's eye view of lots of different things. But if you want to dive into it more, there's certainly other tools out there. I wanted to take just a couple more minutes to show you some other resources. That's not a particularly exciting page. This is the Leadership Connect dashboard that I was talking to you about before. So the homepage you can kind of customize depending on what you're interested in. But it covers a lot of different things. You'll see lot in lobbying firms and a lot of you in the pre questions mentioned, you're interested in law, Congress, et cetera. I think this is probably most useful for the government related things. I don't use it as much for companies or nonprofits. But if you're interested in those, make an appointment, I'll give you my other favorite site for those kinds of things. One really interesting can you zoom in? It's a little small. Yeah. Is that better? That is better. Okay. If you click this little flag over here, this is a government transitions dashboard, which essentially is like updates of people who have changed roles. So that can be a cool place to see newly-elected people who might have newly opened internships and things like that. You can also set up notifications to see when Cornell Alumni change positions. So I get an email, I think once a week or every other week that tells me what roles Cornell Alumni are in or have changed in the past couple weeks. So that's a pretty cool tool to use. There's also district maps on leadership connect. So this is helpful to John's point about wanting to work for someone who you are a constituent of. This is a great place to look for those. The search is really interesting. So especially those of you who are interested in working on a particular issue area, you can search by people or position that they hold. But legislative issue could be a way to search. So maybe we look at people who are passionate about animals. I'm just picking alphabetically here, but so you've got some, every person has key policy areas and things that they've worked on. So let's just go into one profile as an example. Maybe. So it'll tell you about, you know, when, when they've been in office, their social media, it's kind of everything all in one place. But I'll also show you recent legislation that they've sponsored. Policy areas they care a lot about. People that report to them, tweets news articles about them. So it's a pretty comprehensive place to find a lot of information about your representative. Or as I was mentioning before, if you're looking at this legislative area up here or even the committees, you can look at specific, you know, who's on this specific house committee. Could look at any house committee or one specific one based on issues that you're passionate about. So leadership connect has a lot of functions. There's a quick start guide that's linked in the PowerPoint. This kind of walks you through all the different ways that you can use the site. So I would recommend looking at that, but just wanted to give you a sneak peek. And lastly, we wanted to show you the Washington information directory. This is something you have access to through the cornell libraries. So you will have to sign in and do your duo approval and all of that. But this is a really helpful tool that gives you information about different topic areas, again, filtered more so by what you're focused on. So agriculture and food business and economics. Again, just as an example, there's lots of subtopics within each of these. And it will also show you who does work in DC in Washington, that's called the Washington information directory on that particular topic. So let's say we look at consumer protection. Now you'll see agencies, government agencies that do work on this.   But there's, there's a list of government agencies as well as non-profits that do work on that topic in the DC area. So say you're trying to break into government, but you aren't having much luck. You just want to work on that topic. This is a good place to look for. Who does any sort of work related to this issue I'm interested in. So that's a quick overview of what the Washington information directory is. I don't know. Jen, if you want to say anything about other resources, there are so many. Good. Well, I want to just make a plug, especially for the Washington information directory. I think a big thing to know, especially about DC based positions. But a lot of times about think tanks, they're not posting on places like handshake, LinkedIn. They're posting on their own website to find students who want to work at their specific organization. So what that means is that you're going to have to do a lot of legwork to find those places because they're not going to be where you are. So if you are really interested in health policy areas, you can absolutely go take a look on the Washington information directory, look under health, and then find the organizations. And you're going to find a lot of internships. Once you click on each individual person or each at each individual area, I figured out why it wasn't showing me other things because it was signed to be out just like Jen got signed out during our interlude between pulling these. So you can see just a little bit, if you're not signed in, but obviously you have free access to the Cornell Library. I'd encourage you to sign name and use it to its full potential. And that is the Washington information directory you searched and the Cornell libraries, you should be able to access it through there. And it will be on, or the link will be available via this presentation which will send down, yes, we decided there's too many links to keep pasting them on the chat throughout the presentation. So we'll just send you the, the slides and you'll have all of those available. We want to leave a little bit of time for questions if anybody has them. I'm sure there are many, but also we can meet with you individually if you prefer. Perhaps. This is slightly overwhelming because there's so much information. Try to give you an overview of. Samantha, go ahead. Yeah. Thank you so much for that presentation. It was very thorough. I wish I had actually had this when I was like more in my early freshman or sophomore, cause it's so comprehensive. I'm kind of curious about USA jobs because I've gone on USA jobs training session. I've also just tried it on my own and sometimes it feels like it comes with a lot of military geared stuff or things that don't seem like what I'm looking for when I click on like recent grad. So just curious that there are other filters you put in besides just the student or recent grad that you would recommend? Like filter it better? Yeah. Yeah. Samantha, part of that probably is that the Air Force always has lots of jobs and they're almost always the first agency that comes up alphabetically. So that's why lots of military positions do become available. I think a really good way to search is by the job classifications area. Mia do you have thoughts? Yeah, I was going to say that job series numbers as well. And maybe I can pull that list up if you want to take a look on it, but I think that helps. So oftentimes when you search by keyword, I work with a lot of students interested in sustainability careers. If you type in environment, almost every government job description talks about work environment. So that keyword is going to get you nowhere. So it's much more helpful to use job series numbers for some keywords that might be used in multiple ways or I don't know, like inclusion is probably going to be in a lot of descriptions of a certain agency or something. So that's what I feel like the job series numbers are are more helpful than a keyword search. Nicole, go ahead. Hi. Yeah, thank you for the presentation it was really good. My question is, okay, I'm interested in working with think tanks. And I think that my biggest problem that I have encountered while applying to these jobs is like getting my resume at least like checked. I think doing like networking is a key to getting these jobs. And I was wondering what you would recommend to improve or networking skills and how we can connect with the right, like Cornell Alumni in the organizations that were interested to like improve our chances of at least getting like a resume, like checked. Absolutely. So a couple of Cornell resources that I would suggest is if you're not on CUeLinks you absolutely should be. So think about that as LinkedIn but specifically for, for Cornell Alumni and Friends of Cornell who essentially have said, Yes, I'm willing to help students. So that should be the first place that go. Of course, taking a peek at LinkedIn. But most places are also, most Think Tanks are going to have a list of some of their experts. And it's a little bit if you have a specific area that you're interested in, mutually filter by topic. But you can also look at the bios to see if there are Cornellians right there. That's another resource that I would say. And of course I would probably say leadership connect might be another way to go. Mia any thoughts? Yeah, I would agree with those sites that you mentioned. If you feel like you're not having good luck finding the types of people you're looking for. Feel free to make an appointment with us and we can get a little more creative to dig around if you're looking for something in particular. But yeah, I would say generally those sites would be the place I'd start. Got some LinkedIn hacks if we need to get creative, so feel free to make an appointment and we can poke around. But yeah, I think those networking opportunities, we're not necessarily talking about events or whether in-person or virtual. We're not necessarily talking about this mixer type event where everyone's in a room and you, you talk to different people. Your networking might really look more like having a conversation with someone to learn more about what they do. And at the end of it they might say, you have some really great questions. I'd love to help get you an internship. I don't have one in my office, but my friend does. Let me forward your resume along. So that's sometimes what networking looks like a little bit more. Especially as we shift more and more into like virtual modern age. Yeah, it might not necessarily be that big, scary room that we often think of when we think of networking. Thank you. Mia we have a question in the chat, how can someone sign up to leadership connect? It seems that to create an account, you need to have a work email address. Yes, I think you probably just started from the general leadership Connect site. So let me link you and it's in the PowerPoint as well, but you'll want to start from the Cornell library proxy and then you don't have to create an account, it'll just be through Cornell libraries. And I'll stop the recording too, if anybody wants to ask questions and not be recorded.