My name is Mia. Mia Ferraina. I use she/her pronouns and I'm the public service careers coach here at Cornell. So I really focus a lot on non-profit work, government, sustainability, public health, education. Anything in that kind of realm of for the common good type careers are students that I love to work with. So I work in the Central Career Services office, used to be in Barnes Hall right next the campus store, coming to you today from my guest bedroom, but it's really great to see everybody. And I do serve students from all across the university. So that is kinda the nice part about my role is that I get to see people from all different colleges. So that's really exciting. I stole this really cool slide deck from Slidesgo, which I'd never heard of before. But if you're looking for something a little more creative, you can steal their slides and just attribute to them at the bottom, which is great because these are really cute, so I hope you like them. So some people started introducing themselves in the chat a little bit already. But feel free to go ahead and say a little bit about what career path you're interested in. I see Melissa already said that they're passionate about supporting survivors of sexual assault, which is really great and strong proponent of education for communities of color. Awesome. So feel free, doesn't have to be that long or intricate, but go ahead and put in the chat a little bit about what you're interested in. And hopefully it'll help you meet other people that are also interested in similar things. Or at least help me tailor some examples to things that you will care about. So yeah, thanks, Brook. Yes, thanks for bringing that up. And you'll notice even just with these first few responses, some people are interested in working with the boots on the ground community folks and other people are interested in more policy work. All are great, are all needed in this struggle. So thanks for acknowledging those different elements. I guess while people are typing, I'll share a little bit about what brings me to this work, a little bit of work that I do in the community. I work with the local chapter of showing up for racial justice, which is a national organization that is supposed to bring together white people to do racial justice work and elevate the work of other organizations led by people of color in the community. So we work with a lot of different groups like Black Lives Matter, Ithaca. If you've been part of any of the recent protests down in the commons. We work with pretty much all the different groups that are there. So that's something I'm involved in, something I'm passionate about. So I guess I'll, in the spirit of sharing about ourselves I'll share that too, to get things flowing. I see a little bit more about education and immigration, health care. Yeah, this is great. And this is an interesting way of hearing all the different things people are passionate about. And I'm curious too, you know, some of you have incorporated justice topics with career paths, which is great. I'd also love to hear from people if you are like a social justice advocate as a human or in your co-curricular life. But you're looking to go into finance, or maybe you're looking to go into art or something. And you're trying to figure out how to weave those two things together. You don't necessarily have to be going into non-profit work to contribute to these topics. So definitely curious to hear about other ways or other career paths that people are exploring. Digital marketing business. Yeah, that's a great example of like a broad umbrella category. You could do marketing for just about anything. But if you want to do it for a justice related topic, that's a great way to use your skills to contribute to a cause that you care about. Law, for sure. Working with communities affected by mass incarceration. Good. Agriculture, yeah. And a concentration on the education side. Very cool combo. Yeah. I think agriculture is an interesting one to kind of blend with, like food security or things like that. So we can talk about different ways to combine or infuse a bit of a justice tilt in there. Yeah. Great. Workers' rights. Yeah, that's another one. If you haven't heard of the Ithaca workers' center, That's another group in town that does a lot of work with working-class populations in the area. So that is another topic this community is  passionate about. Great. Yeah, film. That's another really cool creative way to do it. I like that. Ok, great. So I just want to give you a sense of what the goals for our session are today. Not to over-complicate it at all. I want to help you see the skills that you're developing as an activist or organizer, however you want to label or envision yourself. There are skills you're developing in that realm that's going to prepare you for future work, regardless of what you're going into. And learn how to actually articulate those skills. So maybe you kind of feel like you know it in the back of your head, but you're not sure how to explain it to someone else. Hopefully by the time you leave today, you'll at least have some tools to start doing that. I just want to give you a brief intro to our career development model, not going to get too academic with it. But if you've come to one of our workshops before, this is a model that we always kind of use in the beginning to set a bit of a foundation. It is okay for you to be at any point in this process. There is no like, oh as a sophomore you should be here and as a junior, you should be there. This is an ongoing cycle. Myself and my colleagues are also constantly revisiting and kind of backtracking, reassessing our values, what we want to do next. And I think that's very common, especially, you know, you've probably heard people talk about past generations where they worked for the same place for a really long time. That's not often the case anymore. So people are kind of constantly going back and forth to these different phases. So no right or wrong. Just take a second to assess like, where am I, what am I looking to get out of today's session? And feel free to ask questions to get at what you're hoping for. Okay. The first very little brief activity just to warm us up that I would like to do is called Story of a skill. I think that's a little bit of the 90's kid coming out in me that's like, that story of a girl song. But this is an activity just to get you familiar with some common skills that employers look for that you probably already have developed through some of your work. So I am going to put in the chat a link to a list of different skills. And they each have a number. Whatever breakout room you're randomly put into, the number of that room is going to be the number of skill that you talk about. So pretty straightforward there. But go ahead and discuss with your group, ways that you have developed this. So go ahead and browse that list in that Google Doc just to get a sense of what options there are. And then I will make some breakout rooms. I don't know if that was enough time. It's really hard to gauge when I'm not like wandering around the room to see when people are talking. So there's a survey at the end. Let me know if that was not enough time. But hopefully that was a good little start to get you all warmed up and thinking about what skills you've already developed. You'll notice I have a new slide up here about transferable skills. Because those are the skills that you're talking about. These are kind of a core set of common abilities that are applicable to a large array of jobs. And you develop them over time and in a lot of different contexts. So this is something people often think about, just class and internships maybe as the places they develop skills. But transferable skills really push you to think about what skills have you developed at home? What about in your activism? What about in your community? What about like even with your siblings or informal relationships with your friends or something. So transferable skills can really be developed anywhere and they're useful in a lot of different settings. So those are the eight that you all were just thinking about. And importantly, they are officially called career readiness competencies. So I'll tell you a little bit more about what that means in a minute. But Career Readiness is really just this idea that those transferable skills that you all were just talking about are ones that graduates will need in order to be successful in the workplace. So being career ready is really about transferable skills. And this is a graphic of the eight different competencies that NACE which is the National Association. It's essentially a group of advisors like myself, as well as employers who come together and talk about ways to make sure that the graduates we're producing as a college are ready for the workplace and have the skills that employers desire. So that's really the focus of this organization. And these are the eight skills that they came up with that they felt like were most important across all different industries. So many of you here are interested in some sort of public service work that translates over from your community work. But even those of you who are talking about marketing and law and other things that are maybe less like directly interacting with the community. These are going to be relevant no matter what you're going into. So a good kind of list of skills to have in your back pocket. A couple that I'll explain a little bit more in depth. You have that list to refer back to if you'd like. But some that are a little less obvious are these three over here, I think. So. Professionalism and work ethic. I'd like to kind of define what professionalism is and debunk some of those stereotypes. Different industries, what's considered professional dress is going to be different. So that's, I mean, that could be a whole presentation in and of itself. But really what we're getting at here is about being on time, following through on things that you say you're going to do. It's kind of like responsibility. You might think of it that way a little bit. Career management is about really managing your own career. It's really about self-advocacy. So even coming to a workshop like this, That's part of career management, you're being proactive, you're learning skills. You are trying to take control and like steer your own career that's what career management is about. So it could be something as simple as like asking your supervisor for another project when you're done with the current one, instead of waiting for them to come to you. The last one, global and intercultural fluency, I actually think they might be changing the name of this one soon. But the common idea here is it's about interacting with people who have a different background than you, whether it's from across the world or around the street. It is about getting to know people and being able to work with people who are different than you in some way, shape, or form. So I'm sure many of you have been developing that in your activism work, which is great. I'm curious how many of you think different ones of these are the most important. So let me go ahead and launch this poll. And I would love to hear your vote about what you think is the most important skill or competency to employers. Well, it's pretty closely tied here. Interesting. I think that's just about everybody. So I'll go ahead and close this. I can show you the results. So you'll see that people felt that oral and written communication was the most important, but very close behind were critical thinking and problem-solving and teamwork and collaboration, professionalism was also pretty popular. But I'm surprised to hear none of you thought that digital technology was important given that we spend our entire lives on digital technology right now. To be honest, this is a survey from 2020. So digital technology probably wouldn't be as highly represented in these results than it would be even just a year later. So it's important to recognize, too, how demands might change. But I'm sure you're all waiting to see what the true results are. Which here is the, the kind of scale and a more visual sense of which ones are most important. So you're very much on target with the four that you thought were most important. And then you'll see there's some that are really not that far behind. And I would say this, like I said, this survey's from 2020, I think global and intercultural fluency as well as information technology are probably increasing in importance, given as we all know, like increased movements towards racial justice for many different racial groups, as well as just our Zoom lives now. So it's, it's interesting to see how that changes over time. For those of you who are like stats nerds out there, like myself, you can see the technicalities of how these work. Okay, so now I would love to get a little brainstorming going. I will send you these slides so you'll get to peek at what's behind this large circle. But the thing I'd love for us to brainstorm about is what you feel like your responsibilities and skills have been in your time doing community activism work. So I'm going to go ahead and put a link in the chat for you. For those of you who haven't used Jamboard before, it's kind of like a, a virtual sticky note kind of platform. So you can see along the left-hand side that there is a little square with two lines on it that looks like a post-it note. You can go ahead and click that to create a sticky note and you can just start adding. So you can add as many as you want. Just go ahead and start brainstorming what skills you feel like you've developed in support of community engaged work. And unfortunately they all pile on top of each other. So I'll try and help you move them as they come. Yeah, so these can be ones from the previous couple slides where they're labeled as teamwork or cooperation, for example, or public speaking, right? That would fall into communication, but it's a little bit more specific. So feel free to get as fine- tuned as you would like. Increasing awareness, especially for people who might not know anything about the topic, yeah, kinda the education piece, right? Teaching other people about the importance of an issue. Especially if any of you want to go into, more of, you know, somebody mentioned going into marketing. If you're thinking about the fundraising side of non-profits, those are all really important to have. Somebody put persuasive writing here that's great. And educational awareness in writing is also a really important skill to get people to see the value of the work that you're doing. I see a lot of empathy, which is great. Yeah, that's definitely important. Outreach. Yeah, that can be leadership, that can be collaboration. It even takes some effort to think about who is the right person to reach out to. So that's a very multi-faceted skill. Networking, great. Intercultural communication definitely, especially if you're working in cross- class or cross-race groups. Definitely on there. Writing persuasively for a general audience instead of academic. Yes, that is a great point. What you would write in a paper for a professor is probably not going to be the same as what you would write in a newsletter for a certain cause. So definitely knowing how to adapt your writing for different audiences is super important. Technology, community outreach, yeah, even tailoring your technology, right? Like I use Jamboard with you all because I think you could probably pick up on it pretty quickly. But if I'm working with an older population in the community, they might struggle even just with Zoom. So I'm not going to do Jamboard with them. That's another great example of kind of tailoring, when to use different technology is important. Difference between interpersonal skills and intrapersonal skills. Definitely, kind of that self-reflection like what privileges do I have or how am I showing up in this work? What's my interaction going to be like with this population based on my own life experience. Lots of different elements there. Find the people who share your passion. Yeah, hopefully you're connecting with some other people through this session even. So, I think for the sake of time, let's go back to. Can you all see my slides again? So I will give you just a little sneak peek of, like I said, I'll send this to you, but these are just some skills even that I compiled in my own brainstorming and just browsing around the Internet of skills and responsibilities that either a professional activist or community organizer role might have in an organization, or even just things that people do in their free time as something that they're passionate about. So I'm sure you're thinking, Okay, this is great. I know what I'm into. Hopefully now you're starting to recognize the value of that. How do I write about it? Well, this is my little, I guess I like to call it a formula, it's not mathematical. But for a strong bullet point, the three parts would be what you did. So maybe it's the skill or the task or the responsibility that you had. Try to be really specific. Something like participated or assisted is not as specific as say, organized or developed. You could participate in just about anything or assist with just about anything. So the more specific, the better. There are lots of lists of verbs out there on the Internet. We also have some in our career development toolkit, which I'll send you the link to at the end. So lots of different ways to describe what you've done. Another helpful component is, how did you do this? What tools did you use? It's a very broad way of thinking about it, "tools," in a large definition. So it could be software, it could be a foreign language. It could be just the fact that you've collaborated with 10 other people from different organizations. So tools, strategies, techniques, any way that you can explain how you did the thing that you accomplished. And then the last piece, I think this is really important for people who are going into this type of purpose-driven, community-focused kind of work is why did you do the thing that you did? So let's even say that you are currently working in the dining hall, but you want to go into community organizing as a career. Understanding why you do certain things in the dining hall can really help you actually shows the transferability of that skill. So you might say something like, you know, rather than just wiped tables, you could say, cleaning tables to maintain a welcoming environment, right? A welcoming environment is a really important element of someone being comfortable in a dining hall and someone being comfortable in your non-profit. So finding a way to connect things together can really come through. At this last piece of the impact, the outcome. You'll hear a lot of people say use numbers as much as you can. If you can, great. If you were fundraising or increased the size of your organization. Absolutely include some numbers. But if not, that's okay. If you can at least say, I increased our collaboration with community partners or I decreased the redundancy between us and another service. Even just a kind of relative term like increase or decrease still gives you an idea, still gives the employer an idea of what it is that you accomplished through that action. And it demonstrates that you have the maturity to reflect upon why and the impact of what you're doing. So it's really important to include these three components. The, I guess these three elements can be in every bullet point that you write or you can just make sure that these three are included in some fashion within each of your job descriptions. So when you're describing, maybe you're the president of an organization on campus. You can describe that just as fully as you would an internship. It doesn't need to be just a one liner at the bottom in a kind of tossed away section called campus engagement or something, you can make that a robust description. It might be the most relevant thing that you've done. Just because you weren't paid for it, doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve what I like to call the airtime of actually giving space to describe that. So go ahead and elaborate on these co-curricular activities that you've done, your community activism. There's a lot of valuable skills from them, so don't be afraid to let them shine, and I'm happy to help you with that. So I want to pause here before we break out and brainstorm. Any questions? I haven't seen any come through on the chat. Feel free to unmute or toss them in the chat. I want to check in, we're about halfway. Should I go back a slide? Is this bullet point formula making sense to people? You can just give me a virtual thumbs up or whatever you want. Thank you for telling me the last breakout rooms were not enough, I will definitely give you more time. So this is actually going to be a much more robust discussion. Hopefully. You don't necessarily have to have a note-taker or anything if you don't want to. But this is really a brainstorm. Think about skills that you've developed that you want to bring into a future career. So I suspect that this kind of public service, non-profit one might be kind of large. I'll break it up into two if it's too large. But go ahead and think about like, where's my goal of where I'd like to end up? And how can I use my community engagement, my campus engagement to demonstrate some skills that would help me make a successful lawyer or consulting or whatever you need to be able to. Hopefully that felt like closer to enough time. I'd love to talk just a little bit about this as a group. Now, I have one other kind of quiet, private activity for you to do to help brainstorm some actual written bullet points. But I feel like we're trying to put these two pieces together, right? We talked about what makes a good point. And now you just talked about what skills you may have. Next, we'll combine them together. Write a bullet point about the skill. But tell me what kind of things were challenging about that. Or even just feel free to put in the chat what kind of skills you came up with. That might be particularly relevant to your field. We pretty much had Law, Policy and Government, public service and non-profit in education. There weren't many folks in the other categories. I was just going to say, I like, do work with a statewide criminal justice organizing group in New York. And I mostly apply to like research related careers in criminal justice. So I connect to my work to a) just being informed about these topics and b) like using my communication skills to inform other people about them and to do that background research, which often involves like going through Assembly bills and stuff in figuring out what tangible impact they have. That's a great example too, that brings up, I think, a helpful distinction, but kinda two different ways to think about it. So not only is there similarity in terms of the topic, criminal justice is the common denominator there. But there's also a commonality in terms of being able to communicate with an audience. Now that audience might be different, but being able to tailor the way that you explain something or research versus writing about it can also be one way. So you might have experience with a similar topic or you might have done a similar skill. It may not necessarily be both. Like Alexandra's example, just was. But as long as you have one or the other of those things, you've got a shot at applying for that job or internship. So maybe you've done a lot of, I don't know, fundraising for the local Cayuga Nation. And you want to go into more work with, with our homeless population, different population, but some overlapping concerns. And if you're still doing fundraising for that new population, you still have the underlying skill even though it's for a different group. So that's, I guess just one example to think about it. Being aware of my own assets that you bring into a space and knowing the learning goals that you want to get out of it. Yeah, definitely. Knowing kind of the time and place to take different approaches. So when are you a leader in a space versus when are you a learner? When is it that you're trying to kind of sit back and listen versus when is it your time to step up and lead. That is something I honestly wish I learned earlier in my own career. That is a really, really valuable skill to know and to just listen and learn from other people. Which is absolutely something that you learn while doing organizing work, great example. Anybody else want to share an example or something that you struggled with? Maybe it was difficult to come up with a example? It's okay if you didn't, this is kind of hard sometimes. So especially if it's your first time thinking about like writing a resume, it can be challenging. And I'll also say if you're feeling shy, we can always meet one-on-one. I'm happy to talk with you more. Outreach. Yeah, Brooke. Great point. Whether it's non-profit work or even honestly education and law related work. Whether it's outreach in the kind of classic sense of bringing more people into the cause. Or it's about collaborating with another law agency or something like that. You are often collaborating in some way. And that idea of reaching out and bringing people into your work absolutely is a common thread amongst all three of those categories that you all ended up in. I want to give you all some time to reflect on this next step here, which you probably won't be able to do both of these, which is fine. Like I said, I'm going to send you the slides. I've recorded this, so once I get it captioned, it'll be up as well. But try and connect some of what we just talked about here. You've articulated some skills in the brainstorming session you just did. You articulated some skills and you also talked about the ways to write a bullet point. So now see if you can put those two together. The way you respond to an interview prompt is very similar. So feel free to work on either. Some people just think that better in written form and some people think better out loud, so try either of these, try and write a few bullet points that connect your current experience to what you want to do. Or try and come up with some little stories about examples that you could share in an interview. Hopefully that wasn't too wandering around the room terribly difficult, but if I went way too far or too fast, let me know, and like I said, I'm always happy to meet with you one-on-one. That's my favorite thing to talk about, so I'm happy to meet. Thinking about a few different ways that you can continue working on things like this, those of you who have been at Cornell for a while, maybe you already know about these courses, but I'll put a couple of links in the chat for you to check out. These are just a few obviously, this is just four out of many many courses on campus that are ways that you can continue learning about different social justice issues or the ways that they are connected to one another, so that's just a general list from the office of engaged initiatives. Any class that's labeled with that tag, and then this kind of long link that I just  put in there is specific for a certain semester so you have the option to do it that way, you can do that through the course search page. So there's that. I think this is a really helpful way, if you are feeling like, well I don't have a lot of time to do advocacy work for free, so I'm doing some paid work that I feel like isn't as related. If you want to still further your learning and your development in some of these areas, a class is a great way to do it, and some of these have an actual community engaged component, where you go tutor in the community, or do a service project with a community organization. So pay attention to the descriptions. Some of them will actually spend some of the class period doing service of some kind. Some additional career support options. Our Career Development Toolkit is a bunch of Canvas modules that are a really really great tool, really helpful tool that covers a lot of different career topics, so everything from resumes and cover letters, to exploring different career options, interviewing, networking, anything you can think of, it's pretty much in there. So if you're working on something late at night and you need some help, the toolkit is a great place to go. Or if you just learn better through reading, start there and then you're always welcome to come to our office and office and we can hash out some more detailed questions. So that's something we just developed last summer. It's a while ago now, but for everyone being remote, we thought that would be helpful. My email is there if you want to reach out with any attachments or specific questions or something. But, also you are certainly welcome to book an appointment. That is also a link I will go ahead and put in the chat. You can book a same day drop-in if you have a short deadline to turn in something by, a drop-in is probably your best bet since I'm usually booked about a week out, but if you want to meet with me specifically, you can book a 30-minute appointment and find my name in the drop-down list and you can book the appointment with me. Yeah, I'm definitely happy to continue the conversation, I see a couple DMs here, so feel free to book an appointment with me, I'd love to talk with you all. So those are some other options for you to get help, but I also would love to hear your feedback. This is the first time I've ever done this workshop. Last year was obviously a bit of a tizzy with COVID happening and that was my first year working at Cornell. So this is the first time I've done this here for you all, I'd love to hear what you thought, thanks Olive for recommending the toolkit. I'm glad that it has been helpful. Thanks for the plug. So feel free to scan the code on your phone, or I put the link in the chat if you would like to do it on your computer, but I would love to hear what you thought of it. Give me your brutally honest feedback, so that I can improve it for the future, and you might even come again and it will be better. So I already know that the first breakout room was too short, but hopefully, you have some other ideas of how this can be helpful. Thank you. You're welcome. Go ahead and fill that out, and really I'm just here to answer questions, I'll hang out for a little while if you want to ask a question out loud or in the chat, I'm happy to answer. Thank you so much. You're welcome, it's great meeting you all!