Jorge Barraza: Hello, again, everyone. As you know, my name is Dr. Jorge Barraza, the program director here in MAPP, and want to introduce you to this page that we created for you. It's our career page. It's something that is meant to help you particularly in your journey to get an internship. Now, you might be at the beginning of your program. So it might feel really far ahead, but the internship is a real critical part of our program. And I know many of you joined because of the practical aspect of our program. So I would recommend spending some serious time looking through whether you're at the start of your career, looking for a career change, or simply upskilling to accelerate your own career progress.
Now, we can't just hand you an internship in this program. That's not how it works. What we do is provide you resources to help you in that journey, and give you a leg up compared to the competition. Now, one of the things we do outside of this page is sprinkle in some opportunities to get that leg up, whether it be through networking events, informal programming, or even within our courses like 550A, for instance, which provides you opportunities to do informational interviews.
Now, these opportunities are excellent, and I would highly recommend doing more of them to build up your own professional network, and learn about the kinds of careers that might actually be appealing to you moving forward. Now, some of you might be a little concerned about this opportunity further down the line for an internship because you might hold a full-time position that doesn't allow you much time to do, say, a part-time internship.
I'll recommend what has worked really well for many of our students in that position as well, which is look through your own place of work. See how you might be able to work with your manager or mentor to create another set of skills or opportunities, or maybe a particular project that can become your internship.
Now, I want to talk about the expectations for the internship for just one second. So you will sign up for 591 Internship sometime either the third or fourth semester of your journey or the last or second to last semester. But the process is going to start much sooner than that because you need a landed internship in order to be registered for that internship course.
And that's really the purpose of this site too is to help you along that. So look around for advice and tips like how to search for an internship, as well as you'll see that there's many other resources to help you. Like, for instance, SC Connect is our USC website that is not just listing jobs, but also internship opportunities, many of which are not available through, say, Glassdoor or Indeed or LinkedIn. So I would highly, highly recommend looking through that.
There's also the Career Center which has many resources as well. But it also has postings of events that are put on by the center. And many of which are virtual. So even if you're not in the Southern California area, there are many great opportunities for you to upskill there in your career search.
I would also recommend, outside of the site, looking to classmates and alumni for greater information around careers. We've learned that a big part of the USC network is the MAPP network in and of itself. So you might actually have classmates who are already in the kinds of roles and positions that you're actually interested in.
What you'll find in this website too is a lot of content around career prep. For instance, how to write a resume, how to write a cover letter, and also some interview tips. I would recommend checking this website again and again, as we'll start updating it more frequently now that we have a career advisor that's 100% dedicated to MAPP students. We're most definitely going to expand the resources here and the resources that they provide.
So, I wish you the best of luck in your journey-- both in your MAPP journey and in your career journey. We really look forward to hearing you and all the successes that you have post-MAPP. So at this point, good luck and have a great day.