Prep for Your Career in College: Three Career Readiness Experiences You Won’t Want to Miss

It makes sense that a majority of students who attend college do so with a specific goal in mind: getting a good job after graduation.

But how do colleges help students reach this goal? Beyond academic coursework, they provide students with career prep while they’re in college.

At Illinois Institute of Technology, providing students with the hands-on experiences and mentorship to develop career readiness is our main focus. It resonates, too. Upon welcoming the largest class of first-year students in recent history in fall 2022, Illinois Tech learned through a recent survey of first-year students that “preparation for career and job opportunities” was the most influential factor by nearly half (48 percent) of those who enrolled.

But what is career prep?

Here is a look at just a few of the unique career prep experiences that you can take part in during your college career.

1. Internships

What better way to get hands-on experience than an internship? According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 91 percent of employers seek job candidates with work experience, and on average, 80 percent of eligible interns receive a job offer. Illinois Tech’s own internal data shows that students who have completed an internship are more than 25 percent more likely to find full-time employment and have at least a $10,000 higher median starting salary than peers who have not completed an internship.

Here are two of the great internships that students at Illinois Tech have worked in the past year alone:

• An internship at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where a student studying artificial intelligence worked on astronaut helmet mounted displays.
• An internship at Intel helped one student not only gain systems security skills, but also to build a network of security researchers who will help him advance his career goals.

2. Competitions

There are few better ways for a student to make themselves known to employers than being on a winning or high-ranking team in a competition in their field. Students at Illinois Tech have said that high-ranking competition placements put them ahead of the job applicant pack, and provided them with real-world skills and experiences that they can highlight in an interview setting.

Here are just a few examples of the type of competitions available to students:

• Illinois Tech is one of only 13 teams participating in the national and prestigious EcoCAR EV Challenge that is sponsored by the United States Department of Energy, General Motors, and MathWorks.
• A team of students won $30,000—and at least one of them directly secured a job from the sponsoring company—for winning a competition sponsored by Keysight Technologies. Students were asked to create an internet of things carbon-neutral monitoring system, and the team built a device that collects soil and atmospheric data to figure out what types of plants will survive best in specific environments.
• A team of students won Illinois Tech’s Grainger Computing Innovation Prize for developing a stablecoin solution usable by millions of Mexico’s residents who do not or are not able to use traditional banks.

3. Research Opportunities

What better way to delve into a career than to contribute to cutting-edge research on the latest trends? Research connects students with not only academic leaders who are publishing in prestigious journals, but also industry professionals who often partner on or contribute to projects. 

Here are two recent examples of research opportunities that Illinois Tech students have taken advantage of:

• One student secured a valuable aerospace engineering fellowship and, through sponsorships with the Illinois Space Grant Consortium, has participated in flight testing of a groundbreaking experimental jet aircraft. He’s even now working on additional cutting-edge, experimental aircraft projects.
• A digital humanities student gained firsthand research experience exploring the Games for Girls movement, which gained national media attention, and also participated in a study away course in Florida that focused on theme park design.

Through our Elevate program, Illinois Tech guarantees that all students take part in hands-on experiences such as internships, research opportunities, competitions, and study away, among other opportunities. It also provides each student with personalized academic and career mentorship, all in pursuit of ensuring that our students receive the career prep needed to graduate career ready.