By: Drew Forbes
Southern Poly has a fantastic Career and Counseling Center. They offer personal, academic, and career counseling services and help students with important career-related goals like improving resumes, building interview skills, and searching for internships and co-ops.
Here’s a link to their site: http://www.spsu.edu/cccenter/
They also conduct an etiquette dinner for any student who sign up. There was a $15 charge, but I managed to go for free because the Resident Assistant staff was encouraged to attend by the Department of Housing and Residence Life. Freshmen who are involved with Res Life’s Emerging Leaders and Resident Hall Council programs, both great opportunities for residents, were also paid for.
A lot of people are going to tell you to “get involved”. I don’t know what that means. Maybe you’re supposed to join a club, or take up one of the opportunities offered by Res Life, or maybe just go to the events that you’d never normally go to that you’ll remember better than another night spent at home playing League of Legends. I can tell you for certain that I got to have a fancy four-course meal for free, so that’s one undeniable event that me and some other folks wouldn’t have had if we hadn’t “gotten involved”. Not that getting involved with an organization isn’t a reward in itself, but I’ll leave that for another blog.
So, I got to have dinner next to a hiring executive from a computer hardware company and hear him speak in Business Language for a couple of hours. That was way more memorable, and probably more valuable, than all the etiquette tips I have previously received. Here’s my biggest impression of the evening: professionalism is a completely different mode. The man was really friendly, but the conversation was so much more polite than what I’m used to. I’m glad I was able to get a taste of it, since it’s likely that the way I talk will need to resemble his in the future
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Something less valuable, but still pretty cool, that I got out of attending the etiquette dinner is the t-shirt you see above here.
SPSU Undergraduate Admissions 