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[There are over 100 million sites on the Internet. 100 million! You might think you know about all the important ones (CollegeCandy, Gmail, Google, Facebook…), but there are thousands of other sweet sites out there (likeRescueTime, Bake It In a Cake and Jog.FM) and more showing up every day! We get it – it’s not easy or fun sifting through the crap and porn to find those gems, so we’re gonna bring the gems to you. Just sit back, kick up those feet and allow us to introduce you to the diamonds in the internet rough.]

Any of your professors, parents, or alumni friends (or CollegeCandy’s editor!) will tell you that one of the most important things you can do in college to help you get a job after graduation is networking. Establishing solid relationships with your professors, peers, and alumni in your field can lead to opportunities that might not otherwise be open to you.

So you set up accounts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and add everyone you meet in order to expand your social network (and hopefully your real-life network, as well). Now, that’s all great, but it means nothing if you don’t maintain those relationships!

Read More »

The following post is written by Josh Olson from UNC, one of our many friends at Uloop, a student powered marketplace. Read more great posts in their blog.

Straight from the dorm onto the street. This might seem to be the fate threatening college students graduating in our current economic doldrums. But there may be hope. There are methods for making yourself more appealing to potential employers. There are ways to manicure your resume; and there’s always the internship option. But you already knew that.

Here are some somewhat less conventional ways to avoid those unemployment lines after graduation. Read More »

Job Wanted.

When we all entered our senior year of high school, the question on everyone’s mind was where they’d be going to college. We worked our asses off to get decent SAT scores and spent every weekend for months writing essays about why we were more wonderful than the thousands of other students applying for the same coveted place on campus.

Four years and a degree later, I now find myself asking a different question: I did all of this for what, exactly?

Of course, I’ve had the time of my life in college. The parties, the late night gossip fests with my roommate, the 4 a.m. diner visits – all of it was totally worth memorizing SAT vocab words and relearning geometry. But when it’s all said and done (which in my case is way too close for comfort), with $120,000 down the hole, what does my little graduation certificate get me exactly?

Apparently, not much. Read More »

It’s finally here: week ten of my summer internship at Magazine X in New York City. I’m proud to report that I’ve made it through numerous days of unpaid labor and braved the horrible commuting conditions (apparently Mother Nature decided that this summer was going to be characterized by either torrential downpours or blazing heat, and nothing in between), and I actually managed to have a pretty good time while doing so. I only had to get someone coffee twice (and I could get myself one too, so leaving the office for a Starbucks run wasn’t too awful), and I have a ton of good clips to add to my resume.

So what have I learned? Read More »

I’ve learned many lessons since graduating from college. I’ve learned that buying a pair of shoes isn’t as important as eating dinner, that keeping in touch with friends is hard and that your first job out of college isn’t always as amazing as you think it will be.

But the biggest and most important lesson I’ve learned is that networking is the key to success.

You may not want to believe it, but when it comes to getting ahead in life, it’s all about who you know. Every single job (from full time gigs to random babysitting jobs) that I’ve gotten since I graduated from college has been because I had some connection to the person hiring. Whether it be the college I went to, the sorority I was in, or just some random person who knew my mom, I would not have gotten the position if that connection hadn’t been there.

And it’s not like I wasn’t qualified. Read More »

Sarah Merion is a “Social Media” pioneer for Gen Y. She has her own website, SarahMerion.com, where she educates on Social Media and challenges people to think about using social media to benefit their business. She has a cult following on Twitter (check her out @SarahMerion) and has even hosted multiple workshops on using Twitter and LinkedIn at her campus at Northeastern and at MIT. Her RoofUp Tweetup was the biggest in Boston and Northeastern approved a grant she wrote to finance her trip to a Social Media conference in Chicago called SOBCon.

On top of all of that, she’s only 21 and still a student at Northeastern, studying Spanish, Management Information Systems and Finance, currently on internship in NYC doing data analysis for a mega media company. Not to mention, she’s sassy, hilarious and can we say: Coolest. Hair. Ever. When I discovered this girl, I knew I had to bag an interview, so I contacted her via YouTube to grab her attention (don’t laugh). It worked and we quickly began collaborating on this interview, on top of a few other projects in the works. Sarah Merion is an inspiration for college girls who want to be entrepreneurs while still in school and proof that maybe, just maybe, the finance world isn’t as screwed as we thought.

5 Questions We Ask Everyone:

1. What is your most ridiculous college memory/most trouble you’ve ever gotten into?
Haha, no comment. Definitely did not involve me dancing on a bar. Hoo boy.

2. What are five things you can’t live without?
1. MAC foundation.
2. iPhone! Hello Tweetdeck, I love you.
3. Pink and black Herve bag. I seriously carry it EVERY. WHERE.
4. Hanky Panky underwear
5. Classic cherry chapstick. Wait, no! Friends! The TV show. Oh also, vanilla Yoplait light yogurt. And Kashi GoLean. Kashi GoLean Crunch. Grande non fat cappuccino with one Splenda. Shoot, that’s more than five, isn’t it? Read More »

Last spring, I was gearing up to graduate and was waiting for the job offers to come rolling in. Instead, the only opportunity that came my way was a summer internship. At the time, I was making plenty of money waiting tables, but I knew that the added experience of an internship would add to my credentials– even if it meant taking a pay cut. So I moved to upstate New York to a place that was a five-hour drive from everyone I would care to visit.

When I first got there, I quickly realized that this job sucked. My boss, the woman who had hired me, misinformed me when I had inquired about the hours, the workload, and the learning potential of the position during my interview. However, by the end of August, when it was time to pack up and move on, I realized I had just had one of the best summers of my life.

Before I go into the ways that you, too, can make the most of your summer internship, let me explain why mine was so terrible. I had been hired by a nonprofit regional theater company as an administrative intern for their summer season. As an English major who was trying to break into theater, that sounded right up my alley when my boss had described my duties. However, when I arrived, I quickly learned that the majority of my time would be spent serving as assistant house manager — ripping tickets and listening to patrons bitch for 8 shows a week. Read More »

As the semester comes to a close, one thing that’s on my mind (and the minds of most everyone I know) besides finals and start-of-summer parties is getting a job.

Whether it’s a summer job, internship, or, if you’re graduating like I am, an entry-level position into a career, finding a job is a top priority.  However, we all know that isn’t as easy as we’d like it to be.  Competition for jobs is higher than ever with the tough job market we’re in, which is why you have to stand out in the sea off all the other job/internship applicants out there.

But before you purchase some sort of ridiculous costume or do the dirty with your interviewer in attempts to stick out in his or her mind, try a few of these more professional ideas:

1.  Network, network, network – You’ve heard it before, and I’m telling you again: networking is one of the most important things you can do when it comes to helping you get a job.  Think you don’t have connections?  Think again.  Reach out to everyone you know–professors, friends, coworkers, your parents–you never know who has info on great job openings. There are also tons of online groups catered to all sorts of fields that set up networking events in cities across the country. Sign up and go to these; you will meet tons of people in your field that can help you out down the road.

2. Utilize your school’s career center – Sometimes universities get job listings that don’t go into public listings.  You may not find anything the first time, but keep checking, because new jobs open up all the time.  Plus, your career center can offer more than just job listings.  Depending on your university, you can get career counseling, have your resume checked, and even do mock interviews. Read More »