I’m looking forward to presenting at Virginia Marti College of Art and Design in Cleveland, Ohio this Friday. I’ll be giving a seminar to the students and faculty about how to set up a blog and the importance of having one if you are a college student. I will discuss my approach when I started job searching at the end of grad school last year. I treated myself as a product. Since I did a bunch of different things (not just designing web sites), I needed some way to break down and document all the different things that I was working on.
I used a blog (different tha
n this one) to showcase the projects I was working on in school. At the time I was working on a number of school projects that included a variety of things such as search engine optimization, css, and iMovie and Final Cut Pro. I made each project a post and talked about my role on each project.
The result gave potential employers more information on each project (more than just a picture of what I had done) and actually drove more traffic to my site (because of the way I had utilized the blog and keywords. For current students, they could talk about each class or a specific project in each class that they worked on and talk about what they had learned from it.
This approach applies to pretty much everyone. Whether you are a business or a college student, structuring your blog appropriately, may help you achieve your goal.
Good post….more college students should think about using online tools and networks as a way to search for jobs. Unfortunately, I see many of them using it strictly as a social tool (which is fine to a point) and their sites and/or blogs include all sorts of information that they most likely wouldn’t want a future employer to view. By the time they think about changing the tone of what they are doing, it is too late. This is really good advice and a great way to use the web for the good!