Nightmare scenario: you’re looking at your transcripts and your GPA is not where you want it to be. Internship-hunting season is coming up.
What do you do? Pray to the Many-Faced God? Hitchhike your way to the Argentinian countryside, become a goat herder, and never talk to your parents again? Switch places with genetically altered guy so you can go into space?
All good options, of course. Before picking one, though, let’s look at some ways you can stand out and impress recruiters without an “impressive” GPA.
See, your GPA is only one indicator of success – and, for many companies, it’s not even an important one.
Depending on your intended career field, other factors will be much more crucial to your success – including your technical ability and soft skills (leadership, communication, organization).
Additionally, your personal brand plays a huge part in your ability to find a great job. I define this in two parts:
- The intersection of your interests/passion, your abilities, and market (or company) that needs what you can offer (and can pay for it)
- The visibility of that intersection
The first part takes lots of work and experience to define well, and it’s difficult to tell you exactly how to do it. However, there’s a lot you can do to improve the second part. Building your online presence – your personal website, social media accounts, etc – is one. Improving your networking efforts is another.
In this episode, Martin and I focus primarily on this aspect of offsetting a less-than-stellar GPA. In particular, I’m excited for you to hear about “love letter” sites – an incredibly effective tactic for standing out to an individual company.
We’ll also talk about other methods of standing out as well. Even if your GPA is great, this episode should help you stand out even more!
Things mentioned in this episode:
- Reddit thread about lizard revenge pizza – though it looks like they deleted everything after realizing this would probably have consequences
- Podcast episode with Brandon Adams
- Achievement Addiction: How to Separate Yourself from Your Accomplishments
- Podcast episode with Ryan Gray
- Podcast episode with Ryan Nguyen
- Quora thread
- Flying Hippo Web Technologies
- I Want to Fly with Hippos
- Florian Is All In
- TEDx
- ThomasJFrank.com V2
- MartinBoeh.me
- Personal Website guide
- The Art of Promoting Yourself
- Moo – where I buy my business cards
- AIGA
- 14 Hard-Hitting Reasons Why You Must Start A Blog In College
- Personal Branding Checklist (and Studying Book)
- Signalling Theory
Want more cool stuff? You can find all sorts of great tools at my Resources page.
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