In the midst of college and all its requirements, it is very difficult to know exactly how to prepare for life beyond graduation. Four years still seems like a long time and besides, there are classes to attend to and nobody likes thinking about getting a job. However, if you do ever take a step back and consider what the end of your tenure at school will look like, an image might come up of arriving in second semester senior year and realize you don’t have any sort of employment lined up or even worse, you don’t have the necessary classes to graduate or never learned to swim. With that terrifying vision in mind, you realize then the importance of developing a plan of action to ensure that doesn’t happen. You know that you should have some sort of plan for laying the foundation for the job application process and the graduation process for that matter, but without ever having attempted to do either of these things in your before it is very challenging to even come up with a list of steps or if you can, they are usually very vague. I know for me, arriving at the end of freshman year and having to look for a summer job that I kind of felt lost in the whole process.

This is where the Becker-Rose Café’s speaker, Dr. Dan Schwartz comes in. As someone who has been at Cornell a long time and seen many students come and go, presumably both successful and unsuccessful ones, he was adept at relating to his audience what exactly differentiates the two. In under an hour, Dr. Schwartz went through an abundance of strategies for making the most of your courses, from which subjects you need to have taken to be ready for life after school to which subjects you need to take to be ready for life in general. Perhaps the most fascinating part of his lecture for me however, was his suggestions for the inevitable job process. One really interesting part of that that Dr. Schwartz touched on a lot were professor recommendations. Although most students do know they have to have recommendations at some point, at a big college like Cornell it can be hard to feel like you know your professors, and even if you did, have the courage to ask them for a recommendation. In this area Dr. Schwartz provided a key insight: every semester you have to make an active effort to get to know two professors and by the end of your sophomore year, even with a 50% success rate, you will still have four professors to drawn on. Adding to that he mentioned something I personally was very surprised by, which was that students should never worry about thinking they are putting a burden on a professor by asking them to write a recommendation. He emphasized that professors know that it’s their responsibility and are usually happy to do it if you know them well. Overall I really enjoyed Dr. Schwarz’s extremely energetic, relatable, and valuable advice, and I hope to put it all to good use in the rest of my time at Cornell.