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You can also enjoy this blog post by listening on Podcast. 
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In my recent podcast episode, I offer valuable insights into timelines and their importance for success, especially for international students. In this post, we will summarize some of the key points shared and provide you with a condensed guide to utilizing timelines effectively.

Timelines: The Backbone of Success for International Students

Understanding Timelines

I open the podcast by addressing the vital role of timelines in achieving success. "Timelines really matter." I encourage listeners to think of them as working for us instead of something we have to chase. In particular, I focus on the importance of visa sponsorship and the H-1B sponsorship deadline as an anchor for planning your journey.

Letting Timelines Work for You

A powerful example from my own experience shows how being aware of deadlines and acting strategically c...

The Magic (and Math) of Getting a Job

Optical Illusions in the job hunt

We’ve all seen optical illusions before - and they exist in the job hunt, too. Try this one: “summer has started”. For those still job hunting, the illusion is that there’s no more time left to get an internship or job. Then decisions are made not to try, or to double down on summer academics. Meanwhile, the start of summer was just a bit optical illusion.

This summer, I say let the illusion work in your favor. And if you’re a fan of magic, let the magic work in your favor, too. With so many companies out there, all needing to solve problems, the opportunities to get hired are endless. When action is taken by you, the job hunter, things happen unexpectedly all the time in the job hunt which simple math does not explain.

Try this one: messaging someone with a nice script result in suddenly getting invited to an interview. All you did was send a quality templated message and an invite to interview was extended ...

Making it harder to get rejected as an international student

Hey everyone, Stuart here! Are you finding it hard to get a job here in the US, such as an internship using CPT or a full-time offer using OPT? Here are a few tips that are going to make this easier for you - making it harder for you to get rejected!

• Ariel used this information to gain an $8,000 monthly internship at a Fortune 100 firm just as summer was starting (her story on Youtube).
• Alvin used what I'm going to be teaching here to get his full-time offer at JP Morgan in New York City, living, living the dream life as it was for him (his story on Youtube)

Tip #1: Stop drawing the wrong conclusion

Concluding that it's too hard to find a job takes you out of the game. Maybe you expected a hard thing to be easy, so you stopped. Let’s say you’ve stopped trying to job hunt at all.  Sometimes stopping to do certain things IS the right move. For example, applying online and hoping to hear back just doesn't work. If you...

How To Job Hunt During Christmas Like A Pro

There can be a lot of confusion about how to job hunt over the holidays so I'm going to clarify that for you here and thereafter, let you not be confused about what you can and can't do when you should and should not message people over the December holidays into January.

Today, we're gonna talk about holiday do's and don'ts, and this is going to be a super good level setting exercise for you so that you can step away from a lot of the assumptions and the thoughts that are kind of spinning in your head.

I know that I can get into these little, um, thought, uh, bubbles at times and get separated from what is the situation that I'm dealing with. And for so many of us job hunting around the holidays, we have all these thoughts and ideas about how it's probably not convenient for example, to do this or that, or maybe I shouldn't do this or that and it's all generally incorrect being in business for decades.

The business world has its rhythm...

How To Get Your Dream Offer With “Minimum Viable” Effort

I'm excited to share something that I call the minimum viable job hunt (MVJ) with you.

There is a really good book that you might wanna check out called The Lean Startup, addressing how companies in Silicon Valley scale and grow so quickly. I thought we should take the key piece out of that teaching and apply it here into our own job hunts. 

If you're with me on this, I think you’ll really enjoy this, and definitely sit down, grab a piece of paper, grab a pen, take some notes, and let's kind of map this out together as we go through this. 

In the book, The Lean Startup, the concept is of the minimum viable product (MVP). What does that mean? There are three letters there, so let’s go through them one by one.

Product (P)

Let's first start with the P (product) that seeks to “launch” and become the next billion-dollar company. It has a P because it stands for “product”. The startup has something that they want to sell into t...

If you “love data”, start by loving your own job hunt data

Are you interested in data and data analytics or doing investments and crunching numbers? If you are, you're interested in data, but one thing that people don't ever consider is the data that supports their own opinions and their own ideas about things. 

Just take a moment the next time you have a stressful thought about your job hunt and ask yourself: “do I have data that supports that opinion?” 

I’m going to be that you don’t. 

Let me give you a really simple example. 

There is a person who I think wouldn't want to talk to me. I reached out once to that person over LinkedIn and they never responded. I conclude, “people must not wanna talk to me”. 

This is one data point. How often does one data point reflect a population? (and how often do people get busy, miss messages, or prefer you to follow up over email?)

It’s interesting in the job hunt: we come across these opinions about how difficult it is to do this or that...

The Best Job Hunt App For Students

Handshake is an incredible tool for getting a job as a domestic or international student. And you want to make sure you use it.

I thought we could go through a brief run-through of what's in Handshake, how you can use it, and how you can take advantage of it because I think this might be a great way to save some time in your job hunt. 

There are three things that you can find on Handshake:

• Jobs
• Events
• Employers

There are some important menu items there, and then “messages” and “career center.” 

If you have any messages - as you've successfully applied or been invited to an interview - you're going to get a message in the inbox and the career center link is right there. You can jump into your career center any time and use their resources.

Did you know that most people don't take advantage of this platform?

Use Your Interests To Find The Jobs You Want 

Now that you are at your university's Handshake center, you can jump in here and you...

Successful Fall Recruiting Requires The Right Kind of Online Course

You might be thinking right now, “do we need training about online courses? I know, I know! How much more Zoom University do we need?

Good online courses help you implement your job hunt. That’s the difference. It means nothing to your job hunt to work “exercises”. The value of courses is in actually getting the email sent, actually getting the interview, actually networking.

And when job hunting, we want access to training that gets us in touch with people, helps us develop relationships.

“How Can Online Courses Help Us ’Get There’?”

There are different modalities whereby you can learn something, and online courses have their place. Here, let’s talk about what I think online courses should deliver.

The Repeatability Factor is Critical

The first thing I think online courses should offer is repeatability. If something is said amazingly well and really makes its point and delivers results, then that material sho...

Ever Felt LinkedIn Failed Your Expectations? Here’s How to Fix That

Delighted to have a moment here to talk about LinkedIn with you and how to use it properly so that you get what you came here for - you get to where you want to go in your job hunt! 

When I look out on the international student space I don't see LinkedIn receiving its highest value. And as a result, people are not empowered in their job hunts. 

Within The Career Accelerator Program -  my flagship training for getting great work experience and getting paid for it - we are all about using tools in the right way to empower our job hunts. 

LinkedIn comes down to this one question: 

“Are you using LinkedIn proactively or as a passive recipient of messages?”

Are you mostly just getting sales pitches?

Ever hesitated to check someone’s LinkedIn page or messaging someone in your dream company? 

That’s what's going on in a lot of the lives of job seekers in the LinkedIn game.

This is an OK place to start! If you'...

Let’s talk about creating a crazy effective professional summary for your resume! 

The first thing I want to do is to start off by saying that you do need to have a professional summary for your resume. You need to have it there - it needs to be prominent and on the top.

If you don't have a professional summary, you are basically not going to succeed in your job. Sounds controversial, but essentially this is the truth because we want to talk about what a professional summary means and what it implies by having one.

Essentially, by having a professional summary, you are making a statement about how you help solve a particular kind of problem. A crazy effective professional summary will do that, whereas ones that are less effective are saying something very general or what you're looking to have and what kind of a job you want, those are less successful as professional summaries.

To start things off, we want to talk about the essential aspect of having a professional summary, it's ...