How Students Can Overcome "Bad" GPAs, Majors, & Internships | Ep #695

Welcome to the Dream Job System, the only podcast that provides proven tangible strategies to help you land a job you love without traditional experience, and without applying online. Get ready to level up your job search with your host Austin Bellsack. Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Dream Job System podcast. I'm your host Austin Bellsack, and in this episode we're going to talk about what you should do if you're a student who's worried about your GPA, your major, your internships, or all of the above. So this topic is near and dear to my heart because I was the student who are worried about all of the above. For me, my grades were never good, and that created intense stress and intense pressure for me because for my entire life, everybody told me how important your GPA was in your future and how I wouldn't be able to get a good job if I didn't have good grades, which I didn't. And then I graduated and I had this major that was completely irrelevant to what I wanted to do. I studied biology in school and I wanted to get into sales in the tech space, and they're not necessarily looking for biology majors. And then on top of that, my internships consisted of really one internship at one company. I didn't have a robust suite of internships at name brand companies, nothing like what students are doing today. And I think there's still the same pressures for students on all three of these things. In fact, I think they've been heightened today because of the way that academia and these companies have shaped the hiring process out of school. So there's even more pressure on GPA. There's even more pressure on deciding on the right major. There's even more pressure on getting not only the right internships, but a whole bunch of the right internships. And frankly, the number of people who check all three of those boxes is very, very small, but we're made to feel like it's very large as a student. And that can create a lot of stress and anxiety. So I'm actually here to tell you why the fact that people are so obsessed with those three things creates an advantage for you because that is a small scope, right? We're talking about three things, GPA, major, and internships. And of course, you want the best grades you can get. You want the most relevant major you can have. You want great internships. All of those things are going to help you. But there's something else that most people miss here. And that is when everybody is obsessed with a certain core set of criteria, a creates opportunities for everybody else to get creative, get innovative about how they operate, how they present their value. So I can tell you from the hiring side and having spoken to a ton of hiring managers and also having coached thousands of people, higher managers and employers will always prioritize real world experience over classroom experience. They will also prioritize an attitude of somebody who is a go-getter, of somebody who has an action bias, of somebody who's willing to take control of their passions and take action on those passions. They are going to prioritize that over somebody who just sits back and is reactive and kind of follows the rules and waits for somebody to give them instruction. So both of those things can actually create an advantage for you as a student because 99% of your peers are going to be focused on those three traditional credentials, GPA, major, and internships. And that's great. They can focus on those things. And like I said, you should too. But there are other ways for you to get your value noticed by employers. And because everybody is focused on that course out of criteria, if you kind of zig while everybody else is zagging, you actually create a larger differentiator because you're not competing on the same thing. You're basically creating your own game and it's a game of one. So it makes it much, much easier for you to win. So what do I mean by when I say that? Well, if everybody else is out here and they are vying for these internships, right? And some of them are going to win those internships. And let's say that you don't get the internship that you wanted or that you feel is directly aligned to the work that you want to be doing. Well, instead of accepting an internship that forces you to go do things that are not aligned with where you want to go, what if you created your own internship? So let's say that you want to get into marketing, right? And you have a dream list of 10 companies and maybe unfortunately you don't get an internship at any of those 10 companies. Well, instead of accepting a sub part internship at another company, what if you spent the summer three months going through and auditing three of those companies marketing strategies, doing a competitive analysis and then creating an entire case study saying, okay, I audited all of their go-to-market strategy. Here are the challenges. Here are the opportunities that I found. Here's the data that backs them up and here are solutions for what I think this company can do to be successful. And you build that all out in a case study that you then host on a personal website or you host on your LinkedIn profile. Well, now what you're doing is you are going out and generating real world results. You are auditing real businesses. You are critiquing their marketing strategies. You are coming up with your own solutions. You're also sharing them in public so anybody can see these things and it's far, far more valuable to see your thought process here than to try to read about it on a resume or to be pigeonholed into some cookie cutter intern role at a company you weren't really that excited about that's not going to let you do this kind of stuff. And this is stuff that you can bring with you. You can put it on your resume. You can put it on your LinkedIn profile. You can talk about it in interviews. So that's one option here. Another thing that you could do is to start freelancing your skills. So if you feel like your chops are high enough where you can start to go out there and actually make an impact on real businesses, you can start freelancing your skills and if freelancing feels like too large of a jump, you can actually volunteer. So you can volunteer at local organizations that are in your university's town or in your hometown or you can find them virtually. You can start with volunteering and you can work on a volunteer basis to generate results. Then you can turn those results into case studies and testimonials. And then you can start charging for your services. So you start by volunteering, offering your work for free in exchange for experience and testimonials. Then you go start soliciting actual business and you use that volunteer experience and those testimonials as evidence of what you can do and why people should pay you. This is exactly what I did when I was transitioning from healthcare into digital marketing. I'll be it after I graduated, but I was getting paid to hone my skills and experience. I started by volunteering in the digital marketing space once I had enough case studies I went out there and I started pitching my services and people were actually willing to pay me. So that is another thing that you can do here. And last but not least, you can just find another way to build a project in public. One of the coolest things about all of these options is that when you start working on your own stuff, your passion is going to shine through. You actually get to pick and choose the projects that you work on, but then you can begin to share your journey. So every time you learn something, every time you build something, every time you make a mistake, every time you get a win, you can create a post about it and you can put it on LinkedIn. You can put it on Twitter. You can write a blog post about it. And now you create this trail of breadcrumbs that's actually being pushed out to other people if you're using a platform like Twitter like LinkedIn, that's going to generate views. And those views are going to turn into folks who want to follow your journey. And the people who want to follow your journey are going to become more and more invested in what you're doing. And that's going to help you build out and expand your network. And all of a sudden, before you know it, you're going to have connected with a whole bunch of new individuals who are probably working in the space you want to get into. They're following along because they've seen your growth and they actually see the case studies that you've built. They know what you can do. And now that question of not having the best GPA or not having your relevant major or not having the best internships, that goes out the window because your value has already been illustrated. It's already been proven out. So I say all this to say, if you are worried about your GPA, your major, the internships you've gotten or all of the above, don't instead take that time, take that energy and reallocate it into finding your own way to create your experience on your own terms. If you do that, I promise you it's going to be much, much easier to overcome all of these objections. But not only that, you are going to be one of the only people at your school. And just in the pool of candidates, who is proactive enough to create their own experience, who is passionate enough to go out and take action on their own. And that is going to allow you to play a bit of a different game. That is going to differentiate you from everybody else who is just trying to be slightly better than the person above and behind them in a pool of hundreds of thousands of students. This is going to put you on a different playing field. Your value is going to be much, much more obvious and it is going to be so much easier for you to land a job that you're looking for. So that's it for today. Thank you as always for listening. And I will see you in the next episode of the podcast.