Let’s be honest, finding a job or internship can be daunting. Coastal Carolina University’s Career Services office has a ton of helpful online resources that make “adulting” more manageable. These digital resources include dynamic job and internship portals, virtual career coaching and mock interviewing sessions, and online assessments that investigate potential career paths.  

My first secret weapons for tackling the job or internship beast: Career Shift or Handshake. These sites allow you to search based on location, type of employment and use of keywords. A cool feature about Career Shift is that it pulls job postings from all over the web (no need for those 50+ tabs cluttering your menu bar!).  

Handshake is the hub for finding internships and the quickest way for scheduling appointments, *cough cough* please make an appointment!   

For those who get anxious about interviewing (or in my case, sweat an abnormal amount even thinking about interviews), Big Interview is the website for you! This platform provides users with mock interviews and career coaching sessions, and you can even pick interview questions within your field of study. Users can record themselves to review their answers, gain feedback from the system and improve their delivery.  

Need to find your inner career path? The cream of the crop resource for self-discovery and career planning is Type Focus. This is an online assessment tool that allows you to investigate your interests and values and search for potential career paths. 

If you don’t like the idea of an “assessment,” think of Type Focus as the equivalent to those quirky BuzzFeed quizzes we all know and love…but for mapping out the rest of your life. Each assessment takes roughly five to ten minutes to complete and provides you with a detailed analysis of potential career paths that correlate with your results. 

All of these online resources are on the Career Services website, www.coastal.edu/career, and are free to students, faculty and alumni using their CCU login. Individuals are also encouraged to meet with a career counselor (preferably me, of course) if you have any questions. Appointments can be made online via Handshake or by calling (843)-349-2341 to schedule via phone.  

Next time: Don’t get me started on the pressure of having your whole life figured out as a college freshman! 

Editor’s note: This is a column written by Olivia Aleman-Lidstrom