How To Gain Real World Experience as an Undergrad

By Joe Pawlikowski on May 20, 2013

The real world. It’s not just a reality show on MTV. It’s something you hear mentioned hundreds of times as an undergrad.

“College prepares you for the real world.”

“You can’t sleep until noon in the real world.”

“Time to leave the comfy confines of college and get a job in the real world.”

It’s tired, and it’s condescending. Yet underlying the overused phrase is a truth. College is supposed to prepare you for the real world, but in reality the job you get after college is nothing like your classroom or social experiences in college.

The two are so dissimilar, in fact, that any student would do well to get real world experience while in college. Internship programs help, but even then the experiences differ. While some interns get experience in their fields, too many are stuck running errands all day. How does that prepare them for anything?

There are still ways students can gain real world experience while attending class. It takes a little extra effort, but it can pay off greatly.

Join the newspaper

If the newspaper is a dying industry, then what can it teach students about the real world? While newspapers themselves might be going down the tubes, the art of interviewing and writing is not. In fact, many students will leave college and find themselves in a job with “marketing” in the title. Newspaper experience can help in many ways.

Marketing is about making connections with people. In the age of mass communications, that often means writing. At the newspaper you learn to write compelling stories that stir people’s emotions. In the marketing world you will have to create compelling stories that move people to buy. It’s easy to see the many similarities here.

Newspaper writing also involves talking to other people. The journalist, particularly the student journalist, is not an expert on any one topic. In order to write a colorful story, the journalist has to talk to experts and live in their world. It’s exactly how marketers work. They have to view the world through the eyes of others.

While you might not pursue a career in journalism itself, the experience of working for the school newspaper can be an enriching one for any field.

Freelance

The old formula doesn’t work any more. You don’t find a field, get a job, and stay there until you retire. People are changing jobs, and even careers, more often than ever. In fact, after college you might not even find a traditional job. You could very well find yourself working as a contractor, without an office to call home.

The best way to prepare for this is to gain experience with it during your college years. The assignments might not flow freely, since college students often lack the requisite experience and credentials. But there will certainly be jobs available for the taking. Covering town hall meetings for local newspapers is a great place to start.

Working as a freelancer in college teaches students the idea of being paid for the work they do, rather than being paid to be in an office. Since more students than ever will find work as freelancers after college, it’s best to get that head start as soon as possible.

Build websites

The future is the web. We’ve already seen consumer commerce shift that way. Soon enough even more of our transactions will shift there. It is those who know the landscape the best that will succeed. Know how the internet works and you have an advantage. The best way to learn, of course, is to do.

What will building websites teach you? Probably the most important lessons any young professional can learn.

Coding. When I was in high school advisors told me to take Spanish, because it was becoming an increasingly spoken language. But honestly, it’s probably more productive to learn a programming language. If computers are our future, those who know the architecture will thrive. Learning to code on the web will prove an invaluable skill in the future.

Design. What draws people? What turns them away? These are important questions for businesses that rely on website conversions. Learning this in college can bestow future advantages on a student.

Sell with words. Copywriting is hugely in demand, because words sell products. When you build websites you learn what words people respond to, and which turn them away.

Invoicing and payments. If you’re going to freelance you need to understand what’s required to get paid. It might sound straight forward, but it is not. Creating and managing invoices, and then accepting payments, is not as easy as maybe it should be. Learning to use online invoicing software such as WePay can help a student after college in many ways, whether as an entrepreneur or a freelancer.

The landscape has changed. We don’t define “job” the same way we did 15 or 20 years ago. The good news for college students is that they have more opportunities than ever to gain experience before graduating, making them more attractive to employers. By joining the newspaper, freelancing, or building websites — or any combination of the three — students can get that leg up on the competition.

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