This week I created my LinkedIn profile page and began reaching out to people and searching for potential internships and jobs. I read an article that provided tips for my profile page. I think some of the tips were helpful reminders to realize that this is a social media page, and therefore not everyone will see every post that you upload. Also, the information that I do decide to share needs to be presented in a professional, yet exciting manner so that it encourages people to comment and react. This will increase the chance of more people seeing my post. Another tip that I found helpful was to avoid using links on the website because the website will block most people from visiting my link.

I also looked at a few articles describing email etiquette. It’s important to keep all emails professional sounding and engaging. A few tips that I found helpful were to try to convey your main point in the first few lines, as that is what most people can see in the preview. Also, you should have a clear subject line so that there is no confusion, especially if you’re emailing somebody new that doesn’t already know you. Another good tip is to look over your email before sending it. An email should not be a nice paragraph or two, rather than a book and it should include punctuation only when necessary. If you reread an email that you just typed and it still seems unclear, then it may be a good idea to scratch it and come back to it later. There is a very good chance that if you don’t know what you’re trying to say then the person that receives the email definitely won’t understand and that could be hurtful to you depending upon the situtation.

While all of this is important information, I find it equally important that individuals set boundaries for themselves. It’s good to show your boss and coworkers that you’re willing to go the extra mile, and be available and ready to work, however, everyone needs time to decompress and take a break from work. I hope to have a set schedule in the future where I can dedicate specific times for checking my email so that I can relax most of my time while I’m at home.

I’m really excited about the material I was able to look at this week during class. I can’t think of a better way to get my foot in the door than an informational interview with a professional in the supply chain industry. Reviewing this assignment made me really excited and hopeful for my future career. Ever since I switched to being a mathematics major, I worried that I would have difficulties down the road getting my foot in the door and making connections to get my first job in the profession. This class has been really helpful to me, even in the first five weeks, because I feel like it’s given me the guidance that I needed to pursue this occupation. My hope is that this interview will open the door for me and allow me to make those connections that can help me get my dream job.

As I mentioned before, I fell in love with this career at a conference last fall when listening to Cody Zimmerman speak about his profession. My hope is that I can get in contact with him through the faculty in the mathematics department and that he will agree to an informational interview. I’m very excited and I think that I could learn so much more from him one on one, even in the matter of fifteen to twenty minutes. I think this interview could really do a lot for my future career and my hope is that I can get some pointers and tips on what to do going forward in order to be successful and get a job after college.

This week, I did some reading about good job searching techniques and how to succeed once you get a job. First, I read articles about big job searching mistakes that are made most often by new college graduates and job searching tips. My biggest takeaways from this article is to be more proactive, follow up on applications and take interviews seriously. It describes how many students make mistakes by not doing those three things. This article made me realize that I need to be more proactive when job searching and to use all of the resources that I have. Along with that, I need to follow up sooner on applications to show that I’m interested and prove that I deserve an interview. Also, I will make sure to prepare for interviews from now on by researching the company and practicing common interview questions beforehand. I also found a few job searching techniques that I plan to use from now on. For starters, I will make sure to include all work experience on my resume, even if it may not pertain to the position that I’m applying for. I was always unsure about what to include, however the extra work experience is never a bad thing and at the very least, it shows future employers that I’m reliable and can interact with customers. Also, I need to start finding a balance between being too picky and applying to everything when it comes to submitting applications. The quality of my resumes is better than quantity. While I need to be more open to job positions that aren’t exactly what I’m looking for, I need to start putting in the extra time to tailor my resume to a specific company each time I complete an application.

I also read articles describing what to do to in your future job in order to succeed. One article describes how it’s important to ask lots of questions, make good first impressions, and to pay attention to your surroundings, especially in your first week. I tend to be reserved and try to complete things on my own. So, even though I usually have lots of questions, I try to ask the bare minimum. However, I’ll need to work on that, to learn to accept help from people. I would also like to demonstrate my commitment to my future job through good first impressions. Arriving early and staying a little late can show my future employer that I’m excited to be there and learn and that I’m a hard worker. This should not be a problem for me as I already do it all the time for work and school. Lastly, it’s good to pay attention to what’s around you. As I said before, I’m a little reserved, so I have no problem watching and learning. I think it will be fairly easy for me to get a feel for the office within the first week. I also think it will be beneficial to watch my coworker’s daily routines to get a feel for how my routine should run.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook contains some very useful information. Focusing on the “math” tab, operations research analysts, aka supply chain, have the lowest median pay in 2018 of about $75,000. Mathematicians and statisticians are close, making roughly an extra ten thousand, while actuaries were in the $100,000 range. I was a little startled at first that it was “that low”(although 75 thousand is still good money), compared to the median for actuaries, even though both entry level positions only require a Bachelor’s degree. However, I realized that those numbers are actually reasonable. Actuaries are hired by insurance companies, which are really big businesses that make tons of money, so it’s understandable that these companies can afford to pay so much for an actuary. Logisticians on the other hand, are needed in decently sized companies, as well as the larger ones. Therefore, working for a smaller-sized company, one obviously would not receive as much pay. I’m sure there are plenty of larger companies out there, such as Walmart, that would pay a supply chain manager much more than the median for an actuary to start.

Looking deeper into just logisticians, I think boosted my self-esteem quite a bit. I was happy to see that no work experience is necessary to get into the field, especially since I’ve been having a hard time trying to find related internships. Also, knowing that I’m moving to South Carolina after graduation, it was refreshing to see that the state has a decent amount of jobs in the field.

I also watched an interesting TED talk video this week, about being an opportunity maker. It talked about how rather than talking and working with people that think and act exactly like you, opportunity makers actively seek situations with people that are unlike them in order to build new relationships. Listening to this talk made me think back to when I first heard about supply chain. I attended a mathematics conference, at which a supply chain manager spoke, the same place that I fell in love with the job. The thing that stuck with me most was how diverse his team was. He was proud to say that not everyone on his team understood the mathematics behind their solutions. Rather, he had a very diverse team, made up of only two mathematics majors, along with art majors, music majors, business majors and more. Everyone was so different from each other, but that was the beauty that created their teamwork. Each person had their own individual ideas and strategies to solve whatever problem that they had, which allowed them as a team to analyze all sorts of different options. I truly look forward to my career, and my hope is that my team leader is also an opportunity maker so that I can experience that diversity in my daily work.

Throughout the week, I have been looking into trade publications and professional organizations for supply chain. I have found that trade publications come in all forms such as magazines, blogs, newspapers, etc. I mostly focused on a site named Kenco, which is a blog for the top supply chain management publications. Kenco shows fourteen main publications, all different branches within supply chain. Specifically, I looked into American Journal of Transportation, Food Logistics, Inbound Logistics, Material Handling and Logistics and Supply Chain Brain. I really enjoyed the Food Logistics, as that’s the specific field that I would like to end up in. The website had a bunch of different magazines that I could read through about new inventions and what’s going on in the industry, as wells as information about transportation and warehousing specifically for food companies. I also found Supply Chain Brain really interesting, and think that it could be helpful to me in the future. It covers various categories of supply chain such as logistics, technology, general SCM(supply chain management) and more. I think that could be a useful resource in my future career.

To my surprise, there were a lot of professional organizations associated with supply chain. I knew that it was a big industry, however, I wasn’t expecting there to be so much information and organizations related to it, mostly because I had only heard of supply chain management recently. I discovered a website with the top supply chain associations. ACSM is the Association for Supply Chain Management, an unbiased partner that is connecting companies world wide to new insights in all areas of supply chain. Their goal is to drive innovation in the industry with new products, services and partnerships, enabling companies to optimize their supply chains. There are tons of organizations associated with supply chain, providing resources from education, networking, supply chain certifications, and even more.

Math has always been my favorite subject. Growing up, I had always believed that I would be a math teacher in the future. However, once I got into my second year of college, I interacted a lot with students and faculty of the math department. I knew that it was an option for a student to major in mathematics but I never knew what someone could do with a degree in math. Faculty and friends peaked me interest in higher mathematics and encouraged me to switch majors. So, now I am a mathematics major, planning to graduate December 2020. While I have found a new passion for higher mathematics, I am not completely certain on what I want to do with my career after college. I have found a few jobs that I think may suit me well but I’m more of a hands-on kind of person, so I worry that I may not like it once I see what the job actually entails. I have also considered attending graduate school and becoming a college professor, which is a job that I think I would enjoy, however I have done little to no research thus far in my mathematics career, and I don’t foresee that I would enjoy that enough to make it through a graduate program and land a position in a college. In October 2019, I had an amazing opportunity to attend the Careers in Mathematics Conference, here at KU, where people from different discipline spoke about their jobs and how they use math in their daily routines. Due to attending that conference, I sparked a major interest in joining supply chain management. It’s all about optimization of products. As the professional put it, he is “a weather forecaster but for groceries.” I think that sounds like a really fun job, and would be something that I’d love to do, so that’s what I hope to go into once I get out of college. However, I have no experience supply chain and I’m having difficulties finding mathematical internships of any kind, let alone ones that are supply chain related, so I worry about landing a job after I graduate.