Network Your Way Through The Holidays

There’s absolutely nothing better than Thanksgiving— the warm feeling of dining with our loud-mouthed families, gorging on oven-fresh turkey, entirely not caring that in a matter of seconds we’ll be too full too move. After weeks of clobbering workloads, this sounds just fantastic---what we could all use and really need. Thanksgiving forces us to leave behind lonesome library hours for face-to-face interaction. From a Career Services stand-point, these animated conversations benefit us more than we know.

We all have those family members and friends that we only see during the holidays, just once or twice a year. After having the cliché freak-out that we’ve grown up so fast, they love asking about our lives—especially our real-world lives. Chances are, we’ll be talking about, rehashing, repeating, and re-repeating our career interests, job-search progress, and aspirations for the future. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, our Thanksgiving will be filled-to-the-brim with career chatter.

And why not take advantage of the career tips and networking opportunities Thanksgiving offers? Bask in the glory of being the night’s center-of-attention and roll with it. This is a time to openly and candidly talk about your aspirations, concerns, stresses, goals, roadblocks— really anything—in a non-judgmental and entirely supportive setting.

Of course, there’s always the consequence of too much too fast. If you’re tired of fielding questions about your career saga, redirect the focus a bit. See this as an opportunity to gather information from your family questioners, who definitely have some tidbits about this daunting thing called real-life. If the time calls for it, you might even ask your Thanksgiving attendees about their own career-lives—the current affairs of their own industry and how they landed that coveted first job. Even if they’re not in your field, they might have connections to field-relevant professionals, or know of some potential opportunities.

Thanksgiving is also a chance to set the stage for any career development on-the-agenda for winter break. In contrast to the mad-dash of Thanksgiving, winter break offers us a long expanse of time to arrange informational interviews, mingle with local professionals, and put our networking skills to good use. If we find a spare moment during the Thanksgiving recess, why not reach out to a few professionals to check in, reinforce our interest, and arrange a meeting for the month to come? It’s never too early to get your name etched into an employer’s busy calendar.

It goes to show that career-development is truly an everywhere, anywhere process. The most candid and vibrant career chatter springs alive when we’re in an atmosphere of relaxation and comfort. And besides, career talk is always most successful over a slice of pumpkin pie.

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Learning to Dine with Confidence

Let’s face it: we love to eat. We love it so much that when we engage in this scrumptious, feel-good hobby of ours, we rarely pause and think: how do I look right now? When it comes to food, we transform from poised, study-hard students into graceless, animalistic cavemen. We gobble, slurp, and swallow until every last morsel of food is down our throats or on our faces.

I’m the last to judge. Of all my friends, I’m always the one with leftover food smudged on my face. Rather than waiting for my food to come to me, I hunch over and graciously meet it halfway. Oh, and I’ll almost always steal off your plate.

But how we conduct ourselves over a meal is more important than we might think. It’s common for prospective employers to take a job candidate out for lunch--not explicitly to analyze fork and knife positions, but to get a feel for the person over what’s “supposed” to be a relaxed, out-of-the-work-zone environment. For quasi-animalistic eaters like me, this screams help. The gargly slurping, loud sipping, cow chewing of our natural habitats transferred to the critical eyes of our next boss? I think not.

That’s where Dining with Confidence comes in, a Career-Services sponsored program dedicated to reforming, and yes humanizing, our dining behavior. The vision of refined, lady-like eating herself, etiquette expert (and Career Services Director) Jean Papalia headed the event. She imparted her wise, worldly words of advice over a delicious four-course meal: butternut squash soup, salad, chicken, and a heavenly chocolate cake.

Jean started the program with true and false quiz, complete with clickers and fancy graphs detailing the room’s results. Then we applied our newly acquired etiquette techniques to the food itself. Here are some dining tidbits I learned throughout the afternoon:

1. Buttering the bread: oh, such a thorny one. When I see fresh, hot rolls plopped on a table, my first instinct is to grab one, slab on mounds of butter, and devour it in three bites. Tempting? Yes. Attractive to an employer? Not quite. To master the messy realms of the bread roll, break it apart in small pieces, butter ONLY one piece at a time, and eat slowly and in small bites. Also--a tidbit I didn’t know. When you pick up the bread-basket, the polite thing to do is offer it to your dining companion before you lunge for it yourself.

2. Never tell a host you’re not a fan of the food, even if you consider it borderline inedible. The purpose of the meal isn’t to soothe your taste palette, but to exchange conversation and impress with your words. So, if possible, try to hide your squeamish face and make a dent in the icky muck. Hey, from an etiquette patrol’s point of view, at least not-so-good food means not-so-big bites.

3. Don’t accept cocktail offers, however tempting it might be to join your prospective boss in a loopy daze. Rather than loose, impressive answers, the more likely scenario is silly blunders and awkward post-dinner stumbles. So save the champagne for the celebratory toast after you get the job. It’ll taste even better then.

4. Eat in small pieces! This may seem like an obvious one, but come that to-die-for steak and before long we’re engaged in a self-competition to the finish line. Approach your food slowly, and stick to the small, easy-to-swallow pieces. You’ll achieve fluid conversation without having to awkwardly motion “one-second” with your fingers.

5. Order a meal that is easy to eat--no matter how tempting other menu descriptions may be. We all love sauce-soaked chicken wings and stuffed-to-the-brim turkey clubs, but even the most ladylike of the pack can’t approach these savory wonders without a whole lotta mess. So unless you’ve mastered the art of the messy food, it’s probably best to save all that greasy, sloppy stuff for later.

6. Probably Jean’s most important piece of advice, underlying everything else she so expertly passed along: It’s not about the food! The point of elegantly dining with your prospective boss isn’t to restaurant hop and food explore, but to communicate and genuinely connect in conversation. Dining, and the oh-so-yummy food that comes with it, is the mere backdrop in which the employer-employee interaction transpires. No matter your locale, the aim is always the same: to position yourself as an impressive and likeable candidate for the job. It’s an opportunity to give your employer a feel for you: how you’ll contribute to the field, yes, but also what you’re like---how your persona will mesh into the job’s social and professional dynamics.

After two hours of etiquette training, I can’t exactly say I’m the world’s most delicate eater. But the dining tidbits I gathered will certainly help when the not-so-far-off time comes to start job hunting and impressing employers. And maybe after enough professional dining, we’ll come to apply some newfound grace and charm to our own everyday eating. That might take more time though…

Missed this semester's Dining with Confidence program? Be on the lookout for future opportunities to master the art of professional dining, small talk and more!

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Dining with Confidence

As I looked around the dining hall last night, I saw innumerable instances of horrifying dining infractions. Students were stabbing at their chicken with knives positioned in death grips a la caveman-style, noisily slurping down the last tricky-to-reach bits of the soup du jour, and engaging in riveting burping contests with each other.

Me? I was hardly the vision of proper eating technique either. I often talk with my mouth full and have even been known to - gasp - occasionally rest my elbows on the table. While no one really bats an eye at this behavior within the comforting confines of Dewick and Carmichael, exhibiting it in a professional environment will probably not go over too well. At this point, many of us seniors are going on job/internship interviews. It is not uncommon for an employer to take a prospective employee out to lunch, either to specifically talk business, or just to get a better feel for the person. It may sound melodramatic, but how you conduct yourself in a dining environment could play a critical role in whether or not you make a favorable impression with your host (i.e., get a job).

Perhaps the kind people of Career Services figured out this deep, dark secret of mine and feared that potential employment prospects could be ruined by my less-than-ladylike dining skills. With that in mind, they eagerly sent me off to the Dining With Confidence luncheon, held in the Chase Center on Friday, February 26. Cosponsored by Career Services, the Africana Center, the Alumni Association and Tufts Catering, this event taught attendees dining etiquette and networking advice over a delicious four course meal (butternut squash soup...mmm).

The event was run by Jean Papalia, the Director of Career Services, and also a certified Business Protocol Consultant. She started off the afternoon by presenting us with a true-or-false quiz about- what else - dining etiquette. Out of twenty questions, I got exactly two correct (and those two were trick questions, meaning that either answer could be right). Apparently, my dining predicament was far more dire than I had initially thought. Was I beyond repair?

Over the next two hours, Jean took us through all the various rules for dining, demonstrated clearly and humorously through slide shows and personal anecdotes. We learned helpful hints like:

• If you are the host, be prepared to pay for everything
• Do not begin eating until the host has
• Only cut one piece of meat at a time
• Break a piece off of your bread, butter it, and then eat it (buttering the whole slice at one time is a big no no...that was an epiphany for me)
• When eating soup, scoop away from you, and then eat it from the side of the spoon (without making any audible noises!)
• Try to keep pace with your fellow diners; if everyone else is done, you are "done" too (even if you haven't finished everything - it's not about the food!)
• When someone proposes a toast to you, you must always return the favor
  

Listening to Jean was very enlightening, and she brought up a lot of good points that I'd never thought of before. She also acknowledged that, although some "rules" have been on the books for a while now, it is up to us to decide whether to follow them, bend them, or break them. For instance, one traditional dining etiquette rule states that, whenever a lady gets up from or comes back to the table, all the men dining with her should stand up. In my own opinion, however, that seems a bit antiquated (and besides, all that getting up and down is just asking for something to be knocked over or spilled). In this case, I would kindly choose to break the rules, and assure my male dining companions that I was perfectly capable of rising from the table on my own.

It was also interesting to listen to my table mates talk about their own experiences (and faux pas) with dining etiquette. One student, who comes from Ghana, spoke to us about how, in her culture, it is considered highly disrespectful to not finish everything on your plate, especially in the presence of older people. So, whereas we are taught in America to keep pace with our peers and stop eating when they do, some cultures believe that finishing everything is a sign of appreciation and politeness (no matter how full you may already be).

By the end of the two hour event, as I was (quietly) sipping my coffee (by the way, Jean told us that it is not mandatory to stick your pinky finger out while doing so), I was feeling way more confident about my dining abilities than when I had first sat down. I was a lady of style and substance now! I could nibble, toast and small talk with the best of 'em! Certainly I will make a fabulous impression with any potential employers that may come my way (they'll show up...one of these days). And thennn I realized that those darn elbows of mine were still resting firmly on the table. Ah well...baby steps.

Watch the Career Services eNews and Google Calendar for future Dining with Confidence programs!

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