Three wonderful years have come and gone, and I truly can't believe I'm saying this, but it's time for me to say goodbye. I apologize in advance for how cliche this post may become, but I never fully learned how to process my emotions and I have been feeling a lot of them in the past few weeks.
More than anything, I want to say thank you. Thank you for believing in me as a young and awkward freshman, and hiring me to write for and about the Career Center even though I probably didn't deserve this job back then. Thank you for allowing me to refine my voice as a writer, for allowing me to write about my own experiences as well as the Career Center's services, for making me feel welcome from the very start of my work here. (I also have to give a special shout-out to my first supervisor and Career Center mom Nicole Anderson - Nicole, I cannot begin to express how grateful I am for everything you did for me.)
Thank you for believing in me again when you hired me as a Career Fellow a year later, and for your patience in grappling with my schedule as a dually-employed student who seemed to never leave the office. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to meet and work with students from all walks of life, for increasing my understanding of on-campus organizations and relationships, for teaching me how to write a resume that a recruiter once told me was "the most impressive resume for a 22-year-old that I've ever seen."
Thank you for your unwavering kindness, whether it was in the form of pleasant small talk in the office, a gift of free food (seriously, I would have starved to death junior year without you guys), or praise for my work even when I didn't think it was of the quality that should be praised. Thank you for becoming such an important part of my undergraduate experience, for giving me a confidence in myself that I so desperately needed, and most of all, for willingly tolerating all of my blog posts' outlandish GIF choices.
To all the current students who are reading this, I am obviously an extremely biased source, but I cannot stress enough how incredible of a resource the Career Center is. Every single one of us will need to get a job one day, and the Career Center is a resource for Jumbos now and after graduation. There is literally a team of professionally-trained, friendly people waiting in the back of Dowling Hall to help you in every way possible to get that job, find that internship, finish that resume. Do not be that person who waits until senior spring to walk in the door. It can be a 15-minute drop-in with a Career Fellow or a one-hour appointment with a Career Advisor - no matter what it is, you will get something out of coming here. Look at everything that I got out of three years of regular visits.
So, in a state of denial, I conclude this post, and with it, my time as a Social Media Intern for the Career Center. With bittersweet excitement, I look to the future, and cannot wait to start my own career, and to hear about how the Career Center grows and changes (and hopefully, in many ways, stays the same) as I do. Since my normal "until next time" sign-off may not exactly be appropriate here, I'll just say...
With deepest gratitude,
Sean Boyden
Class of 2017
