Just for Parents!

2026 Update: Our career expo (formerly the career fair) now attracts a lot of nonprofits, grad programs and social impact orgs that may interest your student! We also host our own Changemakers Summit in the spring in which we invite local changemakers to campus.

Our 2021 grads asked us to produce an episode just for the parents, family, and friends of students interested in government, policy, advocacy, nonprofit, or international affairs. Amy and Susan explain what you need to know to best support your student! 

Transcript

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
Hello everyone. This is Amber Brown and Ahmar Ursani.

We are both GPSI career coaches, and we're here to provide a few updates and a refresh on our existing podcast series.

So some of our episodes use our old community name, but we want to clarify that our new community name is Government Policy and Social Impact.

Or you can just say GPSi, see for short.

We want to highlight our updated career engagement model as well in this episode because it helps us contextualize the work we do.

So I'm going to give you a brief overview of the stages, and you can see more in the show notes.

So it starts with understanding yourself, which is super important for reflection and visioning possibilities,

preparing to the actual search and apply process.

And then finally when you're actually engaging in your opportunity.

So you may also hear in some of our older podcast episodes, a reference to what's called a live chat.

And we wanted to make sure you noted that it's no longer in existence, but instead we have a different resource,

which we have various in-person drop in hours that we had that are GPS specific throughout the week.

And there was also a time that you can meet our career peers. Um, available Monday through Friday for on demand support.

Additionally, we no longer use canvas. All the resources have migrated to our GPS website.

A link again will be provided in the show notes. And our last technology update is we want to discuss Career link.

It's now handshake. So in handshake it's our one stop shop for career related events job and um, job and internship postings.

You can schedule your appointments there and more. And to close, we want to state that our annual Career expo now has a GPS specific focus day,

where employers from our industry come to you to discuss career options.

This, along with our annual Changemaker Summit, which brings local nonprofits to campus, helps you see how you can make an impact on our world.

So thank you so much for listening to this. If you have any additional questions, feel free to reach out to anyone on our team.

Hope you're having a good day. See you. Yeah. Thank you.

Welcome to the GPP podcast for budding politicos, policy wonks and advocates.

I'm Amy Heath Carpentier,

and I'm Susan Craig as career counselors in Washington University's Career Center and co-directors of the Government and Policy Work Group.

We walk alongside burgeoning policy wonks, politicos and change agents as they chart their paths to change the world.

This podcast is for you if you're interested in hearing tips and techniques that will position you to find your place in the fast moving,

mission driven world of politics, policy, and advocacy. Actually, this podcast is for you.

If you're a parent of a college student who is pursuing a place in the fast moving, mission driven world of politics, policy and advocacy.

That's right. We've had a number of requests from our students to direct a podcast to their parents.

It's a field and a job search process that is often unfamiliar to parents of college students.

Things have changed a lot since we graduated and got our first jobs,

so we're going to spend some time today talking to you about what you can expect and how you can be supportive of your student.

The first thing we think you should know about this field of government and advocacy is that there's no traditional recruiting cycle.

The career fair that students often attend only attracts a few employers who are relevant to your student.

So your student may not want to put on a suit and attend the career fair.

The places they want to work just don't show up to these like they would like them to.

Now we do often advise them to go.

It's a great low risk way to practice their pitch and explore their options, but it's probably not worth pushing them on it.

If they're refusing to go, yes, and some of the organizations that do come tend to be in very specific spaces.

So, you know, if your student is interested in the intelligence community, sometimes we have those employers show up.

Yeah. But, you know, the sort of more advocacy based, smaller nonprofits often don't.

So it's it's important to kind of know their interests and, and go from there.

The next thing you need to know, which follows from this lack of a formal recruiting cycle,

is that the timeline to apply and get offers to jobs and internships is all over the place, and mainly is uncomfortably late in the school year.

We've seen lots of seniors that cross the commencement stage without job offers,

and interestingly, we have had several receive offers as they're crossing the state.

We are not kidding about that, parents. It's true. And we've even had some of our strongest candidates not get offers till after they graduate.

So it's not indicative of your student and their potential.

Many students who want to get an internship in D.C. don't even get that offer till late April or even May.

This can be very stressful for your students because their friends in the business, school, or engineering have been set since fall.

A lot of the programing and advising we do is around familiarizing students with this timeline so they recognize they're not behind or left behind,

and their anxiety can go down a bit. This is where we could use your help.

Your understanding of this timeline can help us in getting some of the pressure off your students.

Your loving inquiries about what they're doing this summer can add to some stress that they're already putting on themselves.

So if we work together to remind them of this kind of delayed and frustratingly late timeframe, perhaps it will stick.

So here are a few other things that you might not know in this field.

Internships are very important. They're also very competitive and sadly they are can be low or even know paying.

So this also adds to your student's stress. On top of that part about them not landing until late into spring.

So we offer several pieces of advice around internships to maximize their chances of landing and keeping the compensation piece in perspective.

First, we advise students to start building a target list and network early.

They can be doing this in their first year.

Networking is the most effective use of their time, and it greatly reduces the number of applications they'll need to complete.

We have a few podcasts on how to do these things if you're interested in learning more.

We often also encourage students to reach out to other students, not just to people high up in the organization,

so encourage them to reach out if they're first years or sophomores to juniors and seniors.

We have a few podcasts on how to do these things if you're interested in learning more, but just know this.

This is where we direct them to expend their energy.

So when you're doing your loving inquiry, the best question to ask then is have you talked with anyone interesting this week?

Rather than how many applications have you submitted?

Another way you can help with this process is to think about and leverage any personal, professional network you might have on your students behalf.

Many of our students start out despairing that their parents are doctors or engineers or teachers

or whatever that don't have what they think are connections to government policy advocacy,

but that's usually not true. So even if you're in a field that is far from this one, mine your contact list for people who might,

you know, have some exposure to it, even on a local level.

And aunts, uncles, parents of friends, the second and third connections are often the most fruitful.

I mean, I once had a student meet with a former roommate of her father's, which she found really odd,

but she did it because her father set it up and it wasn't the perfect connection.

But then he connected the student to his wife and it landed her a job.

Wow. Yeah. These are the kinds of third connections that you just.

It happens. But you don't need to have those connections in your own network.

That is why we build our alumni group for the government and public policy workgroup.

Yeah, which is such a great resource. So a good way to start is just to ask your student for their target list.

This will get them going on it if they haven't started one. And then take a look at it.

If you're not familiar with the organizations, make them explain them to you and why they appeal to them.

This is good practice for their cover letter writing.

And then maybe there's someone you know that's tangentially affiliated with an organization on the list or who just works in that same field.

So, for example, your student may have the ACLU on their list.

You probably don't know anyone there specifically, but maybe one of your friends spouses does civil rights law,

or maybe the student is interested in working on the Hill. We have a lot of students that want to do that sort of legislative work.

We've had some students with, um, ridiculously direct connections to members of Congress, but that's unlikely.

But it could be that, you know, someone who works for a member of your state house or state representative office or in the district office,

or maybe you even know someone who just lobbies with them or works with them indirectly,

maybe through government relations or your local school board?

Any kind of those kind of connections can be helpful for your student and can result in

them learning more because the internship or the networking process is as much about,

if not more about, learning and exploring possibilities than it is about directly landing a job or internship.

Out of that, it's just about that exposure, right?

And trying to understand what it looks like to be in that in that space and whether or not they want to be there.

Exactly. So we really believe in exploration as a big part of this.

Now, about the compensation piece. While this is challenging, many of the internships in policy and advocacy are unpaid.

They are resource constrained organizations with plenty of people willing to work for free.

Not that we agree with that, mind you, but there it goes.

And in D.C., Internships are really considered entry level positions because these organizations are resource constrained.

They just don't have the time or personnel to devote to rigorous hiring and recruiting and onboarding like bigger firms do.

So they bring in interns. It's like a trial run. They often result in full time jobs as a result.

A good number of our graduating seniors take internships even after they graduate.

This feels like a slap in the face to those who've worked hard to secure great internships during college.

It's like a hamster wheel feeling, so we try to remind them that it's not about them, it's the system, and it's not a great one.

If they persist and perform well in an internships, it will pay off in the long run.

Yeah, I like to consider it. Consider it as an investment with lots of potential for long term gains.

I know I made it work by moving to DC with a college friend and sharing a two bedroom apartment with two and sometimes three other roommates.

Um, so, you know, we just made it work. We landed. We all landed real paying jobs by the end of our six months.

So for those of you with graduating seniors who are thinking of just making the move without a job.

Know that they are not totally crazy. It is doable. A lot of our students do it, and we've never seen a student fail to find something.

Just a reminder for those students who are applying for internships,

the Career Center offers stipends that can help offset the cost of unpaid or lowly paid internships.

You can find out more on the Career Center website,

but those can be applied for as long as the students in the process of gaining an internship are along the sort of March,

April, May timeline, I think that's important for those students.

So that's it. We hope you found this helpful. We are grateful that you've given us the opportunity to get to know and advise your students.

And they're amazing. You already know that, but isn't it good to hear it?

Thanks for listening. Take care everyone.