Sociology research assistant skills for your resume and career

These days in the job market, the abilities, as mentioned previously, to understand human behavior, contextualize events, and frame what is occurring. The problems that STEM students have now are designing products for humans but do not have that training. Our students are trained to understand humans at the state, institutional, organizational, group, and individual levels in sociology. This allows our students to find jobs if they desire to gain employment in STEM fields and data analytics in general.

Increasingly, we see that the hard skills, due to technology changing so fast, become antiquated quickly. Employees must be retrained yearly or every other year. Therefore, the hard skills have lost some value. We provide our students the opportunity to learn not only statistical packages like SPSS and R, but they have the opportunity to do computational research, textual analysis, and data visualization. This provides our students the opportunity to learn skills they can apply to STEM fields, but our students have the bonus of understanding human behavior. Something that in the workforce is rarely taught.

Many things you can do without enrolling in college can improve your chances on the job market. For example, train yourself in the use of ArcGIS or Q. Having Geographic Information Systems (GIS) skills is highly marketable skillset for many sectors that hire graduates in anthropology. You can also learn R or other similar statistical programs that can bolster your research and analyses skills. Of course, anthropology is about people, so projects or volunteer opportunities that facilitate community building are excellent ways to help the people around you and build your experience portfolio. Giving back or studying social processes in a way that can help improve people's lives is a great place to start applying your anthropological knowledge. Whatever you do, do not spend your gap year playing video games in your parent's basement. You really need to work toward a set of goals. That could be writing an article for your local newspaper or a popular website or volunteering at a nearby clinic or shelter. Also remember, there is really no replacement for college credentials so not finishing those degrees will not serve you well in the future market.

Employers value our graduates for their ability to independently solve complex problems, whether in or out of the lab. This skill has not and will not change regardless of instructional mode.