Student internship skills for your resume and career

Our students tend to take a few years before settling on a career path. Many go to law school (our most recent grad who did so got a boatload of money, which is pretty rare for law schools); historically, all our graduates who have applied have gotten into good placs, and most in top-20 institutions. The three other graduates of 2020 took different paths: one is working for a relative who runs a business essential to the COVID response; another (double major in Writing) spent time writing for a few specialist journals and has applied to an MA program; the other, a second-generation immigrant, plans to apply to graduate school in Europe after the pandemic calms.

Over half of our majors double major in another field (we even had one in Chemistry about 20 years ago), and that gives them added flexibility (History and English are the two most common other majors for our double majors). Even in these tough times for academia, we have had students apply to and get large fellowships and scholarships for further study in Classics or History (2 Ph.D. acceptances, 1 M.A. in the last 4-5 years). A good percentage go into secondary education (teaching Latin and, often, something else in high school or junior high); these tend to work toward getting a master's degree in teaching as they move through their first years of employment. A couple have taken jobs at Loyola in administration or student life and used the university's benefits to get a degree in another field: for example, one double History and Classics major (and Phi Beta Kappa) got an MBA at Loyola and is now working in administration at another university. A few more of our double majors (Art History is another common component) have worked in the publishing industry, sometimes starting on the ground floor as proofreaders and have then moved up. One of these then moved into a Ph. D. program in Linguistics in Europe and hopes to land in a think tank or government agency here or in the EU.

Over the last 10 years or so we have had graduates spend 2 or more years in service-related work (the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and Teach for America have been common destinations) before continuing with work in the religious sector or social work.

Technical Skills - passion to work in agriculture, Precision Ag, Drone, - people skills, work ethic, farm background

We see many students go into museums or to graduate school where their research and writing skills, their communication skills, creativity and determination, are most important. This year has been a test of character. Museum or art market/art gallery jobs are often a transition into professional fields and graduate schools lead on to professorial or museum curatorial work in the future. Each year, graduates often take a year or two off in related fields before going on to graduate schools or the next step in their personal and professional lives. Familiarity with working remotely has (perforce) added new skills to us all and to our graduates in working today in our media world culture, a positive side to what otherwise has been a tragic year of pandemic, hardship, and death. There are "silver linings," but this has been a hard year for our students and us all, a real test of character and determination.