This Success Story highlights Sophie’s journey from a psychology student at Tulane University to securing an HR internship and full-time role at NBCUniversal. By focusing on strategic coaching, she transformed her work experiences, built confidence for interviews, and mastered networking to position herself as a standout candidate. Her experience offers valuable insights for students transitioning from academia to a thriving career in human resources.
Who: Sophie is graduating early from Tulane University with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology
Challenge: Sophie first worked with us to secure an internship the summer before her senior year. She decided to pursue human resources opportunities. Sophie needed to gain confidence before she started interviewing.
Next Steps: Jodi worked with Sophie to build her confidence, frame her work experiences into relevant stories, and think about the interview as a conversation.
We coached Sophie in the following:
- Ensured her resume pulled out her transferrable work experience. Being a camp counselor has many skills that are relevant to the workplace. Sophie’s stories reflected this.
- Educated Sophie about organizations to join as a student member to show her leadership involvement which makes her a great candidate.
- Guided Sophie on where to look for roles. She would search the usual job sites (LinkedIn, Glassdoor) but additionally showed her other sites that were specific to human resources as those were the roles she was targeting.
- Taught Sophie how to use LinkedIn to find connections at companies she was applying to. She learned that just applying online without outreach would not get a human to look at her resume.
- Practiced interview questions and responses to make Sophie stand out. What also helped her stand out was the company research and the questions she asked the interviewer.
- Shared LinkedIn and thank you note templates so Sophie could efficiently manage her time.
Outcome: Sophie landed an HR internship at NBCUniversal. She had a great experience and then had the opportunity to interview for a full-time job with NBCUniversal upon graduation. Jodi helped Sophie prep for these interviews, and she was positioned as the best candidate for the position. Sophie landed an internship and a full-time job.
