Building on academic experience
Over your time at Glasgow, you will have developed a strong range of skills both from your formal coursework and by taking part in other extracurricular activities.
You have a mix of skills and strengths and some of these fall within the ‘skills matrix’ which Glasgow framed under the term ‘graduate attributes’. Attributes are skills which a university defines as particularly important within the student journey and which also have a clear employability dimension to them.
Graduate Attributes
As a graduate, it is important to take stock of how far your skills have progressed and record a variety of evidence-based examples, showing how you acquired, used or developed them. Having this evidence at your fingertips will make it much more likely that you ‘count yourself in’ when you see these skills (or attributes) mentioned in employers’ job adverts and person specifications.
Revisit Glasgow’s graduate attributes to help you reflect on what you can offer graduate employers.
Make sure you include any research experience in a lab or with an academic from Glasgow or another institution. The same applies to practical business case studies. But whatever degree you studied; your academic staff were focused on embedding graduate attributes content into the teaching. Reflection is needed though to extract the evidence from your overall experience which will help you now as a graduate job candidate.
What our grads say
Name: Keshini Beetul
Graduated: 2019
Studied: MSc Biotechnology and Management
Current Job Title & Organisation: Scientific Officer at Eco-Sud Mauritius
The approach to building on academic experience is unique to everyone on this journey.
I explored my research interests by working in a couple of industries between my undergraduate and postgraduate studies. To build my academic portfolio, I welcomed opportunities such as writing scientific articles as well as presenting my final projects’ findings at local and international conferences among others. I also found it interesting and helpful to take on a research internship, even if the area of research was remotely related to my own – as it equipped me with transferrable skills.
This journey is certainly exciting but can be disheartening at times. What motivates me the most is my purpose to contribute to the effort to solving pressing questions and issues related to climate change. However, on bad days, I do lean on the wise words of many great people to keep going. One of my favourite quotes for a crisis is from Elon Musk: “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour”.
