Jim Parham, PR Chronicle

It’s good to think about the future and what great educational and job opportunities may come your way this year. While the economic news is as dark as a jet-black cat, it’s good to take an optimistic and almost scientific approach to internships and the job market.

Here are some New Year’s resolutions for aspiring students who need to land an internship or job.

1. Hone your writing and communication skills.
Sharp people get the first shot at a job and impressing someone with your skill-set will put you ahead of the pack.

2. Research your potential employer.
Not a cursory home page read of their Web site. Dig out the news, find some fresh content — study.

3. Talk to family, friends, professors, classmates.
Networking gives you the very best approach to learning of jobs and internships not widely disseminated.

4. Don’t rely on mass mailing resumes to addresses you found on the Internet.
Mailing resumes to “Whom it may concern,” is a wasted effort. If you don’t work hard at getting to the right people, you won’t get an audience with her/him.

5. Develop a hard-hitting and attractive writing portfolio of your best work.
Even if it’s class assignments, you must show the employer the best you have.

6. Don’t rely on e-mail; pick up the phone and call people.
You should know by now that e-mail has severe limitations for communications. You can’t hear someone’s inflections over e-mail or his enthusiasm or lack thereof.

7. Don’t give up and decide to go to grad school.
Sure, graduate school is an option in tough times, but you need experience (and maybe some cash, too) and a first job or internship provides that opportunity.

8. Make a New Year’s resolution: Get ahead of the pack, stay there and land the job that others want through hard work, smart research and networking.

It must be finals week in Bloomington because for once the libraries are more crowded than Nick’s or Kilroy’s.

As college students on campuses around the country are entering finals week, I thought it might be good to offer some advice on how to conquer the week ahead.

Get enough sleep. Cramming at the library or the union until the sun rises before your 8 a.m. final is not an effective study method. Your mind will function better if you make sure you’re scheduling your studying with time to sleep in between.

Make sure you arrive early for your exams and make sure to bring all of the materials necessary. A student of mine once told me the story of how one of her friends forgot his graphing calculator and had to run all the way across campus to fetch it from his dorm room, subsequently missing half of his calculus exam.

Make time to relax. Note that I said relax, not party. Watch a movie with friends or play some games, or bundle up and take a walk around the Arboretum. After all, you need to let Faulkner catch his breath once in awhile — all those long sentences can get pretty long-winded.

And, above all else, don’t panic. It is just a test. Most of the time undergraduate finals won’t bring you down more than one or two letter grades. And if worse comes to worse, there’s always next semester.

Over the long Thanksgiving weekend I got caught up on a bit of reading while I was trying to work myself out of a slight food coma. Dr. Frank Luntz’ book, Words that Work has a lot of good ideas on how to hone your writing skills. I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy for easy reading.

Here are some rules I thought he really hit on the head:

• Use small words. Simplicity counts.
• Use short sentences.
• Credibility is as important as philosophy. People have to believe what you say to buy it.
• Consistency matters. Repetition, repetition, repetition.
• Offer something new. Words that work often involve a new definition of an old idea. Sound and texture matter.
  
• Creative use of words in novel ways work.
• Speak aspirationally. Personalize and humanize the message. Spark emotion.
• Visualize. Simply paint a vivid picture. Write descriptively.
• Ask a question. Sometimes it’s not what you say, but what you ask that really matters.
• Provide context and explain relevance. Give people the “why” of a message before you tell them the therefore.

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