university of siegen career service english language website
… at least a little bit, even if you are actually happy that it has finally arrived, the long-awaited invitation to the job interview. Who wants to know how to prepare well and successfully for the interview, should visit career:IMPULS, this week, Thursday, 11.03.2021, at 5:00 pm. Registrations directly by mail to info@career.uni-siegen.de
… that perhaps is the best recommendation to give, if one is dealing with the written application. But of course some background information is always helpful. So joining todays career:IMPULS “How to apply” is a good idea for everybody who wants to make his application more successful.
… heard the last lecture. It’s 5 p.m., the online university day is over, you turn around, still on the desk chair. You spent the whole day in front of your screen, and now, from one moment to another, you’re at home. And that brings you back to questions, perhaps discussed in the morning at the breakfast table with parents or friends, and you wonder what you can do with all the academic stuff, later in your professional life. And of course you still have some applications waiting to be sent. The application for the internship, mandatory in the next semester for example, and for the job, of course, which you hope is to follow the study, seamlessly, if possible.
This is exactly the situation the career:IMPLUS seminars have been designed for. In the evening, when your university work has been done, one hour focusing on a topic from the area of application and career planning. Compact information, background knowledge and many opportunities to get involved, so that no question remains unanswered and the evening is relaxed and made well use of. The goal: You can plan your career path with a new perspective.
… are not nice, of course. But if you look at them more closely, they are not such a bad way to start thinking about what you are doing right now and what you want to do in the future. To prevent your reflections from turning into musings, it is important to talk about them with others and to inform yourself. For this purpose, the central student advisory service is offering a digital theme day on Feb. 11, 2021. The Career Service will be there. The program can be found here: https://www.uni-siegen.de/zsb/psychologische/infoveranstaltung.html
… and that makes me think of René Descartes and his „Discours de la méthode“, containing an autobiographic episode, where he describes how he, just passing through a small village near Ulm, prevented from continuing his journey by the unusually severe winter of 1619, found the leisure to contemplate his thoughts as he was enclosed all day alone in a small warm room.
Currently in the home office, browsing my home bookshelves, Descartes’ book fell into my hand and I got stuck on the little green volume, the bilingual edition of Felix Meiner Verlag.
Descartes contemplative time of leisure was the impetus for a text that, first published in 1637, has left its mark in the history of philosophy. Today, for me, in my profession as a counselor, it is an impulse to trust one’s own thinking, one’s own judgment, and to encourage the people I counsel to do the same.
Here are a few links as a suggestion to continue browsing and thinking about independent thinking and the impulses it can give one, for the diverse shaping of one’s own life path.
Text editions freely available on the net:
The French original: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Discours_de_la_m%C3%A9thode/%C3%89dition_Adam_et_Tannery
A German translation: https://www.textlog.de/descartes-methode.html
And an English translation at gutenberg.org (only available if you don’t have a German IP): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59
And then tow interesting pages:
The transcript (in German) of a Deutschlandfunk radio broadcast: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/descartes-und-der-schnee.700.de.html?dram:article_id=81434
And an article (in German) about a conference in Ulm: Artikel über eine Tagung in Ulm im Jahr 2019: https://www.uni-ulm.de/universitaet/hochschulkommunikation/presse-und-oeffentlichkeitsarbeit/unimagazin/online-ausgabe-uni-ulm-intern/uni-ulm-intern-nr-351-februar-2020/descartes/
… was a colleagues answer, to my question about his expectations for the coming 2021. The look of the little good-luck pigs on the office desk seem to say just that. The picture was taken before the Christmas lockdown at the Career Services office. The transparent bags were part of the package for employees, a small substitute for the Christmas party, combined with good wishes for a new year.
… is the book store of Walther König in colognes Ehrenstraße. The Result of my last visit is a warm orange yellow book on my table. Perhaps it was the subtitle that finally made me take it home: „Lebenswege in eine Welt für sich“ (Life paths to a world of its own).
Life-paths are diverse, and making your way in the world of art, especially as a profession, rarely follow classical patterns or traditional tracks. Franz Schultheis, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of St. Gallen, has published this volume entitled „Kunst als Passion“ (Art as Passion), ISBN 978-3-96098-429-0, in which he has compiled around 200 interviews with people who talk about their way into the world of art, both professionally and as a private passion.
The publisher of this book is Walther König, the owner of the legendary art-book-store in colognes Ehrenstraße. Walther König was a guest at the career:FORUM of Siegens University in 2014. He knows everybody of importance in art and his ambition as a book dealer is to have every book about art available in his shop or make it available. The screen:BOOK, documenting his visit, is still online. Here the link: https://www.uni-siegen.de/cs/medien/screenbooks/screenbook_waltherkoenig.pdf
Last but not least: A special feature of the video interview is the need to put yourself in the right #light not only verbally but also practically. It is important that you are easy to recognize and that you are not blinded yourself. Very bright light from the side can have the disadvantage that the illuminated half of your body and face looks very pale and your facial expressions cannot be recognized properly. Ceiling lights can, depending on their placement, blind the interviewer and make you appear only as a shadow. It is best to use a frontal, indirect light source. This source could be a window or a lamp reflected from the wall.
Think of three aspects in advance that you can bring to the job that may not be on your #resume. It is important to make yourself indispensable and attractive for the company. What added value you can you bring to the company with your #skills? Maybe your communication skills? Maybe your ambition? Or maybe your keen interest in the job topic? In times of home office, companies are increasingly looking for applicants who are flexible, independent and adaptable. One way to present these qualities could be to tell what your situation looked like during the difficult initial phase of the pandemic and how you coped with it.
And now we come to the probably most important aspect of the „home interviews“ – the technical requirements. Here the motto is to eliminate as many sources of problems as possible in advance. This includes, among other things, that a reliable and sufficiently strong Wifi connection is available. It is also helpful to inform roommates/family about the upcoming job interview and to ask them not to download large data packages during the interview. Furthermore, the laptop should be fully charged, the cell phone should be available as backup and other applications should be closed to avoid annoying pop-up windows. You should also make sure that #camera and #microphone are working. It also makes sense to use a LAN cable for security reasons.