College Admissions Counselors: Avoid Summer Melt with 10 Tips for Your Deposited Students

My university (Georgia State) has many First Gen students. I offer these 10 tips to motivate them over the summer. The tips are excerpts from my book, 99 Motivators for College Success, which colleges can mail to their deposited students:

10 Motivators for Professional Success

1. Don't let anyone crush your professional dreams.  However, the riskier your dream, the better your backup plan must be.

            Fly with a net or no net?

2. Live life with no regrets.  Sometimes doing the “wrong thing” may be the right thing for you.  Just be prepared to deal with the consequences.

3. The most important thing during school is to get out of the classroom and into an internship, which exposes you to the day-to-day ups and downs of that profession.  "Learning by doing" will give you a better appreciation of the job than learning through textbooks.

4. Do what you love but don't let your career choices jeopardize anyone you love. Including yourself.

Translation 1: Take care of others but don't forget to take care of yourself, sometimes before others.  Listen to our airline flight attendants: "Put your own oxygen mask on first before assisting others with their masks."

Translation 2: Do you know how to say NO to people you love or work with?

5. Determine whether you are driven to be your own boss or if you crave the stability of a steady paycheck.  Assess your personality traits and the risks inherent with both paths. (e.g., the risk of putting up your own money as your own boss versus the risk of losing a job in a company you work for) 

6. Don't rely on luck or fate in your career.  Professional success is about putting yourself in a position to create numerous opportunities.

            Can networking actually be fun?

                       

7. Over the course of your lifetime, there may only be a handful of impactful career opportunities.  Assemble an inner circle team of advisors now, so you'll be able to act quickly to objectively assess the pluses and minuses of future opportunities.

8. Do you recognize impactful career opportunities when they present themselves?  If you go for it, do you know what it means to push all of your chips into the middle?

9. Clean up your social media presence online!  What's publicly available might not bode well for your future employment. 

10. Always have fun!

            Well, I could only come up with 9 legit suggestions :)

Excerpt: 99 Motivators for College Success