We look forward to working with you on defining a career with purpose and meaning. Don't hesitate to email us at career.center@bc.edu or drop into our office during our office hours.
Welcome to Boston College from the BC Career Center
We’re excited to meet you and to get to know you. The Boston College Career Center's goal is to help you discover your unique gifts and talents so you can pursue meaningful work and live a meaningful life. It’s important to start thinking about career exploration during your first year -- but that doesn’t mean you need to figure it all out. It means following your interests, getting involved, compiling experiences, and reflecting.
Getting Started
In order to help you get started with this process, we are asking all incoming students to complete a series of self-assessments using the Focus 2 Career portal by Monday, July 29, 2024. This exercise will provide you an opportunity to reflect on how your skills, interests, and values align with BC-specific majors as well as a range of occupations.
Complete Your Self-Assessment
Register for your free Focus2 account. Go to the Boston College Focus 2 platform, click and fill out the quick form.
Note: You’ll need to enter the Access Code: Eagles
Complete the following five self-assessments within the Focus 2 platform:
- “My Academic Strengths” -- Recognizing your academic strengths will bring you one step closer to pursuing a satisfying area of study and career path. A key part of career planning is finding a career that is a good fit with your personal attributes.
- "Work Interest Assessment" -- The Work Interest Assessment will identify occupations that provide the kinds of work related activities and tasks you most enjoy doing. Your top three work interests can be matched to occupations and majors that will typically appeal to you.
- "Personality Assessment"-- The Personality Assessment will match your personality type to occupations compatible with your personality preferences. Your personality type describes how you react to certain situations/people, make decisions, organize information and go about solving problems.
- "Values Assessment" -- The Values Assessment will identify occupations that are compatible with your work values. Your work values are job-related beliefs and ideas that are important to you.
- "Skills Assessment"--The Skills Assessment will identify occupations that match your skills profile. Skills can be learned or be the result of natural abilities and talents for doing certain tasks. It is important to explore occupations that you have the ability to do or plan on becoming more proficient in.
Once you've completed all the self-assessments, click the "Combine the Results" button. Select different assessment results (Work Interest, Leisure Interest, Skills, Personality, Values) to uncover potential BC-specific majors and occupations that could be of interest to you.
Note: Results are a mere starting point. Suggested occupations and majors are not exhaustive and should be viewed as inspiration for further discussion and exploration.
Explore, rate, and save the occupations and majors. The Focus 2 platform should be an ongoing resource where students can explore majors and occupations as well as update and review results.
Students’ Holland codes, taken from their Work Interest Assessment, will be shared with their pre-major advisor in advance of the fall semester. Holland codes can be used as a conversation starter between the advisor and student in order to spark a discussion around interests and potential paths.
Any incoming student who wishes to debrief their results should plan to schedule a meeting with an Exploration Career Coach at the Boston College Career Center once the fall semester begins.
Other Ways to Start Exploring
Complete your Handshake profile, including work experience, courses, extracurricular activities, and more. Add a photo and summary to help your profile stand out. If you’ve never logged in to Handshake, activate your account by logging in to the platform using your Agora username and password.
To sign up for a career cluster(s) and receive newsletters related to your interests, update your career interests in Handshake. By updating your interests, not only will you receive updates and resources from our coaches, you’ll be 5x more likely to hear from relevant employers directly about open positions and upcoming events. We have six different industry-focused career clusters to choose from. Read through the industries that fall within each career cluster to see which appeals to you.
Create or update your resume using the step-by-step information and sample resumes by career cluster on the Career Center website. If you’d like feedback on your resume, attend drop-ins.
"What Can I Do With This Major" can help show you some popular paths that people with specific majors go into for employment as well as what types of employers could potentially hire them. While this is not an exhaustive list of all the things that you can do with your major, it is a great way to fuel your sense of possibility! You will be surprised at the variety of career paths you could pursue!
Connect with the BC alumni network through Eagle Exchange to learn about careers and fields of interest. Eagle Exchange is an interactive virtual platform that fosters connections between students and Boston College alumni. You can use Eagle Exchange to build your professional network, ask career-related questions, find alumni mentors, and more. It is up to you to make the most of your Eagle Exchange account. This guide below will help you get started.
