My Senior Situation (long)

[wegs the wegs]

Here’s the background. I am currently a twenty one year old senior at a small college outside of Chicago. I have been in school the last eighteen years of my life. I am a business major with a double concentration in Human Resources and Small Business Management. After this semester I will have 115 credits of the 125 required to graduate. I have completed all the required classes for the major and the Management concentration and need one more class to complete the Human Resources portion.

The eighth semester of college (second semester senior year) is designated the time to get some real world experience while still getting college credit. This means get an internship. I really want to get into Human Resources to start my career. Last spring I tried to jump the gun and try an internship over the summer to sort of ‘get it out of the way’. I pursued four or five options in the HR field heavily but none of them panned out, either they were already filled up or they were looking for more of an extended stay, something I could not do due to this fall’s semester. So summer passed with no progress towards my major (I delivered pizzas, fun but worthless).

This semester I have been keeping my eye on the HR internship postings, but they have been few and far between up until about last week. Last week quite a few listings popped up on the boards; some look decent. However, registration for next semester is due next week Monday. They require me to either have an internship set up with a company or take classes. Now it will be extremely difficult to secure an internship within five days.

Over the last year or two I’ve been looking at job postings for entry-level positions in HR, and most if not all require some sort of experience, typically a year, before they will consider your application. This scares me. I want to work, yet I’m afraid that I will get sidetracked in a different field and not get into the field that I feel like I am supposed to be a part of. I feel that when I get into the work force I will do well, I’ve always excelled at the jobs that I have had in the past and feel confident in any situation that I’ve been faced with before. Whenever I’ve set my mind to it I have always come out ahead of either my fellow students or coworkers. (Not trying to toot my own horn here but just trying to explain my perspective, I’m not arrogant or cocky, just confident in my abilities.)

So I have a few options here:
1) Grab on to the first internship that I can find, whether in my concentrations or not, grin and bear it throughout next semester, graduate and find any job that will take me just to get out there and work and slowly try and move up the ranks and into the field of HR after a few years (or decades).
2) Register for classes for next semester like any normal semester but continue to search for an internship until the end of January (when the second semester starts). If I find an internship that suits me try to drop all classes and still get school credit for the internship, if not, carry out the internship anyway and take just a few night classes in order to graduate on time next May.
3) Forget about the internship completely; take my one HR class and a few worthless classes (intro to ceramics, etc.) in order to graduate in May. Then I take my chances in the working world with no previous experience whatsoever, just a college degree and 3.5 GPA to go off of to hopefully land any job anywhere (like in option #1)
4) Forget about the internship completely; take the classes for next semester, but stick around for another semester next fall, where I can pretty much guarantee an internship through a program offered where I live in downtown Chicago, work from there, then graduate next December but not with my friends and classmates that I’ve been with for the last three and a half years.
5) Take the classes next semester, graduate, but keep going to school for higher education. However I did hear that most programs require that a student to have a year or two of work experience before they accept them into the program. I haven’t researched this at all, but it still worries me.

That’s about it for now. Any thoughts, suggestions, advice, or experiences with the dilemma I am faced with? I’m just really worried that I have wasted the last four years of education if I am not going to go out and use it to the best of my abilities. I also feel like I might have already missed the boat on my future and have set myself back quite a few years before I have even started. Thanks for your time.

[swede123]

I'm curious about one thing, why human resources? It just strikes me as odd that someone is actually actively pursuing a career in HR.

Swede

[MrTrik]

way tl;dr

[jakethebake]

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way tl;dr

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Yea. Someone tell me if it's worthwhile. Cliff notes please.

[tonypaladino]

I am finishing my degree in Human Resource Management this semester.

Internships are not as valuable for our field as they are for others, because almostnall entry level HR jobs suck balls. Unless you are concentrating in Executive Compensation, Union Relations, or some other specialized area, then just worry about finishing your classes and graduating.

Some side notes:

HR is a very interesting field but it's hard to find something entry-level thats not a lot of clerical work, and you will be stuck in Middle Management for most of your career, which is hard to accept when everyone else with business degrees in things like Finance, Ops Managment, and Marketing Management are looking to eventually become C-level executives. at HP, Carly Fiorina was one of the first C-level execs of a major company to come from a human resources background, and it ended in a disaster, so things are not looking good

[LethalRose]

go for the internship, i did and it worked out well. Not quite in your situation though. Just do one that you will enjoy, a lot of them suck. took me 2-3 tries before i found one that I really like.