Confusions related to career as an international student

Lexii·Oct 05, 2023

Posted in:Advice Early Career Job Hunting

Hi everyone, I heard elpha from social media. I believe women always help women, so I joined this community.

I am mostly based in Australia. Right now, I have some confusions about my life and my career, basically my career.

My basic background:

I come from China, as an international student in Australia, and I am currently have a part-time job as a project coordinator.

I am looking for a new job, the one I am more interested and it's full-time position.

What I can do is to find jobs on LinkedIn, some local job websites, and uni career web. Besides, may talk to professors and some relative people.

They gave me advice is networking.

So I get it. I may need to find some relative communities or groups or activities, participate in them and talk to those people, maybe I can get the opportunities.

But is it the most effective way? Or what else I can do?

As a person who is not familiar with this society, it's not easy to get things right or effective. Besides, I know I need to try, but I am a person who worry about if I am doing things right so that I won't waste my time, a kind of personality.

Additionally, I am also looking for some job opportunities remotely worldwide. I don't know if I am wasting my time.

Yeah, that's what my confusions in brief.

Hope to get some advice~ Thanks!

Lexi

Iynna·Oct 08, 2023

Hi Lexi! It's so nice to meet you and thanks for sharing! What are you majoring in right now at school? And what is your current internship? That might help guide the different career paths you can follow as you kickstart your career. But don't be too stressed about it, you have your whole life ahead of you and my advice would be to stay super open as far as career options, you don't have to have it all figured out right (in fact you most likely won't have it all figured out and that's what's beautiful about it :))

Lexii·Nov 22, 2023

Hi Iynna, thank you so much for answering. I didn't log in elpha, so it might be late for the reply. My major was project management, and I worked as localization pm intern and also e-commerce project coordinator. I think the problem is I don't have a positive attitude when finding the jobs, so that it makes me anxious.

Iynna·Nov 22, 2023

No problem at all! Excited to have you back here though. This all sounds interesting and experiences you can leverage! I understand how the idea of job searching can be daunting. My advice to you is to reposition it not as a chore (though I know it feels like it) but like a "game", you reach out to people and send in apps to unlock a new level in the game (or whatever analogy makes sense in your head really if you're not a gamer). Are you more an intro or extrovert? If the former, you can use a curated approach where you reach out to say 2 people a day on LinkedIn in your field of interest or intended field of work and if the latter, go to IRL where you can be exposed to a large number of people at once. It doesn't mean it will lead to something but just being out there will help dramatically because sometimes all you need is to get in the rooms with big thinkers and other people who can either lift you up or be inspired to get ahead in your life/career.You got this! You know I also came here alone and as an international, facing the stress of recruiting and then not having a network and not always understand the culture (I also arrived in NYC and faced the very high cost of living so had to figure real quick how to make money given my visa constraints)All of these experiences will only help you get far in life!