MIT's Global Education and Career Development Center visits Lisbon

							MIT’s Global Education and Career Development Center visits Lisbon

In late January, Dr. John Nonnamaker from MIT’s Global Education and Career
Development Center (http://gecdc.mit.edu) visited IST in Lisbon to conduct a two-day
career development workshop with approximately 18 students and other representatives,
mainly from Transportation Systems but also including the other focus areas of the MIT-
Portugal Program. In addition to basic career development, the workshop sought to better
understand the market for the Complex Transport Infrastructure Systems (CTIS) Master’s
program vis-à-vis current industry partners.

Students from the CTIS degree program constituted about half of the workshop’s
participants, as such, Dr. Nonnamaker met with Professor José Viegas prior to the
beginning of the workshop to discuss the Transportation Systems program in greater
detail. On the morning of Thursday, January 29th, Dr. Nonnamaker met with a
representative from Alstom, one of the CTIS program’s major corporate partners to
understand the synergies between Alstom’s research and the program’s educational
focus.

Dr. Nonnamaker held the first part of the workshop on the afternoon of the 29th. Using
knowledge gained from his meetings with Professor Viegas and Ms. Susana Moretto
from Alstom, he provided detailed instruction on resume writing and the job interview
process. As many CTIS students are interested in working in the United States, being able
to create a strong American-style resume is very important. The major difference
between styles is that typically, European resumes include information about gender,
birth date, test scores, and photographs, while American-style resumes do not. These
exercises paved the way for a networking workshop and personal meetings on day two.

On Friday, January 30th, Dr. Nonnamaker held a workshop on networking, perhaps one of
the most overlooked career development opportunities. In addition to traditional
networking examples, Dr. Nonnamaker showed the students how to tap into IST’s online
alumni database and search for useful contacts. Later in the afternoon, Dr. Nonnamaker
scheduled one-on-one meetings with many of the students to critique resumes and discuss
different career development related topics. These meetings were immensely popular;
students waited up to 90 minutes for a visit as individual meetings tended to run long and
be behind schedule.

Two first-year CTIS alumni were present throughout the series of workshops and were
able to provide feedback on how the program prepared them for the workforce. First-year
CTIS students did not complete a thesis, which seemed to hinder them in the job hunting
process. Dr. Nonnamaker used this feedback to suggest to current students that they
should make every effort to combine their thesis work with practical work for a firm or
agency, especially sponsors like Alstom, so that students could develop strongly personal
networks while still in school.