New Hope for College Students Seeking Jobs

There is a new start-up in town, aiming to help connect college students with internships and entry-level positions.  They claim LinkedIn is geared more towards every career stage, making college students underrepresented.  And through the past 8 months of the internship search, I can confidently confirm this is in fact true.

From my experience, searching for internships seems like a bottomless pit.  There are hundreds of postings on websites like Indeed or LinkedIn, but it never seems like applying through those websites will actually get your foot in the door.  Of course, when you have connections, you should use those.  However, for places you don't, it would be nice to have another place to go to feel like your application is actually getting through.

Enter: WayUp.

This New York-based start-up proposes to be the solution, creating more personalized profiles and easier applications.  Clearly, they aren't the only ones that are backing this business idea, as WayUp just recently raised $18.5 million from investors.  I believe that this tool could be extremely useful, and hope that it is successful so it can help my job search next year.

The Dangers of Going Viral

So many people and companies dream of making their content go viral.  While going viral is extremely exciting since your post or content is being seen worldwide, it can be a very bad thing when something negative goes viral.  Here are some recent examples that have went viral for all of the wrong reasons:

1. United Airlines

United Airlines has had two viral incidents in recent months that have resulted in terrible press for the airline.  The most recent was a video gone viral of a passenger being forcibly removed from an overbooked flight in order to make room for crew members needing to go to fix something at the destination.  The officers went as far as dragging the man in aisle to get him out.

The other incident took place less than a month ago, when two teenage girls were denied access to a flight until they changed out of their leggings or put a dress over them. The teenagers were flying under a friends and family of United employees program, but this story still gave United a lot of bad press when the incident went viral. 

2. Pepsi

Pepsi intentionally tried to make their new commercial featuring Kendall Jenner go viral, but the internet did that for them.  However, it was not for good reason.  Pepsi's new commercial that was intended to be about uniting as a people, but it came off as offensive and not genuine.  The commercial featured people of all different races, ethnicities, religions, and sexualities joining a vague "peace" protest together.  The commercial ends with model Kendall Jenner leaving her photoshoot to join in and give a cop controlling the protest a can of Pepsi.  The whole crowd erupted in cheers when the cop took a sip, assuming all of the ambiguous problems were solved. After going viral for such negative reasons, Pepsi was forced to pull the commercial and apologize. 

Be mindful of the things you post online or what is being filmed- you definitely don't want to be next.