by Willy Franzen on November 7, 2008
Considering that college is a time when you’re supposed to be working towards having a productive adulthood, a whole lot of self-destruction seems to be going on. It must be hard for the health nuts to fit in. If you prefer 8 glasses of water a day to keg stands, celery sticks to buffalo wings, and the Nintendo Wii to the Xbox, then you’ll be a lot more comfortable in an entry level job at Rodale than you will be at a frat party. Rodale is a “global media company with a heritage, mission, and authority dedicated to the health and wellness of the individual, community, and planet.” They publish magazines such as Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Organic Gardening, Prevention, and Runner’s World. They’re also the largest independent book publisher in the U.S.
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by Willy Franzen on October 30, 2008
If you’ve been paying attention to what we’ve preaching here every day, you know that we think that in-depth employer research is the key to finding and landing great jobs. You also may have noticed that we routinely feature tech startups, and when we do, we usually encourage you to check out what TechCrunch has to say about them. TechCrunch is the blog when it comes to news and information about Internet products and companies. They’ve been around since 2005, and they’ve rapidly built themselves to be one of the top 3 blogs in the world according to Technorati. They also happen to have an RSS subscriber base of close to 1.3 million. That is an insane number. Despite all their success, or maybe because of it, TechCrunch has continued to break news stories and deliver quality content. They’re not resting on their laurels.
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by Willy Franzen on October 24, 2008
Back when I was in high school (yes, part of that was in the 90s), I thought that I was really savvy when it came to using the Web to do better in my English classes. I found online, public-domain versions of many of the books that I was reading. The best part was that these were searchable, so if I needed to find a quote or a specific passage, all I had to do was remember a key word or two. It was fantastic. A lot has changed since then, and I don’t even know the extent of what academic resources are available online now. What I do know is that it’s not fair that today’s students have access to sites like Shmoop, when I couldn’t even dream of something like it. What is Shmoop? It’s hard for me to describe briefly, so maybe you should take the Tour de Shmoop.
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by Willy Franzen on October 13, 2008
Ok, it may be politically incorrect to celebrate Columbus Day, but it’s just about the only holiday that I had off in college. Maybe it just happened to be a convenient weekend for Fall Break, but I still can’t believe that I didn’t have class on Columbus Day, but did have class on Labor Day (when I went to a School of Industrial and Labor Relations). Anyway, Christopher Columbus wasn’t much of a navigator. He had no idea where he was going, and he tried to take the long way around the world. Still, his ineptitude was the reason that he “discovered” the Americas. Had Garmin been around in the 1490s, Columbus never would have ended up where he did. Then again, the existence of a company built on GPS technology would have changed a lot of things for famous explorers five centuries ago. (Much like the existence of iPods – like the one we’re giving away – would have changed the world for musicians back then.)
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by Willy Franzen on September 18, 2008
If you’ve already read our article about using Facebook advertising in your job search, you might know the name Alex Payne. He was one of the participants in our experiment who responded to our call for “adventurous job seekers.” He’s a new grad from Duke with a double major in English and Literature, and he was looking for a job in marketing and publishing. We’re not sure if our experiment helped to ignite his interest in social media, but he’s taken an internship at Ignite Social Media to try his hand at online marketing. Alex recently pinged me to let me know that Ignite is hiring for a couple positions that might be well suited to new college grads. It’s good to know people on the inside.
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by Willy Franzen on September 6, 2008
To most college aged guys the words “men’s health” brings up images of jacked guys on a cover of a magazine that claims that it will help you “Lose Your Gut in 43 Days” and go on the “Red Hot Sex Safari.” Others might think of the retired athletes who now appear in commercials about prostate cancer, but for the most part 20-something males don’t think about health issues too much (and for good reason, most of us are completely healthy). I was taken aback when I started reading Adam Frey’s blog. Adam is a Cornell University (my alma mater) wrestler who competed in the NCAA championships this spring. A few days after his wrestling season finally ended, he was in a horrible car accident, but walked away from it mostly unscathed. He went to the hospital and had some precautionary tests done including a CAT scan. His body was completely unharmed from the accident, but that the doctors discovered that Adam had testicular cancer. Since his diagnosis Adam has been blogging nearly every day about his battle with cancer. His posts are inspirational, and his honesty is sometimes overwhelming. He is doing a fantastic job of bringing light to men’s health issues, much like the Men’s Health Network, which is a non-profit educational organization that aims to “significantly improve the health, longevity, and quality of life or men and their families.”
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by Willy Franzen on August 26, 2008
Are you a superhero whose alter ego happens to be looking for a job? Just for cover, of course, because superheroes don’t actually need to work. You’ve managed to keep it quiet through your 4 years in college, but now that you’re going off on your own, you need a good place to hide out when you’re not beating up villains and saving the world. Why not work at the last place that they’d ever expect you to work – Marvel Enterprises. It’s so obvious that it’s completely unobvious. In all seriousness if you’re not familiar with Marvel, they’re “one of the world’s most prominent character-based entertainment companies.” They made their name in comic books, but they’ve expanded into tv, movies, toys, video games, and more.
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by Willy Franzen on August 20, 2008
Software used to be all about personal computers. You bought a computer, then you bought software, and finally you loaded the software onto the computer. Whether you wanted to play a game, make a spreadsheet, or edit images, the process was essentially the same. We’re rapidly moving towards a future where much of the software that we use resides on someone else’s computer – a server – and we access it over the Internet. One obvious example of this change is Google Apps. Another less obvious example is Facebook. You may say, “But it’s just a website!” Yes, it’s a website that does a lot of things – it’s software. More and more developers are spending more and more time building applications that run “in the cloud.” The biggest challenge for these developers is ensuring that their applications scale – in other words, that they work just as well with 100,000 users as they do with 100 users. Building the software and hardware infrastructure needed to scale efficiently is a mountainous task, that’s why 10gen is building a software based solution that runs on most current hosting hardware. They envision a future in which a single developer can build a software product that serves millions of users without having to worry about scaling.
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by Willy Franzen on August 4, 2008
Despite what their name might make you think, Ruder Finn was not founded by someone from Finland with bad manners. They are actually a family-owned public relations firm that was founded in 1948 by David Finn and Wlliam Ruder. Ruder Finn has four specialties – Health & Wellness, Global Connectivity, Corporate & Public Trust, and Life & Style – with many areas of focus within those specialties. The firm’s first client was Perry Como, who was followed by a list of other celebrities; however, Ruder Finn represents more than just celebrities. They work with many major corporations, the United Nations, and they even represented the Bosniaks and the Croats in the Yugoslav Wars. Yes, warring nations choose Ruder Finn to manage their PR – that’s impressive, albeit a bit strange.
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by Willy Franzen on July 31, 2008
Sugar certainly doesn’t have the cleanest reputation. It’s accused of making us fat, rotting our teeth, and causing hyperactivity. Sugar Inc. is a company that wants you to throw out those bad associations you have with sugar and just think back to when you were a kid and sugar was the essence of everything good. Sugar Inc. isn’t in the business of sweets – they run a network of websites, but their CEO is named Brian Sugar and his wife Lisa Sugar is the Editor in Chief, so they’re running with the sweet play on words. Sugar Inc. consists of 15 style/entertainment sites – PopSugar, BuzzSugar, FabSugar, BellaSugar, CasaSugar, YumSugar, FitSugar, Geek Sugar, GiggleSugar, DearSugar, PetSugar, LilSugar, SavvySugar, CitizenSugar, and TeamSugar. You can probably guess from the names what topic each of the sites covers, but you should probably check a few of the sugars out to get a better sense of Sugar Inc.’s content strategy, which is to be “the definitive online media company for trendsetting, passionate women ages 18-44.”
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by Willy Franzen on July 27, 2008
A child’s first sign of teenage (pre-teenage?) rebellion often begins at the radio dial. The parent’s up-to-this-point unchallenged decision of what to listen to while in the car is called into question, and all hell breaks loose. If there are multiple kids in the family (or even just in the car), the negotiation can quickly becom more heated than a multi-lateral peace process in a war-torn nation. The parent will fight hard to maintain his or her right to National Public Radio, but the kid will persist in his or her challenge to hear something that feeds a suddenly “eclectic” taste in music. Often the parents cede this battle in hopes of winning in the future (bad idea!), which results in the parent’s driving the kids around the mini-van listening to rap music that would be a lot more offensive if the parent knew what some of the words meant. Eventually the rebellious tykes will grow up and realize that they too want to be more cultured, and they slowly, but surely come around to listening to NPR. Or maybe some kids just never speak up. They like NPR from the start. Maybe those are the ones who end up taking entry-level jobs at NPR.
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by Willy Franzen on June 26, 2008
In case you couldn’t tell by our post about Apple’s entry-level jobs, we’re really big Steve Jobs fans. That’s why we’re going to look at another one of the Steve’s projects (one that you probably didn’t even know was his) for exciting career opportunities for new grads. Steve Jobs started Apple, but left in 1985 after some disagreement with the board of directors. That left him with a lot of money and a lot of free time, so he did what any creative genius would do and purchased Lucasfilms’ computer graphics division from George Lucas for $10 million in 1986. It eventually turned into Pixar, which has put out computer generated classics such as Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles. Pixar was bought by Disney in 2006, which made Steve Jobs Disney’s largest individual shareholder. Now that you know that Steve is even more of a genius than you previously thought he was, let’s look at what kind of entry-level opportunities Pixar offers.
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by Willy Franzen on June 1, 2008
With all the hubbub about the ridiculous price of gasoline, another, more pressing price increase has been overlooked by many people. World food prices have skyrocketed as of late. On average only 14% of an American’s spending is on food, which means that we aren’t typically price sensitive when it comes to how many calories we consume (how we consume those calories is much more price sensitive). Now imagine living in a nation where the average person spends the majority of his or her income on food. If food prices go up, you must eat less. Not a good situation to be in. Freedom from Hunger is a non-profit organization that “brings innovative and sustainable self-help solutions to the fight against chronic hunger and poverty” and will hopefully be able to help people across the world cope with the increasing price of food.
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by Willy Franzen on May 14, 2008
There’s no doubt about it. Traditional media is dead. Even the stodgiest newspapers and magazines have been forced to go online. Television stations can’t thrive without a web presence. That means jobs in traditional media are dead too. We understand that some of you still aren’t trusting of jobs at Internet companies and that you want the “safety” of a well established company. That’s setting yourself up for failure. Sorry to be so blunt, but to paraphrase Seth Godin, every day you spend in a traditional media job is a day that the skills that you are building become less valuable. If you’re looking for jobs at a major media company with a proven track record, why not take a look at CNET Networks?
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by Willy Franzen on May 9, 2008
Jeremy Schoemaker is ShoeMoney. ShoeMoney is probably best known for his picture of the check. Using AdSense, Google’s advertising platform for web publishers, he made $132,994.97 in one month. Since then, he’s had amazing success with marketing ringtones through affiliate deals and a project called AuctionAds, which allows web publishers to market eBay auctions on their sites. There are a lot of web startups that seem glamorous because of their big ideas, but they often lack profitability and end up in the deadpool. ShoeMoney Media Group ignores the glitz and goes where the money is. They follow 3 core principles: embrace new trends and look for opportunities to exploit them; focus on what you know; and small changes can equal big revenue. There is an absolutely insane amount of information about ShoeMoney on the web, so get researching. Google ShoeMoney, visit ShoeMoney’s blog, and read his hilarious, but honest post about his 10 worst money making ideas. There’s also a short BusinessWeek article about ShoeMoney that you should read. It focuses on how he makes money online teaching other people how to make money online.
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by Willy Franzen on April 30, 2008
Judging by the number of you who enjoy reading about jobs in your e-mail or RSS reader, there seems to be a pretty big market for delivering fresh content in an easily digestible format. There’s something really nice about having information delivered to you instead of having to seek it out. Well, we found a company that uses the same methods as we do to deliver content, but brings you literature instead of jobs. They’re called DailyLit, and they can bring people full length books through RSS or e-mail.
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by Willy Franzen on April 1, 2008
We’ve been thinking for months about ways to trick our readers for April Fools’ Day. We considered writing about six figure entry-level jobs or telling you that we are selling out to the evil Monster.com, but nothing really seemed all that funny – or believable. The web is rife with great pranks on April 1st, and we’re just going to stay out of it. Instead we’ve found a company that is not only relevant to today’s holiday, but is also hiring new college grads for entry-level positions. We’re talking about the Motley Fool, a company that aims to “educate, entertain, and enrich” its customers with excellent financial advice. What company could be better to feature on April Fools’ Day than the one that owns Fool.com?
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by Willy Franzen on March 30, 2008
Having to write about two non-profits that offer entry-level jobs each week, we’re constantly looking for organizations that serve different types of communities. Our daily posts are intended to both inform you about the organization that we’re writing about and give you new ideas, so that you can find similar organizations that might be hiring new college grads. We recently found Poets & Writers, which is unlike any non-profit we’ve featured before. It’s an organization for creative writers, by creative writers, and it provides a wealth of information and resources that not only help individual creative writers, but also improves the state of modern literature as a whole. Maybe we should get more creative about how we write our daily posts so that we can take advantage of the resources that they offer – or maybe we’ll just save all of our “creativity” for this Tuesday.
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by Willy Franzen on February 16, 2008
Rocks and Minerals, Romance Quarterly, Preventing School Failure, Demokratizatsiya, Behavioral Medicine, and Historical Methods. No, this isn’t an excerpt from one of those spam e-mails with random words that don’t make any sense, but a small sampling of titles put out by Heldref Publications. As a non-profit publisher, Heldref Publications aims to provide a forum for scholarly discourse in the approximately 50 titles that they publish. These titles are geared towards academics in a wide range of fields, as you probably gathered from our first sentence. Those fields include “research and practice in K-12 and higher education, world affairs and political science, history, world literatures old and new, the arts, popular culture, psychology, social sciences, health, and the environment.”
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by Willy Franzen on December 26, 2007
Most of our readers are high achievers, right? A lot has gone into getting you to this point. Hard work. Great parenting. Good genes. You can argue about it like Mortimer and Randolph Duke in Trading Places, but you’ll never know which of these (or other) factors is truly driving your personal successes – or will you? Today’s company hasn’t figured out the answer to that question yet, but they’re well on their way.
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