BY JEAN EDELSTEIN, BA'03

In the Arthur Currie Gym, it's 5:00 p.m. on April 30: the last exam of the year is coming to a close. As invigilators collect completed workbooks, some students leap to their feet, anticipating four sunny summer months. Others, however, are a bit more reluctant, hesitating over their signatures and collecting their belongings slowly, as if trying to make the semester last just a little bit longer.

For these students, the summer break doesn't portend lazy days at the beach so much as something rather more sinister. To fund their journeys towards becoming the leaders of tomorrow, many McGill students spend their summer breaks as the labourers of today in positions that don't have a lot to do with their academic interests.

Richard Dub, BA'02, knows that feeling. "I once had a job drilling asbestos from the walls of an abandoned slaughterhouse," he says. "That's about as far as a halfway-completed English degree will take you."

For many McGill students, the search for summer employment begins while they are still spending their days bundled in down jackets. Often, they want to find summer employment related to the field they are studying with the goal of building stand-out CVs that will help them penetrate tight job markets after graduation. This means that job searches must start early, often to meet early winter application deadlines for jobs that start in May or June. Many McGill students, however, find career-related job opportunities to be few and far between, and thus consider themselves lucky to secure occupation in other fields -- from janitors to camp counsellors to door-to-door knife salesmen.

	Nicholas Calamatas at McGill's Career and Placement Services office.

They don't have to face the summer job hunt alone. Nicholas Calamatas offers advice to students on getting summer and part-time jobs at the campus Career and Placements Services (CAPS) office, located in the Brown Student Services Building.

Calamatas, whose title is Non-Career Related Student Employment Coordinator, says his approach is very much oriented around a central point. "I'm so into using networking to find summer jobs," he says. He especially encourages students to initiate conversations with potential employers in addition to applying for advertised positions.

"Only 20% of employers post their jobs, so students have to do a little bit more, they have to be more proactive, because the jobs are out there. Throughout it all there's a constant theme, which is network, network, network." Indeed, he advises, connections made while students seek summer positions can be so important that they may help them to find full-time employment after they graduate.

"When you develop a strong network, don't let it collapse. Keep making connections with the people that you've made contact with, even though you're already employed, because the employment of the future is going to be more short-term jobs. Most people change jobs quite frequently now."

5,000 McGill students and graduates look to Career and Placement Services each year for help in finding summer, part-time, and permanent jobs. 1,580 summer jobs have been advertised on the CAPS non-career job listings website. Each day, the CAPS website receives approximately 400 hits from McGill-affiliated job-searchers. There are 11% more jobs listed in 2002 than there were in 2001. Non-career jobs are listed in 52 categories, from administration to youth counselling.

To lend a hand to current McGill students searching for summer employment, Calamatas offers a number of services at CAPS, from personal counselling sessions to group seminars and a frequently updated website with lists of available postings.

"Building contacts and doing a self-assessment are some of the most important parts of networking," he explains, pointing out that students should realistically figure out what they want to get out of a job, whether it is career-related experience or merely income. They should also realize that opportunities that they may not be qualified for after their initial years of study at McGill will become easier to take advantage of as they progress through their studies. "The students at McGill really make my job here easy," he says. "They [employers] come back for more. I've very rarely had a complaint. I'm always happy to say we've got the greatest kids, the greatest people -- they are really tremendous." Calamatas also emphasizes that jobseekers shouldn't undersell themselves. "The BA is one of the most unfairly maligned degrees," he says with some animation. "Do you know that 80%-90% of CPOs and CEOs in the United States have bachelors of arts?"