Many college students attend college with the hope of being able to obtain a high-paying job to get out of poverty. However, as many of us are aware nowadays, it can take a lot more than a college degree to get a job, especially in a competitive market such as jobs in STEM. Students who don’t have guidance from family, friends, or mentors can end up lost and struggling to compete with other candidates who were fortunate enough to be able to follow a path that ended up with a high-paying job. Luckily, RadGrad seeks to solve some of these problems to help you better organize your coursework as well as plan your career development in order to meet your goals after college.
RadGrad offers tons of career options that I did not know I could go into after completing my Computer Science degree. I also appreciated the descriptions and video explanations of what these jobs do on a day-to-day basis, which helped me better understand the differences between these different fields. I think the vast selection of options has made me take a step back and think about what field of computer science I want to go into after I finish my degree. For now, I think I will stick to the job title that has become rather famous over the years and one that many students who graduate with their CS degree end up getting: Software Developer. Although, I do hope that as I continue through, I will have taken more courses and be able to narrow down my selection of jobs that I am interested in.
Another feature that RadGrad offers is showing a list of opportunities that are available that pertain to your interests. This way, students who want to get involved with outside projects or internships can have a list of opportunities to look at. Different opportunities also have different rankings in terms of how much they will help you with your degree experience.
Personally, I don’t think that RadGrad will drastically improve my degree experience. I think the best part about RadGrad is its ability to lay out plans in order to see if you are on track to get the most out of your degree. I have a sense of what I need to do, and I also have mentors and friends who have walked the CS path to guide me and help me lay out a plan for me to follow. I think that the website will help those who don’t have anyone to guide them or just need help creating a plan, and for those individuals, they will get the most bang for their buck. I think that the website would be helpful to more students if the opportunities tab offered a list of companies that you could apply for an internship opportunity.
I do enjoy the leveling system and the point tracker. It allows people who are competitive to compete for a higher rank, and the point tracker allows students to get a numeric value as to where they are in their CS journey. The point tracker is also visible within different opportunities, which allows students to take up opportunities that will really help in their degree experience.