Career Transitions

Turning chaos into careers

Katharine Brooks, Ed.D. is the Director of Liberal Arts Career Services at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of You Majored in What? See full bio

March 6, 2009

Laid off? Bag the Goals. Start Wandering.

It's official: The job market is at its worst in recent years. Read the bad news here. Read More

March 2, 2009

Career Changers: Make the Job Market Care

Years ago I heard a talk by Dr. Wayne Dyer. He was discussing the reactions we all have to traffic jams and bad drivers. He commented on how angry we get, how we hit the steering wheel or our horn, how we gesture or shake our fists at the traffic. (Even a recent Psychology Today blog post dealt with that topic.) But, as Dr. Dyer so eloquently said, "the traffic doesn't care." What a wonderful and weirdly calming thought: we can get as excited or angry as we want, but the traffic is going to be the traffic and it doesn't care. So we might as well calm down. Read More

February 24, 2009

The Pitter-Patter of Big Feet: The Impending College Graduate Boomerang

It's almost May: Do you know where your college graduate is going to live? Every year around graduation articles appear about "boomerang kids": the college graduates who return home after college. But in this mother of all recessions, it's not exactly going out on a limb to predict that the answer to the opening question is going to be "home." Read More

February 19, 2009

Boxing Away the Stress In Your Life

Did you see the morning news? According to an Associated Press poll nearly half of all Americans are worrying about becoming unemployed-double the percentage from last year. Read More

February 16, 2009

Rejection: The Hell in the Hallway

I once saw a church sign announcing a sermon entitled Hell in the Hallway. Intrigued, I asked the minister what she meant by that. Read More

February 13, 2009

Do Desperate Times Call for Desperate Actions?

If you're looking for a job you don't need to be told that it's a tough world out there. CNN and other news outlets will be happy to remind you of daily corporate layoffs. It would be easy to become demoralized and consider desperate measures to make yourself stand out from the crowd of applicants even if it only means just slightly, somewhat, sort-of exaggerating about yourself in your resume and interview responses. Read More