In this episode, Jeanie Kimbel and Sophie Switzer from the UI College of Public Health’s Career Services Office dig deeper into what networking really looks like and how to explore different career paths, build authentic connections, and map your next steps even if you’re not exactly sure where you want to end up.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the student hosts, guests, and contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the University of Iowa or the College of Public Health.

Lauren Lavin:

Hello everybody and welcome back to Plugged In to Public Health. In the second part of our career readiness series, we’re talking about something that’s often misunderstood, but absolutely essential, networking, career exploration, and how to find the best public health job that’s right for you. We’re once again joined by our incredible guests, Jeanie Kimbel and Sophie Switzer from the University of Iowa College of Public Health’s Career Services Office. If you missed part one, we focus on resume mistakes, application strategies, and how to prepare long before graduation. But today we’re digging deeper into what networking really looks like, how to explore different career paths, and where to find the jobs that don’t show up on Indeed. Whether you’re an undergrad, a master’s student, or in a doctoral program, this conversation will help you walk away with practical tips on building authentic connections, asking the right questions and mapping your next steps even if you’re not exactly sure where you want to end up.

I’m Lauren Lavin and I’m joined by Maxwell Hansen. And if it’s your first time with us here, welcome. We’re a student-run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they’re relevant to anyone, both in and outside the field of public health. So let’s get plugged into public health. Plugged in to Public Health is produced and edited by the students of the University of Iowa College of Public Health. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the student hosts, guests, and contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the University of Iowa or the College of Public Health.

We all know that networking can be a really big part of how we can secure new jobs, but it’s also really intimidating, and it can be hard to know where to start. So what strategies do you recommend for students to create meaningful connections while they’re still in school and looking for employment?

Sophie Switzer:

Networking is a big one and there are a couple things that I want to address on this. So the first is that I think students see networking as this really terrifying formal process, and it certainly can be. You can go in your suit and tie to a career fair where there are several hundred employers and you give them your elevator pitch and you hand them your resume. And then what? The vast majority of networking is actually just talking to people. Everyone that you know in your life is part of your network. It can be your parents, it can be your friends, it can be your parents’ friends, and the more you tell the people around you what you’re looking for, that you’re interested in certain things, “I’m hoping to get a summer internship in healthcare administration.” The more you will hear from people who actually maybe work in that field who you didn’t know before, or they know somebody who works in that field and they might be willing to connect you with somebody who you’ve never talked to before.

That is actually how networking happens. So for example, I like to use myself in this example, because I think most students know me in my professional capacity. I’ve lived in Iowa 20 years. I work as a career counselor. My background is in global programs, but I actually grew up in Massachusetts in a small town that is known as the marine biology capital of the world. I have a lot of contacts in engineering and marine biology of all things, but I would never volunteer that information in a regular conversation and I wouldn’t know to bring it up to you if you didn’t mention it. So a lot of people have contacts, they have neighbors, “Oh, my neighbor works for that hospital. You should connect with him.” Make sure you’re telling the people in your life that you’re looking for a job or an internship and what it is that you’d like to do.

The second thing about networking that I really encourage students to think about is that you need to prepare more than you think you will, and this relates more to some of those conversations. So say a friend connects you with their neighbor and that person happens to be the CFO at the hospital where you’re applying for a job. You need to prepare for that conversation. You arrange 20 minutes, you meet them at a coffee shop, and then what do you talk about? There’s this inclination to assume that that person is going to come with questions and that that person being the more senior professional in the conversation is going to drive the conversation, but you need to do the work upfront because you are the person who is going to get something out of the conversation and you’ve requested their time. So make sure that you are looking them up online, looking up their organization, finding out a little bit about their background and thinking of what questions you might want to ask them when you do have 20 minutes of their time.

It doesn’t have to be a formal interview where you’re firing questions at them. It can be a conversation, but you need to think about what is you want to get out of that conversation. What is it that you want to take away from this? And in doing so, you need to be ready to, like I said, steer that conversation and kind of take the reins. We practice this style of informational interviewing. In the undergraduate class that I teach, we actually spend two weeks formally practicing. I bring people in and the number one takeaway from students is, “I didn’t realize how much I needed to prepare for these things.” And they can be simple questions like, “Well, how did you decide to get into this career track?” Or, “What did you do before you were in this position?”

Or they could be really specific. Maybe you learned that they did a really specific niche research and that happens to be something that you really like. You could ask them questions about that. The other thing that I hear most from students who practice this informational interview skill is they mostly say to me things like, “I didn’t realize that they were just people.” They’re people and they’re nice and they want to talk to you about this thing that you’re interested in because they’re also interested in that. Most people want to help. At worst, they will say no because they’re busy, but they really do want to talk to you guys. They want to see new students, new graduates walking into the field that they are passionate about.

Jeanie Kimbel:

The only other thing that I would add is that it works from the other side of the table too. What Sophie highlighted was how students conceptualize networking as a tool or a mechanism for finding opportunities and leveraging relationships. The people, humans who are just people like Sophie said, who are working inside those organizations, they operate the same way. Something like 80% of jobs are filled through networking, not from posting on a job board and doing a formal process. And I think that that’s another misconception is that students think that the jobs are posted out there on indeed.com. We’re going to get to that in a minute, but they’re not.

As it relates to networking, the most common way that jobs are filled is that the person who needs help inside the organization leverages their own network and is talking to people that they trust to figure out, “Okay, how can I find a good person quickly?” And it’s about those relationships, those conversations. You want to be in conversation with someone who knows someone that knows that person who’s hiring or who may have an opportunity for you and helps you cross that bridge and make the connection.

Max Hansen:

We talked a lot about career fairs and stuff like that, just those opportunities to get out there and network. I feel like a lot of career fairs are communicated through the college both related to public health and not related to public health. Do you feel like there’s benefits of going to those career fairs that are not directly related to a student’s particular interests or career path?

Sophie Switzer:

Oh, absolutely. For one, there’s a lot of organizations and agencies that exist out there that you might not be aware of, and it’s good to be familiar with who is out there. The other thing is that so many public health jobs exist at organizations that don’t work in public health. Maybe what they do is adjacent to public health, but the people at that organization don’t really see themselves as public health. Maybe it’s a corporation, but they have a whole wellness office and they hire health and wellness people to service their employees, and that is a public health job in an organization that is completely removed from public health. So there are a lot of opportunities that you can get through some of these organizations that may not on the surface look like they are public health related. The other thing is that you need to practice talking to people, making these conversations, practicing those networking skills that we were just talking about, and it’s better to do that with an organization or a recruiter or a person who maybe you don’t feel like you urgently need a job from.

It’s the same concept with interviewing. Don’t wait to have your first interview if it’s your dream job. The same thing with networking. Don’t wait to network when you really desperately need something, start practicing now. Make your mistakes with a company where you’re never going to apply, and as you practice, you will get better at this. And then when an opportunity does come up and you happen to be in a conversation with somebody who is the executive director of the organization where you really would like to work, you will feel comfortable having that conversation with them.

Max Hansen:

One thing that really stuck with me there was that there seems to be public health jobs everywhere, really, and I’m curious, not just career fairs, not just the occasional newsletter that highlights these opportunities, where do you feel students could find these careers at and where do you think they could find these job postings?

Jeanie Kimbel:

Picking up on that thread that I mentioned earlier, I think indeed.com is not it, okay. That’s what I will say. That’s the short answer. Indeed is very popular. We hear that come out of students mouths on a regular basis. “I’ve been on indeed.com forever and I’m just not finding things or I’m not getting interviews and I don’t know why this isn’t working.” And that’s because that particular job board is so vast and so comprehensive that it lacks that health-specific focus that we talked about at the very beginning of this podcast, which is so important for our students to understand that the public health practice sector has specific needs, it has specific challenges. So there are health-specific, public health-specific job boards that we would point you to that will already cull your search for you, and they will obviously bring a community that is focused in the same directions that you are.

In order to find those boards, the first place that I would point you is at the website for our own career services office, so in the College of Public Health website, the main page, you would go to the current students tab across the bar at the top, the current students tab, and in that dropdown tab you will see career services. That’s how you navigate to our career services website, and once you are there, you will see that Sophie has done a phenomenal job. I can take no credit. She is a guru with all things platform and applications that are computer programmed, and she has done a fabulous job.

We’ve gotten compliments from across campus even about this particular website, so if you are one of our students and you have not seen this website, you’re missing out. You need to go there and poke around. There is so much information there that will support you in your professional development preparing for your career search, and then specifically point you toward those public health specific job boards and even specific job posting. Sophie has formatted so that there are lists that get populated on a recurrent basis with a set, with a segment of the kinds of jobs that are out there that are public health specific. So that is the biggest answer that I would provide to this question is bounce off of our website. If you have not found it, if you’re not doing that already, it will help you immensely to go there and to follow the directions on how to navigate your search. And Sophie, please go into greater detail about what they will find there, if you would.

Sophie Switzer:

Yes, of course. Well, that’s very kind of you, Jeanie. I appreciate it. We do have direct links on our website that will take you to some of the larger public health specific job boards. My favorite are typically publichealthjobs.org, which is maintained by ASPPH. APHA has a similar job board called CareerMart and then also there’s publichealthcareers.org, which I believe is maintained by NACCHO and is specific to government agency jobs. It takes all of the state and county jobs that exist across the country and brings them into one location, which is really convenient because every county and every state uses a different job posting software, and so it’s really hard to find them all in one place. That’s a fairly new website that’s been amazing for students to use. The other place to look is with professional organizations and associations. So I just mentioned that one of these is maintained by APHA.

Every niche professional association has their own job board. Some of them will be hidden behind a membership login, but a lot of them will be publicly available, even the local ones. So the Iowa Public Health Association, IPHA, they have a career board specifically for careers in Iowa. Similarly, the Iowa Environmental Health Agency will also have jobs specifically for jobs in Iowa. There won’t be a lot. It will be maybe three or four at a time, but they will be definite jobs that are currently hiring. You’re not going to run into the problems that you have on Indeed or LinkedIn like scams or jobs that were posted and are now closed, but they forgot to go in and take them down. It’s going to be a lot more tailored to what you as students and new graduates are looking for. The other thing that I will mention is you need to be specific in your search terms.

When students come to us and say they’re having trouble finding internships or job opportunities, the first thing I ask is how they’re searching and they almost always say, “Well, I typed public health into LinkedIn and not much came up.” And that’s because like we mentioned before, a lot of public health jobs or jobs that utilize public health skills are not necessarily categorized under public health. The employer might not even realize that what they’re asking for is public health skills, so we have a whole suggested search terms page on our website to help you get this process started. There are other search terms that you can come up with that aren’t listed there, but it’s things like thinking about searching for population health or community health or women’s health or immigration services or data analyst or whatever those search terms might be. Public health honestly will get you maybe some county and state jobs and maybe some jobs in epidemiology, but you’re missing out on a whole vast swath of the public health jobs that could be attainable to you.

Max Hansen:

Is there anywhere that students could potentially look beyond the traditional job board?

Jeanie Kimbel:

I think I would double back to what we talked about in the networking conversation. That yes, it is actually most common that the job board, any job board is not where most people find their jobs. It is great, it is great for you to go there and sample and see what you can find because some people do find their jobs that way, but as I said earlier, 80% of people do not. 80% of people end up finding their jobs and finding their way to the job by having those conversations with people, with real people that are not necessarily about something that has already been posted, but is just being talked about, is just being discussed and because that person initiates the conversation or is put together with the person searching for the job by the person that’s in the middle and can make the connection. That’s many times how opportunities are born, how it happens for people.

Sophie Switzer:

I will say that we have a weekly email that goes out with featured jobs if people want to sign up to receive that. Current students are automatically added to that list, but once your UI or email is gone, obviously you’re not on that list. You have to sign up to continue to receive that email and the sign up is really easy. It’s on our website. Similarly, there are other similar services or similar organizations. One of my favorite is called PH SPOT, Public Health SPOT, and that is a public health career services kind of website and organization. She does similar things. She posts weekly featured jobs. She does a lot of international jobs as well, which is really helpful.

She has a podcast similar to this one, but specifically about public health careers. Those types of things can be really useful resources as well. I think she has a paid service that you can, if you want to be a member of that, you can do that as well. I’ve never explored it, but I do encourage at least checking out her website. She has some good blog posts, things like that, and seeing who it is she’s talking to and what types of organizations that she works with.

Lauren Lavin:

Great tips, and we’ve talked a lot about how to apply for jobs that you know you’re interested, how to create resumes and cover letters, but what about students that are still feeling like they need to explore different areas or different career paths with their degree? What suggestions would you have for them or tips?

Sophie Switzer:

The best ways to try it out. I mean, you have to really get into some of these careers to know what it’s all about, so talking to people in those career paths, finding out what they do on a regular basis, what kind of maybe taking internship or research assistantship. That’s really the only way to kind of determine what it is that you want to do. It’s better to take a six-week internship or a 10-week internship and discover that you hate it than to go and get a master’s degree and really commit to this field and then realize that you don’t like sitting behind a desk all day or you actually really don’t like doing data analysis, you want to talk to people.

I think one of the most common things I see working with undergraduate students is post-COVID, a lot of them want to go into epidemiology, specifically infectious disease, but the epidemiology master’s program, the graduate degrees are really statistics heavy. They are really math heavy degrees, and a lot of the students actually, what they really want to do is work with people. I mean, obviously there are some who are like, “Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted.” And they go into that, but you’re not really going to know that until you actually maybe shadow somebody an epidemiologist for a day or try it out in a research lab. You have to really talk to people about what it’s like in the field and explore that in order to know what these careers are really about.

Max Hansen:

I feel like we’ve covered a lot of topics today in this conversation. We’ve heard a lot and I’ve also been introduced to a lot of new things as well through it. It’s clear to me that all of this cannot fit into say, a couple advising appointments. Say you have a student that comes in and they’re looking for your best piece of advice that you could give. What do you think that would be in regards to career preparation?

Jeanie Kimbel:

So I would first of all tell them that it’s great that they’re here, that they have taken the most important first step, and that is to recognize that, to interact with another person, to have a conversation around what their goals are and how they’re already focused on finding that job, to ensure that they’re considering everything, that that’s important. To understand that this is a process that most people cannot navigate successfully all by themselves, that it is important to take advantage of all the support that’s available. Talk with multiple career advisors if you can, and on this campus you can. We’ve discussed there are a variety of offices that provide career support.

You all pay student fees that supports all of them, so I advise students to not just meet with me, but to go across campus and meet with the offices that are there as well, and cash in on the benefit that is there for you as well, because you will get different feedback from different folks, you will. And it is important for you to do that, to have someone proofread your materials, to have somebody speak to you from their own knowledge base or their own experience and provide the resources and the tools that they have access to so that it can strengthen you, it can support you in your trip forward.

Sophie Switzer:

Yes, I absolutely agree with that. I guess my advice is that career searching is a skill and like any skill you need to practice this, so starting early does help, but the ability to talk to people comfortably about yourself and your achievements, interviewing, networking, all of those things that are skills that need to be practiced. You’re not just going to be able to graduate in May and walk across the stage and suddenly be proficient in what you need to be able to do to get a job. So starting early is really helpful. The other thing that I want to remind students, because I feel like we’ve talked a lot about all these things they need to do, and you should have started earlier and all of that, and I don’t want students to feel like they’re behind, because everybody starts in a different place, and wherever you are in this journey, you will start now and you’ll be okay, but careers aren’t linear either.

I don’t think any of us, Jeanie and me included, thought that we would be here in our career path when we first graduated college, so you don’t have to have everything planned out, and I do encourage you to be open to new opportunities. I think the best advice I got when I was a student was a career advisor told me that, “10 years after graduation, 25% of you are going to be working jobs that don’t currently exist.” I mean, how can you possibly prepare for that? Now it’s about ensuring that you have the skills that you need, practicing those soft skills, those transferable skills, and the technical skills and making sure that you are proficient at those, and so when a job comes up that maybe didn’t exist before, but is asking for those skills, you have them.

But obviously if the job doesn’t exist right now, how can you possibly know that’s where you’re going to end up? And it can be a meandering path, and that is perfectly okay. I have a question for you guys though, actually, can I ask a question?

Lauren Lavin:

Of course.

Sophie Switzer:

You’re both students and you kind of have spanned all the degree programs we have in the college. Having heard what we’ve had to say now, do you have any things that have surprised you about what we’ve said or preconceived ideas that we’ve dispelled? I mean, what have you gotten out of this interview?

Lauren Lavin:

The first thing that comes to mind is just that these resources are available for PhD students. This is not something that we hear a whole lot or at least that I haven’t, so that might be my fault, but just knowing that these resources are available for us I think is really helpful. It’s a really long road and sometimes it can feel a little bit isolating, so just knowing that you guys are there and have tips and tricks for us has been something that I’ve taken away from this.

Max Hansen:

Yeah, just to kind of echo the sentiment there, I feel like there’s a lot of community that is built around not just student services and individual students, but also just the students themselves and their misconceptions like we have talked about about careers in public health. And I feel that it’s nice to be reminded and remain mindful of the bridge being built between student services and students. That’s ultimately getting them into the industry and getting them out there working.

Sophie Switzer:

Awesome. That’s great to hear. I’m glad that you both individuals at least have found this really insightful, so that’s great to hear.

Jeanie Kimbel:

Yeah, very good.

Lauren Lavin:

I’m sure our listeners will too. I definitely think this is right up their alley, and even if you don’t go to the University of Iowa, these are also still actionable tips because I’m sure that many other universities or most universities have people similar to you both working there that could also assist them.

Sophie Switzer:

Our website is available and most of the resources are accessible for not just current students, but alumni or anybody who wants to access them. That job bulletin that we mentioned that goes out on Friday, we have quite a few subscribers that are not alums of the college at all. They’re public health professionals who want to know more, so there’s quite a bit that you can access and take away from this that I think would be useful to anybody.

Lauren Lavin:

We like generalizability.

Sophie Switzer:

Yes.

Jeanie Kimbel:

It helps.

Lauren Lavin:

Well, thank you both so much for chatting with us today. This was a long one. We had a lot, well, not we, you guys had a lot to say and it was all really great, so thank you for taking time.

Sophie Switzer:

Yeah.

Jeanie Kimbel:

Yes. We get excited about what we do, Sophie and I just really love to share, so I’m not surprised. It was a long one.

Sophie Switzer:

Also, these are conversations we have with each other a lot, and so it’s nice to be able to have the platform to tell students just come see us. PhDs, please come talk to us. I’m always surprised it’s the same conversations. “Where are you searching?” “Indeed.”

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah, yep. Well, thank you both so much.

Jeanie Kimbel:

Thank you for having us.

Lauren Lavin:

Thank you all for listening today. I hope you walked away with some interesting insights into the world of career services and what you can do with your public health degree and how you should go about doing that as you look forward to graduation. Big thank you to both Jeanie and Sophie for joining us on the podcast today. You are both great resources. This episode was hosted and written by Lauren Lavin and Maxwell Hansen and edited and produced by Lauren Lavin. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. If today’s conversation gave you new tools or inspiration for your career, please consider sharing it with classmates, colleagues, or anyone pursuing a future in public health. If you have any feedback for us, we’d love to hear from you. You can reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiwa.edu. This episode is brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. And remember, you don’t need to have it all figured out, so stay open, stay curious, and take the next step forward. Until next time, take care.