Career Readiness for Physics Students (and Faculty!): A Présumé

We present the results of a campaign to improve undergraduate, and graduate, physics career development. A new industrial seminar course was created and a proposal is made based on the results from the course. The seminar arose from the need to do things early in the student years to help them in learning more about industrial and other non-academic careers and about how to populate their resumes: taking electives like economics and doing internships in industry, for instance. Our idea coming out of that seminar, which was a series of industrial physics visits, is the following: as advisors and pre-advisors we could ask even first-year students to make a practice job-specific resume and cover letter and guess what they might take to help them in preparing for a variety of careers. We give them guidance to make this a doable exercise even for the beginning student. (We are not, however, discouraging those students desiring a university academic career.) In this proposal: we call this practice resume a pre- résumé or rather - a présumé for short- the accent marks tell you how to pronounce it. We propose a program presuming early students should have a présumé. The physics présumé program.