Digital Brown Bag

Digital Brown Bag is a weekly seminar class in the New Media Certificate. In this class, we explored and discussed employment pathways, industry trends, and emerging technologies, among a couple of other things. Almost every week we would have guest speakers come and speak about their careers. They were all from many different backgrounds and careers, giving a wide range of people to hear from. The speakers discussed their journey from college involvement to internships to where they are now. They gave great advice and hearing from them provided a better understanding of where I wanted to go in my career path and what I should do to get there.

One of the first things we learned was about credit cards and healthcare options. These lectures were very helpful since I had never really been taught that much about those topics before, especially in a classroom setting. An assignment we had with this lesson was to go and get our credit scores and evaluate our financial position. This particular assignment and lecture were useful as I still apply the things I learned to ensure my credit score is good. Another class requirement we had was to make our own business cards to use at career fairs and hiring events, which I still use today.

Since the New Media Certificate focuses on technology, we were also assigned to look over our digital identities. In this exercise, we looked up our names on Google and evaluated how we appeared. When looking up my name, I found a lot of other people with my name and very few images of myself. I was able to find more about me when looking up my first and middle name instead of my last name. Knowing how we are seen online and what employers can see about us was beneficial so we can know how to improve.

Overall, Digital Brown Bag offered many opportunities to learn about potential careers and gave us time to reflect and focus on ourselves.