Start Your Search with Focus and a Plan.

These three steps will ensure your search is on track from start to finish.

Connect with the Career Coaches and Search Supports

✅ Get to know the Career Coaches

Use this page to get the details about three ways to connect with a coach: appointments, online office hours, and chat in MS Teams. Chat is best for quick questions. Attend EMP Career Coach Office Hours for advice and feedback most weekdays while classes are in session. Schedule an appointment in Handshake right away if you’re not feeling productive in your search, if you aren’t getting responses from your applications, or if you haven’t started yet. We want to help!

✅ Keep up with the EMP Career Coach Alert MS Teams Site

Set your MS Teams site notifications to get emails if you don’t use Teams regularly.

✅ Create your Handshake profile to connect with jobs, internships, events, and employers at Duke and nationwide.

Using Handshake regularly helps to customize your experience. Optimizing your profile helps recruiters to find you when searching the site.

✅ Reference Duke Career Hub for advice, tools and resources.

Take note that the Engineering Master’s Programs part of the site has all sorts of materials and extra tools customized just for you. The blue buttons bring you into specialized materials for each of the 8 main processes in every search and you can scroll down the page to see featured collections of a few varieties.

Clarify What You Want and Why You Want It

If you’re looking for clarity on your next step or future path, you’re not alone! Here are some steps to support you, and when in doubt contact a coach. We love to have these conversations! If you’re clear already, skip to the next section.

✅ Understand what you want, like, or are good at.

Your identities, values, skills, interests, and priorities are all different and overlapping aspects that influence a meaningful next step. This guide provides definitions and suggests a few action steps for each.

✅ Understand the possible opportunities.

We recommend differentiating opportunities by field, organization, role, and location. Your future path will be guided by strong preference in some of these areas, flexibility in others, and any constraints that factor in. This is the guide with definitions and action steps for understanding opportunities.

✅ Find people, communities, and events.

Separate from any internship or job offer, you can test out different options by participating in their communities to get exposure and see what people are working on, talking about, and generally like. Here is the guide for finding people, communities, and events.

✅ Spend time with news and trends.

Another way to explore fields, organizations, roles, locations, or your constraints is to keep up with current events. Beyond Google, alerts, and social media, the guide has an introduction to some high powered tools you have access to as a Duke student.

Start and Sustain your Search

To launch and sustain your search, work through these three phases, each has full details on its own page:

✅ Your Internship Search – Phase 1: Three Steps to a Solid Search

✅ Your Internship Search – Phase 2: Good to Great, Incorporating the Employer Perspective

✅ Your Internship Search – Phase 3: Troubleshooting

Here is another link on the topic, too. It’s from Spring 2024.