For the thousands of members of class of 2025 who are just days away from the next chapter in their lives, UCLA has a clear message: We’re here to help you with your future.
From the UCLA Career Center to the UCLA Alumni Association, the university offers an array of resources, advice, hands-on trainings and mentorship opportunities designed to help both job-seeking students and alumni find what they’re looking for.
It’s understandable that Bruins may be experiencing some uncertainty at the moment, given questions about the direction of the economy. But take heart, say the people running these programs: There are many paths forward and many members of the UCLA family who are eager to help. The important thing is to connect.
UCLA’s Career Center: Getting creative to meet students’ needs
The Career Center offers both in-person and virtual services for new graduates up to three months after graduation, along with on-demand online resources. The goal is to help graduates along their path after college, whether that involves job-hunting, graduate school, an internship, entrepreneurship, a gap year or other options.
“We really look at different platforms holistically to continuously make sure that we’re meeting graduates’ needs,” said Carina Salazar, the center’s executive director for career and immersive experiences. “We’re continuously looking for resources and partnerships that will provide opportunities for our students.”
One-on-one sessions
To help with those opportunities, career advisors are available for scheduled in-person or virtual sessions — as well as shorter drop-in sessions — in which they will work one-on-one with new graduates to address a range of needs. That includes helping with job and internship searches, reviewing resumes and cover letters, providing advice on how to negotiate job offers, and giving guidance on preparing for graduate school. Advisors also regularly conduct mock job interviews with Bruins, and the center provides special interview rooms to accommodate those needing privacy for online interviews with potential employers.
Online career resources
One of the first stops graduating Bruins should make online, Salazar said, is the UCLA Handshake website, which is available to new graduates for a full year following commencement and has more than 40,000 job and internship listings. The site connects them to employers, jobs, internships, workshops and other events, as well as to the center’s career-advising services. It also features a tool called Focus 2 to help students and recent graduates assess their skills and interests so they can refine their career options and employment searches.
Career Center staff recommend that students take advantage of additional online resources like the UCLA-specific Parker Dewey and Forage sites, which offer project-based micro-internship opportunities — both paid and unpaid — for students of all majors, years and degree levels who want to upskill, and its Vault guide, which lets Bruins research companies and chart potential careers.
Alumni will have access UCLA’s Slack channel for jobs — #internship-and-job-opportunities — which they can connect to using their UCLA Gmail (@g.ucla.edu) address.
Tools for careers in the academic job market
Separately, the center’s graduate career services advisors provide tailored guidance for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, including individual meetings, workshops and coaching for the academic job market, as well as use of individual development plans like MyIDP (for doctoral students in the sciences) and ImaginePhD (for graduate students in the humanities and social sciences). Recent Career Center panels have explored opportunities in community colleges, social justice, pharmaceuticals and consulting.
‘Real Talk’: Sharing job-hunting experiences with your peers
This summer, the Career Center is starting a new program called “Real Talk,” a virtual space where graduates with new bachelor’s degrees can gather in a group setting with center staff to share experiences — like the stress of job searching — and ask questions of Career Center staff about career development, resources and the possibility of pivoting if their job searches don’t seem to be bearing fruit. (Information can be found on Handshake by searching for “Real Talk.”)
“What we are seeing is that students have a particular job or professional goal in mind, and if they are not necessarily getting the callbacks they want, if they’re not getting the interviews, or they’re just not finding those jobs available, they are needing to look in new directions,” says Kim Terrill, the center’s associate director for undergraduate career education and development.
Degree not in demand? Rethinking your next steps
“We really try and pivot our services to be able to help students wherever they’re at in their career journey,” says Halee Harrell, the center’s associate director for the industry relations and experiential learning team.
Some students might find their topics of study aren’t directly translatable to the job market. The center works with students and recent graduates to identify the skills and experiences they used during their school years, from leadership and critical thinking skills to teamwork, and explore how they might be able to translate those skills to other employment categories.
UCLA Alumni: Resources, networking and lifelong engagement
The UCLA Alumni Association’s alumni career engagement team invites the graduates of the class of 2025 to utilize its career-support tools, networks, and programs — resources they can access throughout their lifetime. The association launched its class of 2025 initiative at the start of spring quarter, ushering the new class into alumni life.
The importance of networking and relationship-building
There are a few critical things Bruin graduates should think about as they pursue and develop their professional careers, says Mia Seleshi, career engagement director with UCLA Alumni Affairs.
One, she says, is to get comfortable asking people for help. Graduates should identify Bruins working in the companies they are pursuing and request to conduct an “informational interview” with them. They can use the informational interview to gain insight into the work environment and culture of potential employers as well as to find and engage advocates in the organizations.
And, importantly, network through UCLA. UCLA’s alumni network is 670,000 members strong and is a tremendous asset for new graduates as they seek to understand their next steps. At UCLA Alumni networking events, you can find career support through mixers, volunteer work and professional information sessions. Regional alumni networks and welcome events occur around the world, so new graduates can plug into a community near them.
UCLA Alumni also helps facilitate those connections through its Bruins in Top Organizations Data Dashboard. The platform uses LinkedIn data to identify where Bruins work in the fields of consulting, investment banking, finance and technology — by location and company. New graduates can identify alumni who hold leadership positions in those organizations and reach out.
Since the spring, UCLA Alumni has hosted a number of workshops with regional network leaders to provide graduating seniors the steps to successfully move to New York City, the Bay Area and locally around Los Angeles and Orange County.
“Ultimately, jobs are not really found just by applying to a job online anymore; it really is about relationship-building,” Seleshi says. “And the great stories we hear from our alumni about how they found their jobs are often from other alumni.”
Online resources for alumni
As a first stop, new graduates should visit the association’s website dedicated to the class of 2025 for resources tailored to this new stage in their life and beyond. The site helps guide new graduates through all aspects of the job search process, from leveraging a resume to mastering interviews and salary negotiations.
And the association offers a trove of resources for Bruins at every stage in their career on its career engagement website, which includes on-demand webinars and workshops, career advice through its Bruin Success podcast and fee-based career coaching.
There are also several free online networking communities. UCLA ONE, with about 6,500 alumni offering professional development support, has approximately 74,000 users worldwide. Through the site, alumni are available to help newly graduated Bruins by reviewing resumes, conducting mock interviews and speaking about industry-related topics. The UCLA Alumni LinkedIn group is also a great place to find job opportunities and professional connections.
Helping current students get career-ready
Opportunities also exist for currently enrolled students looking to build professional relationships.
Student career preparation programs, facilitated by the UCLA Alumni Association, are available through the UCLA Department of Economics, the UCLA College’s life sciences division and the Women in Engineering organization at UCLA. Not only do these programs give current students hands-on experience, but they introduce them to alumni who engage in a range of roles, like mentoring, guest lecturing, interviewing and serving as competition judges for project pitches. Business undergraduates can also consider the William F. Sharpe Fellows Program, which builds leadership skills and civic engagement in tandem with top employers.
Mentorship opportunities
The UCLA Alumni Mentor Program connects current UCLA undergraduate and graduate students with UCLA alumni for two-way personal and professional development. Mentors have helped students think about job offers, provided general coaching and guidance on next professional steps.
Olivia Gonzalez, who will graduate this June with a degree in cognitive science, was paired with mentor Yuval Zukerman, who graduated in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science.
“Since I am a graduating senior, his guidance has been most beneficial,” Gonzalez said of Zukerman. “He motivates me to keep going — even through the fact that there are many companies freezing their hiring due to the economic state of the country. He always reminds me that I am young, and I have many opportunities. And if I can’t get a job right away, he has encouraged me to explore grad school, internships or certifications. He always points me in the direction of self-growth, and I am forever grateful.”
