Careers Night

October 28, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

We had our annual careers night. Or it might be or bi-annual careers night, or even tri-annual. Some years we have it, and some we don’t, and this year we did.  It’s our attempt to answer the age-old question, “What can I do with a degree in Sociology?”

We know what some sociology graduates have done – become head coach of the Steeles or First Lady of the United States.  But since those jobs are currently taken, we were lucky to have three of our recent graduates on hand to tell us what they were doing. 

We had a pretty good turnout – at least fifty students.

And here are our speakers: Emman Hamdan,  Jessica McCabe, and Kristine Nemec.

Emman is in her first year of an MSW program at Rutgers. 

She’s taking courses and “shadowing” a social worker in the field. She said that her Sociology at Montclair had prepared her so well that the instructor in one of her courses had asked her not to speak up in class so that the other student could wrestle with the questions. 

Kristine got her degree in May, but she is already a consulting company.

Back in the spring semester, when Kristine was in Chris Donoghue’s section of Senior Research Project, Chris got an inquiry from a medical board. They needed a survey.  Kristine was on it immediately. She singlehandedly designed the survey and is now analyzing the data. She plans to do further consultant/contract work. 

Jessica is working for two non-profits. At the Masakhane Center in Newark she is a sex educator, where, she says, the insights of sociology have helped her tailor her approach for the needs of an inner-city population.

She also works at the National Council of Jewish Women, a different p;opulation (Short Hills ain’t Newark). After looking at some of the surveys Council had done, she said to herself, “Prof. Ruane would not have liked the construction of this survey.” She told them so, tactfully, and offered to do it right. So now she is their unofficial in-house survey maven.

The speakers were great, and the students were very interested to know what might lie on the other side of a sociology degree.  We really should do this more often.