<p>I'm a parent trying to help a college student (not my child) find a career path.</p>
<p>Female student (age 24) will be finishing her fifth year of UG work at a Cal State with a degree in Biochemistry. Her GPA is below 3.0. Harsh childhood with a dependency override for financial aid purposes...she has been doing this alone without any family support. Somewhat introverted. Wonderful work ethic and smart, but the necessary part time job has really harmed her GPA. </p>
<p>I don't think she has the grades to get into a Medical Technology school (please correct me if I'm wrong). She can't afford a Masters. She has shown an interest in forensics, but my impression so that the field is competitive and that she would need additional training to become a technician. She just doesn't have any direction and will need to find a job when she graduates next Spring.</p>
<p>Would anyone be kind enough to provide some insight or advice that I can pass on to her?</p>
<p>Has she explored any career options? Volunteering, research, part time job, internship, etc? Does she want something in healthcare, research, academia, industry… or just something that pays her? Many fields are competitive, but that shouldn’t dissuade her from still applying. If she doesn’t have much experience, she may need to cast a wide net to get that first job, and then explore career options from there.</p>
<p>@ninjex
I’m not sure her GPA would gain her admission into any grad programs…especially those that would fund her.</p>
<p>@baktrax
I am sitting down with her next week to ask her pretty much the same as you wrote. I hadn’t thought about volunteering. I think she needs to get her foot in the door with a paying job, even if it’s in accounting in a bio tech company for example, and maybe wait for a lab II position to open. I’ll see where her interests lie. Appreciate your comments.</p>
<p>If this student took a little longer to get her degree and has a bit of a weak gpa, it will be important for her to have some previous lab experience to strengthen her candidacy for lab tech positions. If she doesn’t have any lab experience yet, then she should try to volunteer during the school year - something like ten hours a week would be good enough. Can she take research for credit at school? That would be another option. If she already has some lab experience, she should try to continue it through her senior year, to show genuine interest/commitment, and to keep her reference letter current and supportive. Tech positions are hard to come by in academia these days since grant funding has become very challenging; I don’t know what the job market is in industry but I assume some sort of experience will still be very important to strengthen her application. Fortunately there are lots of west coast companies to target.</p>