Welcome to College Admissions in the Era of COVID-19 Virtual Summit! On today’s episode, we give you a glimpse into Dr. Legatt’s conversation with Vincent Phamvan.
Transcript:
VO: Welcome to College Admissions Real Talk with Dr. Aviva Legatt, a podcast for students seeking to get admitted to top-tier colleges. Each episode will feature an important tip for your college admission success, delivered with candor and love. If you’ve ever wanted to take a peek inside the mind of a college admissions officer, this is your chance. Have a question? Text Dr. Legatt at 610-222-5762. So, what’s your dream school?
AL: Welcome to College Admissions Real Talk. I am Dr. Aviva Legatt, founder and elite admissions expert at Ivy Insight and author of “Get Real and Get In”. You’re going to be hearing today from our summit speaker, and I’m so excited to share just a glimpse of the summit with you. I wanted to give you a sense of what you missed if you had to miss it and invite you to get a VIP All-Access Pass to the summit. This access pass will allow you to get full, unlimited and lifetime access to all those session recordings. This is just a clip. You’ll also have the ability to attend live Q & A session with me where I will answer your questions about college admissions right on the spot. And you’re going to also gain access to my personal Ultimate College Application Template bundle with bonus materials and that has a value of $397. So click on the show notes. Go ahead, reserve your VIP ticket so that you can gain access to the full summit experience and all its perks. See you soon.
I want to start transitioning over and getting ready to introduce Vincent Phamvan. Last year, he organized an incredible summit called The Hope Summit, which brought in so many different career and job seekers, large companies; everybody who was anybody was there. And it was a really incredible experience to be part of. And I’ve taken a lot of cues from Vincent and his team in organizing the Summit, so I want to thank him for that. Vincent is a founder of Vyten Career Coaching. This is an online coaching program that helps ordinary people get incredible jobs with the pay and purpose that they deserve. He specializes in helping job candidates to interview with confidence and secure a job that enables them to enjoy the best that life has to offer. He has been featured in Forbes, Entreprenuer.com, Fast Company, The Tennessean, Nashville Business Journal, and more. He’s also the 2020 award recipient of Nashville Business Journal’s 40 under 40. Since 2014, Vincent and Vyten have helped over 800,000 job seekers advance their careers. So today, Vincent and I are gonna be talking about career readiness during COVID-19. So welcome, Vincent. It’s great to have you. VP: Thanks so much for having me, and it’s really great to be able to have you at the summit that we hosted last year as well. AL: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. To kick things off, I would love for you to tell me and to tell everybody out there a little bit about your organization, what you do and how you came to this work. VP: I came to this work because I graduated from college in 2009 and, you know, at the time I graduated, when I entered college, we were at the top of the world. The economy was doing great. People were getting great jobs. And when I entered college, the seniors that were graduating at the time, they were heading off into the jobs that everybody wanted to get. They were working for large consulting firms, working for large banking organizations. Doctors were going off to become doctors. Lawyers were becoming lawyers. And when I graduated, that wasn’t the job market. People were having a hard time even getting retail jobs at the time. It’s not too different than what we saw last year. Internships were getting canceled in 2020. Unemployment was at an all-time high, and it made me realize that it was time to be able to go out and serve. And that’s when an incredible group of people came together in Hope Summit yourself included. And we had over 80 people come together for a week of going out and helping people take the next step in their career. And what I’ve really seen over the course of the last year is while many people are putting their career on pause, many people are accelerating their career. There are many trends, and we’re going to talk about a lot of them over the next hour where COVID 19 is accelerating trends that have already existed in the workplace. And so things like remote work, things like automation, things like ecommerce. Ecommerce was something that already existed well before COVID 19. But those trends are now just accelerating. And if you are looking at industries that are growing, there are ways to be able to get jobs right now in places where jobs are actual expanding solar energy, wind energy is another example of areas where jobs are growing. And so what I’m really excited about is being able to help people understand how to identify these industries and these jobs that are growing so that they can really get excited about their future. AL: That’s amazing, Vincent. And I think it’s so incredible that people have you and your organization as a resource to navigate these changes in the landscape. I’m curious if you’ve heard from the younger folks in your community or if you have a sense of this just from keeping your pulse in the industry. What are some majors or ways that folks who are a little bit younger might prepare for these kinds of changes that are happening and that will happen? VP: One of the first things, first and foremost is having a quantitative background cannot hurt. What I mean by that is many of the areas that are in demand. Being able to work with numbers is really helpful. Many employers like Uber, for instance, actually have a quantitative test as part of their hiring processes. And so they actually will give you a spreadsheet as part of their hiring process. And they’ll ask you questions similar to, like, an SAT-style test where they ask you multiple choice questions, giving you a spreadsheet that uses some of their data. And so, as part of their high hiring process, they’ll give you a spreadsheet that will have an example of some of their drivers and some rides for the week. And they’ll ask you questions like, “Okay, during what time period where they’re the most rides that were requested?” And then you have to calculate using that spreadsheet the time period that had the most rides that were requested, so that you can understand when they would want to have more drivers that were on the road. And so being able to learn the in school and then apply that employers are looking for people who can take the skills that they can learn in school and then quickly apply that in that job. And so the more that you can gain that experience, whether that’s through internships, whether that’s through previous work experience or really, even whether that’s through experiences that you pick up through student organizations or clubs, students I talk to and work with are often surprised about is even something like, like planning an event for a student organization. If you talk about how you build a budget, how you plan for ordering supplies, and how you organize attendees, and how you build a spreadsheet to be able to do that, those are oftentimes things that employers are impressed by because that’s the type of work that is needed to be able to plan events at work as well. And so being able to build those types of skills are really beneficial for being able to transition into that first job after college as well.
VO: College Admissions Real Talk is hosted by Aviva Legatt, edited by Stephanie Carlin, and produced by Incontrera Consulting. I’m Caroline Stokes and this has been your daily boost of college admissions insight. Have a question? Text Dr. Legatt at 610-222-5762. For more information on Dr. Legatt and Ivy Insight visit www.ivyinsight.com. And you can pick up Dr. Legatt’s book, “Get Real and Get In”, at major retail outlets across the world. Insight out.
