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Many online job applications require that you state at least three professional references. The motivation behind this is to ensure that the people that companies are looking to hire have people who can vouch for the prospective employees' skills and work ethic. And there's a difference between this and a personal reference.
Now, here's the problem: I don't have much "professional" experience to my name. Aside from being part of a small-name press group (one that's just big enough to qualify for press badges at fan conventions) for the past three years with an editor-in-chief who I'm on excellent terms with and could vouch for me, I've got very few if any to back me on what little experience I have--I've had a job, but as mentioned in my other job hunting thread, it lasted for two months and I was on neutral terms with my supervisor.
Instructors at college and universities count, apparently? But I never knew any of my instructors particularly long enough for them to be on particularly good terms with me, though several instructors are ones I took two or three classes with.
Comments
Maybe try to find an instructor you took a few classes with and did decently well in, and ask them nicely to help be a professional reference?
I dunno. I kinda suck at this too.
It's even worse when they limit professional references to the last two years. The average unemployed worker is there for like 40 weeks, and recent grads upwards of a few years.
i was about to say "start your own business?"
then i realized that, ironically, staying employed by starting one's own business actually wouldn't necessarily yield recent professional contacts either
My uni grades aren't the greatest. They kind of began to falter about 1/4 of the way through my uni career.