Leveraging Your Experience
For many of you, Puentes represented not only your first living experience in another culture, but also your first foray into the work world. The invaluable combination of the language skills you learned, the experience of navigating a new and different world, and the network you developed during the program is something that should help you flourish in your future career. Your ability to adapt to unfamiliar settings and think on your feet has been tested and should only continue to improve. Keeping in mind that the only constant is change, embrace this ability to acclimate when presented with new situations. Also, given that international immersion programs such as Puentes are excellent opportunities for bonding, some of your peers from the program will likely become longterm contacts that will help you grow a broader network in the coming years. We want to make sure that you make the most of these leaps and bounds in growth and learnings that are the result of your Puentes experience.
Telling Your Story
A great way to translate your experience into future opportunities is by talking about your international immersion experience. Pitch yourself as a global citizen. Update your resume to reflect your newfound intercultural navigation skills. Highlight your language skills and demonstrate your capacity for empathy in an ever increasingly global environment. If you’d like for us to help you brainstorm how to highlight your Puentes program on your resume, reach out to us with your draft, and we’ll take a look.
How to Job Search Internationally
The best way to get started with your international job search is to do informational interviews to learn about the region that interests you. Never underestimate the power of making personal connections in your target region. Remember the age old maxim: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” In some cases, such as Latin America, personal connections carry as much weight or more than personal merit. If you are certain about where you are want to live, move to the international destination and volunteer in order to meet people and develop a network. As you are getting acquainted and making contacts, rethink your skillset and consider what makes you uniquely qualified to work in that country. Try to think of what might make you better than locals would be at doing the same thing and focus on those skills when carrying out your job search. And remember that the Puentes team is always available to help with ideas and brainstorming on how to create your international work path.
Post Graduate Opportunities Abroad
Princeton in Latin America: Open to students from all universities, this program helps future leaders develop lifelong connections to Latin America and the Caribbean, placing recent college graduates into highly selective year-long fellowships with social organizations throughout the Americas.
The Fulbright Commission: This is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs whose goal is to improve intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of the United States and other countries through the exchange of persons, knowledge, and skills.
World Teach: This program recruits, prepares, and supports teachers for the international classroom, by seeking those who are dedicated to engaging students in purposeful learning regardless of prior teaching experience.
Peace Corps: A volunteer program run by the United States government, its official mission is to provide social and economic development abroad through technical assistance, while promoting mutual understanding between Americans and populations served.
Teach For All: This international arm of Teach for America is a global network of 50 independent, locally led and funded partner organizations whose stated shared mission is to “expand educational opportunity around the world by increasing and accelerating the impact of social enterprises that are cultivating the leadership necessary for change.”
Digital Nomads: This is a community of people who use telecommunications technologies to earn a living and, more generally, conduct their life in a nomadic manner. Such people often work remotely from foreign countries, coffee shops, public libraries, co-working spaces, or recreational vehicles.