Job Search Resources for Film Students: Mandy.com & StaffMeUp.com

Mandy.com

Mandy is a simple job search tool for those in the film and theater industries which functions a lot like LinkedIn. You can easily find casting and crew calls for all sorts of productions and apply for them safely directly through the website. All you need is a free account to start seeing the listings, however, you have to pay for a subscription in order to apply for the positions and make sure your profile is seen. The nice thing about Mandy is that it organizes opportunities by employer. That way if you find an employer you would like to work for it lists all of their available positions in one place, rather than having to weed through all other listings to find that particular employer. 

StaffMeUp.com

StaffMeUp is a great resource for those looking for film jobs and internships. Unlike Mandy, it does not feature theater internships and only showcases film and crew opportunities. The website is extremely easy to navigate and you just need to make a free profile to start applying for positions. With the free version, you are allowed to apply to 5 opportunities every month, but if you would like to apply to more you must pay for a subscription. The paid subscription also gives you access to the status of your application to see when it is being reviewed. Overall, StaffMeUp’s free version is much more useful than Mandy’s since you can actually start applying for positions right away without having to pay anything.

Forage.com Highlight – Gain real-life experience for free!

Forage.com is an online platform that provides students with free virtual work simulations from corporations including JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Accenture, Goldman Sachs, and others. Each application is meant to mimic a real-world working environment and the types of activities that may be encountered if you worked for one of these firms. Students can obtain more knowledge about whether they are truly willing to work in that field and have a better chance of getting employed by displaying a proactive approach and readiness to learn by finishing one of these programs.

These seminars might last anywhere from two to ten hours. As a result, they are brief yet intense courses. Even if they’re only a few minutes long, they’re still a terrific way to get some exercise and gain long-lasting experience.

You can sign up for Forage at this link.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at oliver.decroock@lawrence.edu or grace.kutney@lawrence.edu if you have any questions, or to make an appointment.

Intro to R

Adapted from simplilearn.com and psychologicalscience.org 

R is an open-source programming language often used as a data analysis and statistical software tool. It’s particularly useful for machine learning operations and data wrangling. If R is widely used, what are some potential advantages and drawbacks and is it really worth learning? 

Here are some advantages: 

  • It’s open source. No fees or licenses are needed, which is why if you’re developing a new program, it’s a low-risk venture. 
  • It’s platform-independent, which means that it runs on all operating systems. This allows developers to only create one program that can work on competing systems. This is also why R is cost-effective. 
  • R is great for statistics – it can do many things from regression equations to frequentist and Bayesian statistics. It can bootstrap, simulate, randomize and resample your data which is why it’s widely used in the data sciences. 
  • It’s well suited for Machine Learning. R is ideal for machine learning operations such as regression and classification.  
  • R lets you perform data wrangling which involves turning unstructured, messy data into a structured format. This involves merging data sets, cleaning data and identifying important rows or columns. R also creates formatted tables, complete with significance stars. For this reason, R is often used in financial tech industries and in academia.  
  • It visualizes data well because there are packages dedicated to making pretty plots.  

Drawbacks include: 

  • It has a steep learning curve. It’s best suited for people who have some previous programming experience. 
  • It’s not as secure. R doesn’t have basic security measures. Consequently, it’s not a good choice for making web-safe applications and it can’t be embedded in web browsers. 
  • It’s slow. R is slower than other programming languages like Python or MATLAB. 
  • It has bad memory management, so it takes up a lot of memory when running code. R’s data must be stored in physical memory however, the increasing use of cloud-based memory may eventually lessen the negative effects of this drawback.  
  • It doesn’t have consistent documentation/package quality. Docs and packages can be patchy and inconsistent, or incomplete because it doesn’t have official support and instead is maintained and added to by the community.  

Some stat classes at Lawrence already teach people how to use R like STAT 255, CMSC 205 and ECON 380. You can also install RStudio yourself since it’s free and use online teaching and coding resources like Datacamp to do so as well.  

Fighting Displacement: Three resettlement NGO’s that support the most vulnerable populations

You can see – and feel – the despair and fear on the faces of over 4 million Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia’s advancing army.  Sadly, this is only the latest of many refugee crises our planet has faced in recent years.  From Afghanistan to Sudan, millions have been displaced as they flee war, poverty and oppression. 

Organizations, including the UN, struggle to process the massive waves of people searching for safety and an opportunity to live life with dignity, leading to a greater need for integrative services in countries offering asylum. If you have been exploring the NGO career path, here are three of the best known resettlement agencies:

International Rescue Committee (IRC) 

If you’ve ever spent a considerable amount of time on YouTube, you might have come across a heart-wrenching ad from the IRC. The IRC helps displaced people within countries in crisis. Provisions in crisis areas include shelter, cash assistance, food and water. Programs elevating long-term growth in-country include access to education, minority empowerment (working on policy with local governments), health programs treating preventable diseases and ensuring access to reproductive health. 

In situations like Ukraine where safety is not guaranteed, many find themselves leaving their home-countries entirely. IRC offers resettlement services helping refugees in their transition to the United States, where they receive assistance in a variety of areas including medical, housing, education, legal services, employment and more. 

World Relief

World Relief is a Christian organization founded in 1940 to provide recovery aid after World War II. Since then, World Relief has joined President Kennedy’s “Food for Peace” committee, responded to earthquake disaster areas, and provided aid to thousands of refugees. As of 2015, World Relief has worked in over 100 countries, has partnered with 6,000 churches, and has recruited over 95,000 volunteers. 

Much like the IRC, there are departments supporting refugees including immigration services, youth support, case management, education, and employment.

Refugees International 

Refugees International is an advocacy group founded in 1979 in response to the crises in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Their main functions are to “investigate displacement crises, create policy solutions and advocate for change”. Their Refugee Advocacy Lab dedicates resources to working with US representatives on creating supportive policies for refugees among other efforts.  The four main issues this organization focuses on is climate displacement, Covid-19, access to employment, and minority empowerment in over 40 countries. 

If you are wondering about NGO work and want to see if this work is for you? World Relief, Refugees International and IRC all offer internships available to undergraduates and graduates. Learn more about these organizations by clicking on their websites posted below:

https://www.refugeesinternational.org/

https://www.rescue.org/

https://worldrelief.org/

Career Spotlight: Environmental Organizations

If asked to name a concern of global importance, many Lawrence students would cite the changing climate and its impact on the environment. Some go so far as to declare environmental justice as their desired career path. In fact, some past Lawrentians have already done so, choosing to turn their passion for the improving the environment into a career, by working for an environmental organization. 

While environmental organizations may occasionally be a private company or corporation, most of the time, such entities are part of local, state or federal government, or they may be a non-governmental organization (NGO), or an intergovernmental organization.  In addition to climate change, other environmental issues they focus on include pollution, waste, resource depletion and human overpopulation.

In the United States, the primary federal government agencies tasked with serving and protecting the environment include the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service.  Most states have their own versions of some of these agencies as well. 

The list of NGO’s in the United States and around the world committed to environmental protection is too long to list, but you have likely heard of many of the larger ones, including the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Greenpeace. 

All of these government agencies and NGO’s hire interns, so if you are looking for a place to get hands-on experience in protecting the environment and fighting climate change, consider a summer internship for such an agency or organization.  Please note that government agencies hire their summer interns very early, so you should start looking as early as this fall for internships in the summer of 2023.

Another great way to get experience in this area is by joining one of the many Lawrence environmental clubs and organizations, some of which are Greenfire, the Lawrence University Environmental Organization, the LUCC Sustainability Committee and the Sustainable Lawrence University Garden (SLUG)

Join the LU Business Networking Club

We’ve discussed how vital it is to meet new people, network, and form relationships with individuals in the business world in previous newsletters. However, having to reach out to someone you don’t know and ask them questions might be really awkward. What if they don’t want to be bothered? What if they think that we are just wasting their time?

To solve this issue, a group of students came together and decided to create the Lawrence University Business Networking Club. Every week, they attempt to bring a speaker who is eager to answer any questions from students. “The idea is to have a typical, casual chat with the guests, in which members can ask any questions they want, even if they aren’t immediately linked to the guest’s field of expertise” (Oliver De Croock, Vice-President of the LUBNC). When they are not able to connect with a guest in time for their weekly meeting, they use that time to learn from each other and share information to help each other succeed.

In the past two months, Oliver says “We were able to connect with a diverse spectrum of outstanding people from a variety of businesses. Some of them were so thrilled with the idea that they opted to drive hours to meet with us in person!”

A list of some of their previous guests:

  • Kazuma Noguchi, Restructuring Analyst
  • Harry Rivas, Consulting
  • Colling McCanna, Marketing
  • Bethany Larsen, Investment Banking
  • Martin Alwin, Analyst
  • Jon Anfinrud, Regional Executive – Commercial Banking

“Every single visitor that came was able to add incredible value and insight, providing us with legitimate ideas that we could instantly implement. They also offered to be a referral for anyone who was there if they were interested in an internship or a professional position with the firm for which they worked”. In the future, they intend to bring in even more guests, including people with more experience in other industries, entrepreneurs, as well as people with Human Resources and recruiting experience, to help the students understand more about what recruiters are looking for and to receive tips and advice on how to use platforms like LinkedIn or Handshake to jumpstart their careers and gain a competitive edge over other people.

How to JOIN and EXPECTATIONS

“As students, we all have busy schedules, and there is always something that we need to get done. If you opt to join our club, we will require you to invest one hour every week to actively participate in meetings, ask questions, and push yourself beyond your comfort zone. We already spend too much time in class, so the idea here is to establish a conversation in which anybody can enter at any moment, with any sort of question, even if it is not directly linked to the guest’s field of expertise”.

If you would like to join, please send an email to oliver.decroock@lawrence.edu explaining what industry you are interested in and why (this will help them reach out to guests that could be interesting for you).

Oliver De Croock ’24, Student-Athlete at Lawrence University majoring in Economics and Career Peer Educator. Connect with me on LinkedIn.