Trial and error, changing careers and taking risks are all steps to realizing one’s true passions. These were just some of the messages alumni in the field of communications shared with students at Hamilton’s first Communications Bootcamp, sponsored by the Career Center and held in the heart of Times Square on March 23.

Hamilton’s Maurice Horowitch Career Center is without doubt one of the most valuable assets on campus for students preparing to make the transition off the Hill and into the “real world,” but sometimes stepping through the doorway and into the third floor of Bristol can be a little intimidating. To address this issue, the Career Center has teamed up with the Days-Massolo Center to offer a collaborative workshop series spread out over the course of the second semester.

Five members of Hamilton’s class of 2013 spent a week shadowing resident physicians at the St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Utica, from Jan. 14-18.  Tiffany Andrade, Emma Geduldig, Robert Hawkins, Megan Lander and Akritee Shrestha all received real-life experience in medical careers. The program, “A Week in the Life of a Family Medicine Resident,” is in its eight consecutive year.

During the two weeks before they returned to campus, some 143 Hamilton sophomores got a close look at possible careers as they took part in the third HamiltonExplore, sponsored by the Career Center.

Throughout the summer the news page has featured stories about students who were awarded funding from Hamilton to pursue their career interests through research projects with faculty or in internships that were offered without pay. In an effort to gain experience in a field of interest, other Hamilton students pursued summer research and internships that were unfunded.

Samantha Sherman ’15 has taken to heart the oft-repeated advice of Hamilton College’s Maurice Horowitch Career Center to “get started early” when it comes to career related experience. Although only a rising sophomore, Sherman has spent the past two months working in a marketing and public relations internship at the Hamilton Farm Golf Club in Gladstone, N.J.

The Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, N.H., is unique among so-called living history museums because it does not focus on a single era of history, but rather documents the transformation of the neighborhood from its original state in 1695 until the residents left in 1955. This unique approach to preserving the past inspired history major Eryn Boyce ’13 to apply for an internship at Strawbery Banke.

The issue of human sex trafficking has long been on the radar of international lawmakers and humanitarian organizations, but the recently emerged problem of human labor trafficking is just now beginning to come under national and international scrutiny. Jasmina Hodzic ’13 is interning at the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina with the support of a Levitt Center Public Service Grant.

English major Madison Forsander ’14 originally planned to find a career-related experience in fiction editing, but this summer she instead chose to accept a textbook editing internship at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information (CITI) at Columbia University. While the opening was outside of her immediate scope of interest, she applied because she thought it would “be a good way to gain editorial experience and simultaneously expand [her] knowledge of media and communications.”

Julia Williams ’14 accepted an internship at The Irish International Immigrant Center (IIIC) in Boston, Mass. because she hoped to get hands-on experience in the legal field while determining if non-profit work fit her interests.