Unlocking Your Future: How College Students Can Leverage Their Unique Power

Alex Boylan: What's up everyone? I'm taking my phone out because I've been told 10 minutes.
Keep it short, keep it tight. How's everyone doing? Good? Really good to be
here. I got a question. Any PKs in the audience here? Preachers kids? Good.
That's it. All right. Let's hope there. I'm a PK. Born and raised on the North
Shore of Boston. My dad ran the Byfield Parish Church for 50 years and I've had
a really amazing career in storytelling and mostly travel adventure shows as we
were talking about here. But when they asked me to come up here and speak at
Chapel, I was trying to think of what's the best story to tell y'all. And I'm
working on this book. The college tour, we're on around like season 14, what
we're filming. Y'all are gonna be in that. 175 episodes. I've had the privilege to
see higher education from this landscape and meet literally thousands of college
students. And I would say there's one thing I've learned and typically this
this talk, this lecture, takes about an hour to get through. I'm gonna try to do
it in eight minutes when I have that left. I want you all to understand the
power you all have being a college student. I'm pretty sure they don't teach
this in college right now, but you can move mountains as a college student.
And I'm gonna walk you through how to do this, but also remember the day you
graduate, it's gonna it's almost like welcome to the real world. You're gonna
be like everyone else. So what I want you to do is, first of all, congratulations on
being here. But I'd say the biggest message that I try to tell students is
you have to take advantage of every resource. College is an amazing
playground for you to meet different people, try different things, explore,
learn, all this. But the number one thing is you are a college student. I'm gonna
give you some advice here, okay? Every adult, most people, they understand what
a student, it's like to be in a student's shoes. The power you all have, you can get to do
any door you want. And I really encourage everyone to take this time to set up
upon graduation because who here wants to have their dream job? I've been blessed
to have it. Everyone? Anyone? Seems like crickets. Yeah? Let's hear from someone.
What do you want to do? Yeah? No? Heads down. Anyone want to say what they want to do
after college? Hospital job. Can everyone hear me? Can you all hear me? There we go.
Could you hear me before? Oh you guys couldn't hear it? No? Not at all? Have I
been basically talking to myself? All right. I'm gonna try to do this over a
real quick again guys. All right. I'm so sorry. Thank you. All right. Listen, I'm
very blessed to host the college tour. I've gotten to travel this country. We're
on episode 170, 80 right now and meet thousands of college students. And my
big thesis that I want to get out while I'm sitting here talking to you is for
you all to understand the power of being a college student and what you have
access to that will be over the day you graduate because you'll be in the real
world like the rest of us. And so I would love to hear if anyone has it, anyone
wants to talk about their dream job, feel free to say it. If not, I'm gonna roll
into, what do we got? You want to be a lawyer? I know we do a lot of medical
missions here. I'm assuming a lot of people want to be in the medical field.
Anyway, I'm gonna move on. Here's the deal guys. Like you can get
access to anyone as a college student and you can't when you graduate. And so
what I want you to think about is whatever industry you're in, doesn't
matter if you're engineering, you're medical, you want to be in television
like I am, you want to be in the mission field, whatever it is, what I highly
suggest you do is build out an Excel spreadsheet and find the best in the
business, right? So if you want to be a chaplain, you know, go find the
hospital chaplains that like inspire you. Find these people because you all can
get access to them now. And so what you need to do is write to them, tell them
you're in college, tell them where you're at, and ask them for seven minutes of
their time and for two questions. You will bat such a high percentage of
building by doing this. I want you to do it over and over and over as much as you
possibly can. I'm talking like 25, 30, 50 times by the time you graduate. Because
what you're doing is building relationships and that's half of what
life is all about. So while you start hopefully doing these interviews,
building relationships, afterwards, so I'm just gonna use an example. For me, my
little niece, this whole show was created from, she wants to work in animation. And
so I was telling her the same thing. I'm like, you've got to go now. The
earlier the better. Freshman, sophomore, junior, not too late if you're seniors
either. Like start now and I want you to find all the best directors out there
that you exactly what you want to be. And here's a very short email that you're
gonna write to them explaining who you are, why you love that job, and if you can
just have seven minutes of your time. You'll be surprised at the percentage of
adults that will get back to you because you are a college student. You have
access to them, okay? And you're not a threat. You're not asking for a job yet.
You're just trying to get some information on them. And the reason for
this is just to build some rapport, build a relationship. After that, anyone here
use Google Alerts? Alright, I'm gonna give you guys another mystery. Go to Google.
They have a thing called Alerts. You can put in that person's name and anytime
they come up, whether, you know, anytime in the press there, anywhere in Google
is talking about it, that name will send you an email. Then I want you to hit
them up very lightly with a, "Hey, congratulations. I just saw you doing X, Y,
and Z at whatever industry." Is this all making sense to everyone? Do that and do
that over every time they come up in the trades. Do that over and over and guess
what? By the time you're graduating as a senior, now you've built relationships
with professionals. And guess what happens? Soon you're all gonna graduate
and who wants to get their dream job? Now it's very easy to reach out to them and
say what they're gonna remember. Here's the deal, adults love to be
praised. Okay, so find the adult that you want to do exactly what they're doing.
Give them very cool praise. Stay in touch with them and then right before
graduation, that's when you reach out to these professionals and say, "Hey, I'm
about to graduate from LCU and I'm looking for a job." So I'm doing this. This
is like 45 minutes to break into all the little subtleties and nuances with this
but I think that's my biggest advice that I give college students all day
long everywhere is like take advantage of where you are right now. You made an
amazing decision to come to an amazing institution. Use that power of being a
college student to set yourself up so you can land that dream job. I'm telling
you all, like I like pinched myself of what my career has been. Thanks to God,
thanks to a lot. It is hard to find your dream job. You ask a lot of adults. Most
people don't like their job. So I encourage you to find your passion. Go
after that passion and never take no for an answer but I think you need to start
now and you start building those rapports. So that's kind of my overall thesis for
you all. I'm happy to answer any questions. I'll be around for most of the
afternoon and thanks for having me. This is gonna be an amazing episode of the
college tour. Thank you for everyone who's been involved and pleasure to meet
y'all. All right, glad you guys could hear me. Cheers, everyone.