Welcome to MyPath

On Tuesday evening I gave a talk for students visiting New York City from American University. Besides the fact that I got to speak at a very cool venue – the stage of Caroline’s Comedy Club in Times Square – something else cool happened. When I asked how many students were on Twitter, almost half of the audience raised their hands.

Granted, it was a room of students seeking communications careers, who are more likely to enjoy the hyper-communication of Twitter. But, it was the first time I’ve seen so many college students involved in the three-year-old micro-blogging site.

If you haven’t yet checked out Twitter, you should. If you’re not familiar with Twitter, it’s a free social networking site that allows only 140 characters per announcement or “tweet.” Get rid of any preconceived notions you might have that Twitter is a waste of time where people post silly messages about their cats and what they had for breakfast. While some people do tweet about nonsense, there are many, many other people whose tweets can be incredibly valuable to your career.

My philosophy is that I follow people on Twitter for three reasons:

- I follow people I admire or whom I want to work with someday, so I can learn what those people are thinking or talking about.

- I follow people who tweet out great career advice and help me learn something new.

- I follow people who share interesting news, articles and announcements that help me stay up-to-date in my industry or the world in general.

You can follow this same strategy by following professionals you admire, companies you’d like to work for someday, career advisors who provide free advice and news outlets that will keep you up-to-date on current events. While there are hundreds of people I could recommend, part of the fun of Twitter is making your own unique list of people to follow. To help get you started I’ve put together a list of 10 of my favorite college-to-career tweeters:

www.twitter.com/lindseypollak - that’s me!

http://twitter.com/MyPath_Manpower - Tweets, news and updates from all of my fellow bloggers here at MyPath.

http://twitter.com/alevit - Alexandra Levit is the author of “They Don’t Teach Corporate in College” and many other career advice books for young professionals.

http://twitter.com/CAREEREALISM - Careerealism offers loads of advice from a variety of career experts, all in one Twitter feed.

http://twitter.com/DanSchawbel - Dan Schawbel is founder of the Student Branding Blog and tweets about personal branding for college students and recent grads.

http://twitter.com/InternQueen - InternQueen is a great resource for – you guessed it – internships.

http://twitter.com/SalaryExpert - SalaryExpert’s tweets help you answer that dreaded question, “What are your salary requirements?”

http://twitter.com/Under30CEO - Under 30 CEO offers inspiring tweets that motivate you to go for your biggest career goals.

http://twitter.com/willyf - Willy Franzen is the founder of One Day, One Job and One Day, One Internship – sites that share information about one potential employer every day.

http://twitter.com/WSJcareers - Wise advice from contributors to the Wall Street Journal Career Journal.

Who else do you recommend for career-minded college students to follow on Twitter? Please share in the comments section below!