For those of you in college and approaching the end of it, it might be a good idea to think strategically about your courses not just in terms of completing your degree and in terms of your college GPA. Every course you take during and even after college (you can sign up to take a course at a local college, even after you have a degree) has the potential to enhance your skill set and your resume.

Think about which courses to take in terms of how you might benefit among these four lines:

1) Finding out where your interests lie- For example, you might be a business major and notice that a lot of business majors go into the hotel industry and want to see if that's a good thing to do with your degree, so you take a tourism management course with your elective.

2) Finding out where your skills lie- For example, you might want to use your English degree to work for a newspaper, but aren't sure whether you can cut it in that environment, so you enroll in a newspaper course that challenges you before you risk going out there and failing in an actual real-world setting.

3) Providing additional coursework to be able to put on your CV (curriculum vitae)- I graduated with a degree in geography, for example, and I knew that my GIS coursework was not comparable to many people with geography degrees in my field, so I used an elective on a GIS-specific course

4) Insuring a safeguard against your major not working well for you in the job market-If you picked a major like history and discovered as graduation was approaching that it might not be the most practical major in terms of being successful in the job market, for example, using whatever electives you might have to enhance your other skills. For instance, if you've studied a lot of Latin American history and have studied abroad in Latin America, one could take their electives and pick up a couple extra higher- level Spanish courses since that's a very workable skill.

These four goals tend to overlap with each other as well: Any course you take has the potential to make your resume look better, get you closer to finding your career path, spread out your skill set, and help you solidify your talents.