John Park is graduating from Iowa State this semester, but had a variety of adversities to overcome in order to find himself a job after graduation.

Park is an international student from South Korea and came to the United States about five years ago when he decided to come to Iowa State and major in computer science. When Park arrived, he didn’t know much English, and it was hard for him to understand his classes to succeed.

“I had to go through IEOP, Intensive English and Orientation Program,” Park said. “It’s kind of an English second language program provided by Iowa State.”

Park wants to be a software engineer, but hasn’t quite found the job yet, although he has had five interviews and is waiting to hear back. He said he has been getting help from the career center within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

“I get a lot of help for revising my resume and am able to ask the questions that I have that relate to the hiring process,” Park said. “They tell me what else I should do to prepare for when I apply for jobs.”

The biggest problem that Park said he runs into when he is interviewing for jobs is his technical skills. It’s common for computer science majors to have a coding interview, where they are asked to write code to solve problems.

Sometimes, it can be harder for international students to find jobs than it may be for others, and Park said he has ran into this problem as well.

“I want to get a job as an information security analyst, and a lot of companies [with those kind of jobs] has data that relates to the government, and that requires citizenship,” Park said. “With international students, there is a lot of regulations and restrictions, and we are expected to have a sponsorship at some point and not many companies want to go through that process.”

There are certain rules that international students must follow. When they get a job, it must relate to the major that they studied in college and they have to have an approved work permit for a period of time, and after that they need a working visa or permanent residency within the country.

Park said that during job interviews, he hasn’t gotten the feeling of any bias during the hiring process of being an international student.

“There’s a lot of foreigners and international students in computer science, so I think it’s less common to have bias when they are looking for people to work for the IT industry because of the number of international people,” Park said.

Park has had one internship while at Iowa State, and it began in May and just ended Wednesday. He worked for MidAmerican Energy on their IT infrastructure team.

“I dealt with the Windows computers and deployed software updates or new softwares so there was not a security vulnerability,” Park said.

Park is currently here on a student visa, but is planning to apply for American citizenship at some point in the future.