These groups made up of people involved in a field, career, or discipline work to further their profession through outreach, education, and professional development. You don't need to join a professional organization in order to reap benefits from them! Through looking into different professional organizations, you can get a glimpse into the field from the folks that actually work in it! Check out the other tabs on this page for ideas for finding professional orgs!
Research Guides
The Library has a created a collection of research guides that give you resources, research ideas, and links on a variety of topics (you're reading one now!). On many of our subject guides, we've added a tab with Career Information that includes links to the major professional organizations in a discipline.
Follow these steps to access research guides:
Search Engine (like Google)
While we've tried to collect a good foundation of professional organizations in our Research Guides, we can't list them all - there's just too many! Use a search engine, like Google to find a profession's organization.
The search we typically use is: career + professional organization. Example: Graphic Designers professional organization.
Once you've found an organization that interests you, head to their website to see if they have information for students or prospective professionals. Many of these websites will outline what a day in the life looks like, as well as including reflections from those in the field, and information about education and training.