Students who walk into Bowdoin's Career Planning Center (CPC) this fall will encounter new faces as well as a new model for advising.
The driving force behind the CPC's revamped program and staff is the new three-phased advising approach aimed to help students explore, experience, and pursue a goal, whether it be full-time employment, an internship, or graduate school.
Three new Career Advisors with real-world experience in the fields on which they advise comprise the "explore" stage of the process.
Associate Professor of Education Emerita Penny Martin, who taught at Bowdoin for 17 years, will advise students interested in non-profit, education, and international careers. Former sailing coach Sherry Mason, a law school graduate and former lawyer, has taken on the role of Assistant Director of Career Planning and pre-law and government advisor. Sarah Paul will focus on early-stage career exploration and will advise students interested in sciences and environmental areas.
"I think students will respond positively to the real-world connection of these advisors," said Director of the CPC Timothy Diehl, who advises students in consulting and finance.
Associate Director of Career Planning Dighton Spooner, who started in August 2007, makes up the "experience" phase by overseeing internship and experiential learning programs and services.Additionally, he advises students interested in media, communications, and the arts, and supervises the advising staff.
Carrying out the "pursue" phase are two new staffers: Associate Director of Employment Relations Chad Mills '95, who specializes in technology and sales and marketing, and Employer Relations Coordinator Kate Bathras '04, a former program advisor from the Student Activities Office, who will focus on building employer and alumni connections for students after Bowdoin.
"Our goal is not just to assist students in getting to that first position or graduate school experience for the first two to three years, but to assist them with skills that they can use for the next 20 to 30 years of their career," said Diehl.
Spooner said the new advising approach arose from a general feeling that "we needed to move the Career Planning Center to a higher level of service to students and greater sophistication of how we interacted with them."
Specific changes were largely based on student feedback. In January 2007, the CPC conducted a survey of the entire Bowdoin student body about what it needed from career planning and led focus groups to discuss new programming and service ideas.
"The nature of student requirements for career planning has evolved over the past few decades so the model had to evolve as well," said Diehl.
CPC has also responded to requests for the enhancement of around-the-clock resources. Two weeks ago, the CPC launched CareerBeam, an online program which Diehl said "provides dynamic, interactive, self-paced framework for students to do everything from career exploration to career preparation," including résumé-building, company research, and interview preparation.
Spooner says that students have been impressed with the ease of using CareerBeam thus far.
CPC's future plans include a major online program that will be launched next summer. "Our goal is to create an online career planning experience at Bowdoin that is as seamless as possible and allows students to connect with information and people that can help them as easily as possible," said Spooner.
Another priority of the office is to develop outreach programs for underclassmen, particularly sophomores, to engage them earlier in the exploration process. The CPC has already collaborated with the Office of Residential Life to speak with first-year students in their dorms later this month.
Diehl hopes to extend the CPC "beyond the physical space on the first floor of Moulton Union to become a presence across campus in spirit." The CPC plans to work with student clubs, teams, and other affiliations to find programs that meet their shared needs and interests.
Rotating staff members will man the new "Ask Career Planning" table at Smith Union one day a week as part of an effort to be, as Diehl put it, "where students are."
"Bowdoin is in a unique place in recognizing Career Planning's importance to its students," said Diehl. "We've received cross-campus support from President Mills to Dean Foster to members of the Board of Trustees, so we're very excited about taking this operation to the next level."