Career and professional development at UNC
By Analisa Price, UCS Career Peers Director
Last Thursday, the Daily Tar Heel’s opinion page featured an editorial on our work here at Career Services. Their stance: UCS has awesome resources that go under-utilized due to a lack of outreach and student awareness. As the Director of the Career Peers program, it’s my job to oversee peer outreach and mentorship on behalf of the office, so for obvious reasons this article stayed on my mind for the past few days.
Much to my chagrin, I know of classmates that don’t know about Career Services. I have friends who know about UCS, but don’t think the office really fits their goals (pre-grad school kiddos, I’m looking at YOU!). I know of people who know about UCS, know they need to visit, and out of intimidation or laziness or some other factor never make it into our office.
So how do we fix it? Perhaps more marketing. But when there’s a budget involved, there becomes a tradeoff between allocating money for marketing purposes vs. the actual resources we’re trying to promote. Emails are sent, cubes are painted, ads are printed, fliers are distributed, but it’s just not doing enough. So for the past five days, I’ve wondered to myself how we get people’s attention. I started to reflect on my own career exploration. How did I end up at UCS? What experiences did I have that prompted me to seek out a career counselor and how can we create similar experiences for other students? After some reflection, I realized a lot of it could be credited to Dr. Penn, my Psyc 101 professor from freshman year.
Now, for the record, Dr. Penn doesn’t know me. I was one of 400 students in his class. I never went to office hours. My class attendance was less than perfect. How did he manage to have a profound impact on my career development? Our first day of notes covered different types of professional psychologists, and the description for industrial psychology really caught my eye. Studying the social interactions of people at work sounded interesting, so I did a bit of Google searching afterwards, reading a few articles on graduate degree programs and career options in the field. I didn’t really think of it again until my parents pushed me to start thinking of internships during my sophomore year. I remembered my interest in industrial psychology and worked with UCS to find an internship in a similar field, and ended up settling on human resources, where I would have the opportunity to put theories from industrial psyc research into practice.
Seeing as Dr. Penn spent ten minutes covering these professions on the first day of class, I’m going to venture to guess that he wasn’t intending on sparking any career epiphanies. But for me, it did because it gave me the message that if I enjoyed his class, I would likely enjoy those jobs. Seeing as Carolina is a liberal arts university, I think this is the link that’s missing for a lot of students. We can take classes in Ancient Roman Law and Russian Literature – classes that don’t exactly match up with a specific profession – and even if you love the class, it’s hard to know how to turn these passions into a professional career. It’s hard to figure out what sorts of transferable skills you’ll be learning through these classes in order to market yourself during the job search. And what’s most troubling is that many times, it’s these departments that avoid giving any career advice. Their students go in so many different directions after graduation that they give up on giving much guidance. But by incorporating five or six related careers into their curriculum, professors can become one of those teachers who really make a difference by helping their students find a way to turn their academic interests into a full time job.
And the thing is, even if students hate that class or rarely go into related careers, it does make a difference. It sends a message. It tells students that we expect Carolina students to be professionally successful, which requires students to start thinking early about their careers and make plans about how they’re going to reach their goals. It changes the culture of UNC from a liberal arts university where students are intellectually curious, to a university where students learn how to carry their intellectual pursuits well beyond their college career.
And that is what will make a difference in professional success for Carolina students – a change in the campus culture about how we view jobs and professional development. It takes something bigger than UCS that can make this kind of difference. It has to be a shared effort by the office, our professors, our peers that everyone can and is expected to achieve professional success. I think back on my experience as a freshman, and I remember tons of things I did because they’re what you do as a Carolina student. I fell in love with Carolina basketball. I felt weird being the only one of my friends without a second major or a minor and started looking for one of my own. I went for a run on the first few pretty days of spring because it’s just what Tar Heels do. So what about career exploration and career development? Why can’t we all be more like Dr. Penn and lightly suggest that we start thinking about these things early? That’s how we’ll get every student to do something with their UNC degrees – besides just frame it.
