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Do You Have Plans?

Online Career Curriculum Prods Students Into Action

Getting students into the Career Development Center has always been a challenge. While students say they’re aware of all the good information that awaits them in the building adjacent to the health center, few make the best use of it, at least not before their senior years. Career counselors at Mount Holyoke hope a new electronic initiative will prod students beginning in their first year to think more systematically about life after college.

YourPlan is a four-year career curriculum that outlines in a logical manner the steps students need to take to find a meaningful place in the world after college. Set up as a series of checklists online, it offers students at appropriate stages in their college years the strategies, structure, and professional support they will need to carry their education into a job, graduate school, or volunteer work they are suited for and find personally rewarding.

“Our goal is to … enhance the academic program by answering the questions, ‘What do I want to do, and how do I take what I have learned, and apply it,’” said Scott Brown, outgoing director of the center. “The process is not mystical—you just have to do it.”

Students interested in participating—they numbered 370 by the end of November—activate accounts online that offer an increasingly complex set of tasks and options on how to complete them. For example, a first-year student is encouraged to talk to family, friends, and alumnae about career ideas, and to focus on polishing time-management skills. Second-year students are offered workshops on finding an internship. Juniors update their résumés and cover letters for jobs. Seniors learn how to prepare for job interviews.

The ability to articulate not just your skills but also your passions and values is something every employer looks for in a candidate but few students have ever been asked to express, notes Brown. Helping students figure out who they are and what matters to them is part of the college’s mission of “purposeful engagement with the world,” and the essence of MHC career development, he added.

Of the tasks outlined for sophomores, Mohaimina Rahman ’10 has completed the personality 5 test, started identifying career fields, and is looking at prospective employers. She chose to participate in YourPlan because “it gives me a checklist of goals I want to achieve, and a sense of how far I have progressed toward achieving my goals.”

Counselors note that alumnae can offer students tremendous help by sharing the ins and outs of particular industries and fields. Select students in YourPlan attended an Alumnae Council lunch in the fall to network with potential colleagues and mentors. (Alumnae Association conferences and activities routinely include a time for students to speak with alumnae.)

Alumnae especially can also provide the antidote to what ails most students: lack of perspective. “Counselors have to point out to almost every student who walks in the door that no one had it figured out at [age] twenty,” notes Brown. Alums get that.

Cori Ashworth, director of alumnae career services, is also helping to pilot another new program, Career Action Teams, in which small groups of seniors support each other as they search for jobs in a particular city. One goal is to have alums as mentors in those cities. —M.H.B.

Check out YourPlan basics at https://yourplan.mtholyoke.edu

Photo of Alicia Hammond ’08 (right) and Cori Ashworth, director of alumnae career services, going over YourPlan by Paul Schnaittacher