Do you have plans this summer? This stressful question resounds across campus far beyond the signs posted by the Center for Careers and Internships (CCI). As students scramble to pull together summer plans, post-graduation plans and funding proposals, many engage with the CCI or their resources for advice and opportunities.
Despite their reach and funding, the CCI seems to have limited effect with the exception of a few fields. While tracks like consulting and finance have a clear career path and hire early, for students looking to go in a different direction, we have often been disappointed – from limited internships on MOJO to being repeatedly referred to MiddCore, which if done over the summer is an additional $9,500. We know the CCI makes a great effort to provide programming and other opportunities that are under-attended. We see this as a disconnect between what students need and what is offered and hope to make this resource with tremendous potential more useful for all parties involved.
Funding deadlines are one example of the discrepancy between the CCI’s plans and the reality of the job market. While many students have not yet heard back from potential employers, the funding deadline was April 6, leaving students who need this already limited funding to pursue an unpaid internship searching for other opportunities. This gives internships with earlier notification deadlines, which tend to require a more formal application process than opportunities discovered through more unconventional routes, priority for funding. This is a give-and-take, for students who have secured internships early need to know if they can commit, but students who have not yet decided also need these funding options.
The appointment system is another example of a system out of touch with student needs. Instead of being able to choose the advisor who most closely reflects our career interests, we have to go to a drop-in meeting, hope the CCI is not busy and hope we get a useful advisor, who will likely just tell us to return for a longer meeting with someone else. This becomes an inefficient use of everyone’s time.
The smattering of options on MOJO also reflect a very narrow swath of pathways. We have noticed, for example, a lack of media opportunities. Moreover, they are not often updated, with students on our Editorial Board going to discuss a posting with advisors, only to discover it was a few years old. These MOJO internships are also prioritized in the funding process, leaving students who want an internship outside what is available on MOJO with fewer options. Students could also use more support for careers with complicated application processes and tests, like certain military career paths and the foreign service, just as we have pre-professional advising for careers in medicine and law.
We all receive a deluge of emails from the CCI to the point where we tune them out, leaving us uninformed about the useful workshops and opportunities. Better coordination among the CCI’s platforms would help address this problem, so students receive one relevant newsletter a week that they know to read. A more streamlined, judicious use of email would help us pick and choose what is useful. Better coordination with departments and clubs would also help push these opportunities through different channels so we receive relevant information.
Take the Campus for example. Many of us are interested in useful discussions about careers in media, but we have very little contact with the CCI. Career discussions co-hosted by the Campus and other media outlets on campus could help draw a bigger audience and make the programming more dynamic. There is a reason the Goldman-Sachs information sessions can pack a room and that most other career paths cannot. People see value in attending finance events. We should make other events equally beneficial and soliciting student organizations is a good place to start.
The Project on Creativity and Innovation (PCI) has done a great job trying to address many of the problems outlined above, working to provide a pathway for students to enter innovative and creative fields or organizations post-graduation. They held their first call last month with five different alumni working at startups to discuss their experiences with interested students. This kind of consolidated call in other fields sponsored by the CCI would allow for students to prioritize just one call with five different people instead of attending five different career conversations and would bring a broader group of people in who cannot necessarily travel to our remote campus.
As students, we must do a better job of engaging with the resources the CCI has to offer, but by adapting the program to be more relevant to what we are looking for and what our schedules require, we can enhance the value of the CCI and make the internship and job search process less stressful for all involved.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
