As the 2015-2016 academic year emerges from the sunny depths of summer, students begin to settle into their routines on campus, and the Colorado College Career Center is already geared up and working at their new location on North Cascade Avenue in the Morreale House.
“It’s wonderful; this place is so student oriented,” said Anna Naden, a fellow at the Career Center.
Naden has glasses, brunette hair, and friendly smile. A Colorado College alumna, she graduated last year with a major in Feminist and Gender Studies.
“I wanted to stick around CC because I love it, and I think it’s a great community,” said Naden. “Ironically, [the Career Center] helped me prepare for my interview with them for this position.”
In addition to providing students with helpful pointers like interviewing tips, the Career Center provides a variety of services for students on campus, from helping resumes to connecting students with job and internship opportunities across the country. Helping students find these connections requires knowledge regarding what students are interested in months before they would potentially accept these opportunities. This task requires an eye for detail alongside a plethora of data and information.
“It’s called the Summer Experience Survey,” said Don Bricker, Associate Director of the Career Center. “We take information from students, compile it, and figure out what kinds of things they did over the summer.”
Once this data is gathered, it is then used to gauge student interest in different fields.
If, for example, the survey results show a lot of students working at conservation-oriented organizations, the staff can pursue potential employers in that field more aggressively, knowing that students will likely be interested in these opportunities next summer.
“We take that information and make sure that the kinds of connections we are trying to make are in line with student interest,” said Bricker. “So far we’ve received about 340 responses… we’d like to see that number get up to five or six hundred.”
The Summer Experience Survey is still live until Aug. 31, and every participant will receive an invitation to a Josh and Johns ice cream social.
The Career Center’s new location and resources will aid in helping students even more this year since they’ve moved out of Worner.
“We have a lot more space that’s our space,” said Bricker.
The new building includes two full stories of offices and workspace. There are enough tables to facilitate helping at least a dozen students at once and the staff is involved and available. There is also a big screen TV and a camera in the back, specifically for virtual interviews.
“Not everyone can travel to New York, or San Francisco, or wherever they need to be,” said Bricker.
Of course, all of these resources need students to interact with them to be of any use.
“We used to be in the Worner Student Center, so it’s important for us that everybody kind of knows that we’re in this space now,” said Bricker. “Last year, one way or another, we saw and helped about 60 percent of the student body.”
To help spread the word of their new location, the Career Center will be participating in the Progressive Open House this Friday afternoon. The event is designed to connect students with a lot of the offices that have moved on campus this year.
“A lot of these offices work really closely with students, so we want students to know where they are now to be able to find them,” said Anna.
This afternoon, all of these offices will be open to visits and also have some kind of activity or food for students to enjoy. For every office visited, students will receive a raffle ticket that they can use at the Career Center later that afternoon.
At 7 p.m., the Career Center will also be hosting a barbeque prepared by the Carnivore Club, and hold a raffle with $300 worth of Visa gift cards up for the students who visited the other offices on campus. As a fun incentive, they have hired Drunk Uncle to be playing on the patio of their new building during the event.
Furthermore, the Career Center will be doing outreach into the Colorado College campus beyond their new building on N. Cascade Ave.
They are hoping to set up drop-in hours at the Butler Center for students with miscellaneous questions, as well as some outreach to resident halls during the school year.
“We’re excited,” said Megan Nicklaus, Director of the Career Center. “Hopefully we can get students here but we also want to get out to where the students are too.”
The Progressive Open house will be held in the Morreale House (corner of N. Cascade Ave and W. Uintah St.) from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. today, with a barbeque at 7 p.m.