1. As the new director of the Career Center, your first few months have probably been a whirlwind. How has Carleton been similar or different from Kalamazoo College?
There’s something I’ve heard here that not only haven’t I heard at Kalamazoo, I haven’t heard anywhere else I’ve been. That is, a student who told me something along the lines of, “Richard, I know I have to tackle this career piece, but right now I have a limited number of terms left at Carleton, and I just want to immerse myself in that experience and soak it all up, but I know I have to do this.” That’s a type of sentiment and comment that I’ve never heard anywhere else. I think it reflects the kind of natural intellectual curiosity of a Carleton student. You know, I think it’s accompanied by a pretty deep and passionate desire to have an impact, make a difference, do something that they can look back at and feel that was a valuable experience. Lots of people elsewhere do that, but it’s just that comment I referred to links very much to that kind of sentiment. In my observations, the depths of the relationships, the way faculty interacts with students at Carleton is different.
2. What challenges does the Career Center currently face?
Well, we face lots of challenges. We face resource challenges. We are currently in a transition mode, so our staffing levels are very low…
We have the challenge of building a foundation of support among alumni and parents and existing friends of the college...
I’m sure there are a host of others. But one kind of metaphor that I’ve been thinking about is that what we’re doing is kind of re-fitting an airplane at 30,000 feet. There are students on the ground right now, and we’re trying to do the best we can to help them with their futures, while at the same time changing the infrastructure towards building a different kind of center.
So you can’t afford to shut down entirely and start over?
Oh, absolutely not. Wouldn’t even think about it. We’ll need every student here and in the future, in terms of helping those behind them. You can’t afford, even in a very practical sense, to take a stop out and kind of close things down, before you build it back up before you keep helping…
I don’t know that this kind of thing has been done in our neck of the woods, on the career side, but I am just a real firm believer that this is the way to go. Most career centers are hardly pervasive in terms of serving a significant proportion of the student body. In one way, shape, form, or another, giving a particular kind of resource, that most typically serve about 15-20% of the student population or smaller. It’s a big challenge.
3. You partially answered my third question: I heard that you’re planning on making some changes around the Career Center. Like what?
I touched on some of those points. Here’s another one: I think that career centers are designed to fail, nationally, in that they’re almost all of them built to serve students until they graduate. They may offer a little bit of service beyond, but that’s not going to be very pervasive. Now, contrast that with, or hold that up against, how many Carleton juniors and seniors right now might be using language in thinking about time after graduation. Using language like, “I want to take a year or two off.” They’re not talking about a year or two of being disengaged. Quite the opposite. They’re talking about a year or two of doing something that might inform their next academic engagement. I believe that what we want to do is create a model that not only serves current students, but also serves students who are one, two, or three years out.
Actually, I see those very students, recently graduated from the college, in part mentoring and coaching and helping those just behind them. If we can get that yoked, if we can acculturate that, if we can embed that in the Carleton character, then we’re going to have a shoulders-on-shoulders kind of manner of approach that can have an exponential pattern of growth and help us realize that external community of support.
4. What about your essay, “Setting Sail: A New Rudder in Career Development?” Do you plan to use the strategies you mentioned in the essay here, as well?
I’d like to lay those on the table for the broader community to consider, but I think they are at least examples of the kinds of outreach models that we want to look to… Some of those ideas in that essay speak to looking at work within a broader context. For example, one of the ideas is to help students engage in workplace experiences with alumni and other friends, but also to live in their homes, for short periods of time. The kinds of conversations that take place when people aren’t caught up in the frenetic pace of a work environment can inform options and ideas and possibilities in ways that the crush and press of the daily work experience might not lend itself to very well.
5. How do the goals of the Career Center relate to Carleton as a whole?
I think of the word, “engagement.” I’ve had conversations with not enough, but a number of recent graduates. What I’ve gleaned from what they’ve shared with me is that after Carleton, not for everybody, but maybe too many, they feel like they’re waiting in line for a chance to engage at the same level they engaged here. That makes me think of all the opportunities that are possible, and maybe all the opportunities that we’ve lost along the way. What I hope to help with is to create more possibilities so that there are just different ways to engage, and that people won’t be waiting in line for it.
6. What does your typical work day at the Career Center look like?
Trying desperately and with limited success catching up with e-mails, in terms of volume of messages. Right now, given the kind of beginnings of an evolution of this model, this idea of a philosophy, I’ve been in touch with a lot of alumni, a lot of parents, a lot of students, some faculty, as their time is available, and my staff, colleagues, and other departments of the Career Center. A lot of phone calls are of a similar nature. I’ve been trying to focus my meetings with students around evening hours and weekends.
I also spend time with my staff, because they are enthusiastic and dedicated, working really hard. There are so few of us right now that paying attention to morale is important. They’re also just really interesting people to get to know.
7. I noticed that the Career Center uses popcorn to lure students inside. Is it difficult to get students to use those Career Center resources?
That’s been a historical thing that really precedes my joining the college.. I think part of the issue is the history of the center (because it’s been resourced at a very low level) so students have been limited. The center needed to try different things to persuade students to check it out. I think we’ll always need to do that. Students are focused on academics and other parts of community life on campus and beyond.
It’s a real challenge to kind of look at how we can build community. One of the things we’ve done this term and last term is try and go to a softer physical environment that has fewer walls and barriers and hard edges. We’re hoping to become the place where students can feel comfortable not only to meet employers or graduate and professional schools, or have an appointment with a counselor or helper, but to just come down and kick their feet up, and read the morning paper, and have a cup of coffee, and just talk with each other, and/or with us. So we can maybe scrape some rust off of this career thing a little bit, humanize the physical environment.
Does the popcorn help?
Doesn’t popcorn always help, at least a little?
8. From the Career Center’s perspective, what is the most common mistake Carleton students make?
It’s not Carleton students, it’s people. This process of searching for opportunities and applying, especially within the world of employment, and selectional interviewing, I’ve described as a bizarre ritual. It’s really quite an odd process. I think the mistake most people make, and I’ve seen it at Carleton, is that they worry way too much about trying to figure out what the interviewer wants to hear them say or see them write instead of thinking more about what they have to say, and what they have to write about. I think it’s entirely achievable to be both modest or unpretentious, and evidence your belief in yourself… I think you can do both, but my experience suggests that the mistake most people make is they don’t give themselves enough credit, they accept suppositions in the selection process, and they worry too much about what they think people want to hear.
This reminds me of something I heard about one of the mock interviews you do, where you role-play an interviewer, and the students play themselves at an interview. One of the questions you ask them is, if their GPA was less than 3.6, why was it less than 3.6? Does that reflect this?
I think it’s a vivid example. This is in the context of what I call a 10-minute diagnostic interview. Two or three questions, where my goal is that the student, after the ten minutes, can assess the extent to which they may want to work on their self-presentation in the selection mode. I’ll ask, “What’s your GPA?” and any student who answers 3.6 or lower, I’ll not waste a lot of time, I’ll look them right in the eye and I’ll say, “Well, why didn’t you do better than that?” My point is that most people, not Carleton students, but most people, let them do that. They accept the supposition that it’s not very good.
When we back away from the role-playing kind of mode, and just talk about it, I’ll ask them, “How do you feel about your academic achievement, your intellectual growth?” And they’re totally positive about it. Have we become a society that’s so fixated on lists, and comparisons, that we forget to look at answering the questions? So what? What’s a three-six stand for? The more important question is, let’s look at what I’ve learned, how that’s helped me grow, and now, that I’m talking with you, how that will translate, how it will transfer, to what you’re considering letting me do here. That’s the heart and soul in that situation. I don’t know what it is in our culture. I think it’s a power thing, perception of power, and it’s totally understandable. When most people really look at themselves, sometimes you can change the question. Why not change it from, “What’s your GPA?” to “What have you learned? How does it relate to what we do?” I think that’s a valid switch-up.
9. How do you see the future of Carleton students changing in the next five years?
I think that we can really put the shoulders-on-shoulders idea into action. By “we” I mean all of us… We’re trying to hire people smarter than we are at that kind of thing. My job is a leadership role in the Career Center, to be the shoulders that they stand on, to help them be successful; but this whole thing is about building community. Not just the spirit of community, although that matters, but right down to almost the physical kind of structure, through which we can identify each other… It would be really valuable to have a network of connections between experienced alumni. If you look at the Harvards and Yales, this quality is embedded in their culture, and they’re resourced at a level, and they’re smart folks, so they’ve found ways to kind of hold it up and cultivate it, maybe harvest it a little better than they used to, but it’s embedded in the culture.
What we’re talking about here is taking spirit and belief and rallying around a goal and a cause. We’re going to be essentially building this on the career side from scratch. I think if it can’t be done at Carleton, I don’t know where it can be done.
10. Were the avocado posters in the basement of Sayles your idea?
No. Of course not. The idea is right where it should be, and it was a student idea. We had a student worker, Allie, who was a senior English major, who worked with us at the end of summer, right when I came in at the end of July. All I did there was say that one of the things I observed in the way Carleton described themselves is that they take their academics and their other engagements seriously but they don’t take themselves too seriously. I said, “Let’s follow that lead, and let’s not take ourselves too seriously. Let’s lighten up the marketing, let’s do something that may surprise people a little bit.”… We know that the spirit of that and the kind of underlying idea of that is the right one.