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When the Job’s the Thing
Dogged for years by student complaints that it was behind the times, the Undergraduate Career Services office has a new director who wants to help graduates pursue post-Yale work that “they are really passionate about.”
October 1999
by Magaly Olivero
Magaly Olivero is the former publishing director and editor of Better Health magazine and a freelance writer in New Haven.
Few would argue that a major benefit of attending Yale is that the power of its name and its network of alumni will open doors to the future when a student graduates. But which doors? Bright and accomplished as Yale students may be, by Commencement only a happy few have picked out the job chair in which they wish to sit for an entire career. For years, Yale has attempted to ease the search-and-decide process through its Undergraduate Career Services office. But to hear the customers talk, the results have been decidedly mixed. Beginning this year, with a new director in place, things are likely to change.
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“The nature of work has changed tremendously.”
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The new director is Philip Jones, a 20-year veteran of the career counseling field, and his goal, as he puts it, is to assist students with not just “the nuts and bolts” of job hunting, but also with “examining and understanding the many places their education can lead them.” With his wife, Karyn (the associate director of student affairs at the School of Management), Jones has already established a link to his constituency by moving into Morse College as a resident fellow. Jones expects he’ll get lots of feedback from the student advisory committee and from the students themselves during the day-to-day interaction in the college. “They’ll know where to find me,” he says with a laugh.
Although the conventional description of his position is to find jobs, Jones sees himself as being in the “stress reduction business,” with a responsibility for helping students make sense of the “seemingly limitless” career and academic opportunities that await them. And he wants to reach students early during their years at Yale, thereby “creating an awareness of this office long before they are ready to start asking the crucial questions” that come with graduation. He plans to do that by harnessing technological resources, while developing networks among students, faculty, alumni, and employers to help students prepare for the future.
Jones’s appointment represents the start of a new era at Undergraduate Career Services, which has come under fire in recent years for being inaccessible to students and technologically behind the times in providing students with high-quality resources and diversified career counseling. Yale used the recent retirement of UCS director Susan Hauser, who had served in the post for 16 years, to reorganize the department according to recommendations made by the Undergraduate Career Services Review Committee. Among the first changes was the reassignment of foreign-study programs, such as the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships, from UCS to an independent Office of International Education and Fellowship Programs (see sidebar). This should enable UCS to concentrate exclusively on providing career counseling services to students in search of post-graduation employment.
“Yale has made a commitment to a serious strengthening of career counseling services,” says Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, who commissioned the review of UCS. “But it’s a two-way street. Students also need to take responsibility for their own futures. It’s natural for students to feel apprehension and uncertainty. Students want to know the answer to the question: 'What will my life be like?' But what students don’t realize is that they will be composing the story of their lives—for the rest of their lives—in the face of opportunities and challenges that can’t always be foreseen. Our job is to give students a sense of the range of opportunities and help them recognize the gifts and interests they can offer the world of work.”
Housed at One Hillhouse Avenue, Undergraduate Career Services has for years provided a wide array of services, ranging from career counseling, to seminars and workshops on the interviewing process, to assistance with tracking down summer internships, identifying study abroad programs, and applying for prestigious fellowships. Responding to criticism about the department’s recent past, Susan Hauser says she believes it counseled students effectively, particularly in the pre-med and pre-law areas. “Students receive terrific individual advice from knowledgeable advisors at UCS. Our web page [www.yale.edu/career] offers great information and fantastic links,” she says. Hauser says criticism of UCS was often unwarranted, noting that career counseling is an easy target for students anxious about their future. “The resources are here, if students want to take advantage of them. But students need to take the initiative,” she says.
Yet even those students who do take the initiative can feel frustrated. “It’s clear that UCS had too many things going on and the staff was overstretched,” says Vairavan Subramanian Jr. '01, a biology major who served on the USC Review Committee. “Students felt the office was not approachable and that the technology was out-of-date. Information is compiled in disorganized binders. It’s difficult to find what you need.” Other students expressed dissatisfaction with the on-campus recruitment process, claiming the department does little to reach out to students who don’t follow traditional career paths in medicine, law, and finance.
So what should the future Undergraduate Career Services look like? Should UCS be a job placement service, or an information clearinghouse? Does today’s workplace call for specific career training instead of a liberal arts education, the cornerstone of Yale’s academic programming?
Brodhead believes firmly in the value of a liberal arts education. “Yale is not in the business of training people for a spe- cific career,” he says. “We are not a trade school. We teach skills that are useful in highly mobile ways. Some argue that as we get more technologically advanced, the value of a liberal arts education decreases. I believe it’s just the opposite. The more rapidly changing and evolving the world of work, the more important it is for people to have a broad and diversified education and not be specifically or narrowly trained.”
Gary Haller, chairman of the UCS Review Committee and master of Jonathan Edwards College (as well as chairman of the chemical engineering department), agrees. “Students' expectations,” he says, “are often unrealistic: 'Here I am. Get me a job.' That’s human nature. But people need to have realistic expectations about what Yale can do for them and what they need to do for themselves. Students need to think about which careers best suit their interests and talents through a joint dialogue with career counselors and academic advisers.”
Ezra Stiles College dean Susan Rieger says she has seen a dramatic shift in students' expectations regarding the workplace, with more seeking immediate employment after graduation rather than pursuing graduate school or a special interest. “They’re more interested in establishing a 401K than in exploring career options, “ Rieger says. “Maybe it’s because tuition is over $100,000 for four years and they know it’s probably going to cost $300,000 to send their own kid to college. They are incredibly anxious and only consider a narrow range of professions. They feel pressured that, somehow, they are wasting a Yale education if they don’t become a lawyer, or a doctor or a Supreme Court justice. They don’t think about becoming accountants, dentists, or teachers. They get ridiculed for wanting to go into their dad’s construction business.”
Not all recent Yale undergraduates were impatient with UCS in its former incarnation. Ben White '99, graduated with a degree in biology and is taking a year off before attending Harvard Medical School. White says UCS was “incredibly helpful. With the curriculum meeting at the beginning of each semester and the office hours, there was ample opportunity to have all my questions answered. Granted, it does take some student initiative to stay on the ball with the application process, but the pre-med office is easily accessible by phone, e-mail, or just walking down the block.” Yet he, too, feels the increasing weight of debt, as do many of his classmates. Says White: “Students are nervous about money and look for jobs straight out of school to pay off the loans. They don’t pursue what they are really passionate about.”
The new UCS director agrees that students are “definitely anxious about the future.” But, Jones adds, “It’s what you do with that anxiety that matters. Some students close themselves off to opportunities and take jobs they aren’t really ready for or want. That’s when you start getting the e-mails asking for help. Other students take that anxiety and begin exploring options so they can make informed decisions about the life they wish to lead. That’s the kind of service and relationship I want our office to provide.”
Jones says Yale can best begin to develop those types of relationships by reaching out to students through their residential colleges—the places they live, eat, and study. Jones, formerly director of the Career Development Center at Mount Holyoke College, says he takes a “developmental” approach to the career counseling business. His two decades of experience include posts at St. Michael’s College in Vermont and in England, where he served as a career counselor and internship coordinator in London and Birmingham.
“We want to create an environment that supports students during their entire time at Yale and beyond,” says Jones. “We don’t want students to come to us in desperation during their senior year.” Accordingly, he intends to create an awareness of UCS at the freshman level, so students “know we’re an operation they can turn to throughout their four years. It’s important for students to recognize us as a valuable resource long before they need to get serious.”
Jones will begin his efforts at Morse College, where he plans to offer “interactive workshops” to help students “develop ideas about what is important to them and how others view them.” These workshops can provide a foundation for students to explore possible academic and career pursuits. Jones says he will use the experiences at Morse to develop career counseling programming at the other residential colleges.
Career counseling at this level already has wide support among students, says Subramanian, who cites existing programs at Pierson College as an example of an approach that effectively brings students and alumni together. At Pierson, students take part in career fairs and workshops that include alumni in the fields of public affairs, journalism, medicine, law, public health, teaching, the environment, even the Peace Corps. Students also have access to files on various vocations. These activities, says Pierson master Harvey Goldblatt, “are by no means meant as a replacement” for UCS, but instead “offer another strategy” to engage students and alumni alike.
Jones expects to build upon such efforts, at least in part with the help of technology. The Internet in particular will play a major role at UCS, he says. Web sites and electronic databases can provide students with a wealth of basic information regarding career options and graduate school opportunities. Technological advances, he says, “can also reduce the administrative burden on staff so they have more time to spend one-on-one with students.” Most important, he notes, technology can enable UCS to “keep in touch with students in a way that was never possible before.” Web sites and electronic mail make it easy for students to “access valuable information any time of the day or night, at their convenience. They don’t need to worry about getting to us during office hours.”
However, stresses Jones, no amount of technology should substitute for human interaction among students, counselors, faculty, and alumni. “We’re here to help students understand and articulate their thoughts once they’ve gathered the basic information,” he says. “We’re not a quick-fix operation. We want to help students make informed decisions, so if they decide to go to graduate school or take a job, it’s because they want to, not because they have nothing better to do or don’t know what to do.”
Technology also will play a major role in identifying alumni interested in serving as mentors and career counselors, says Jeff Brenzel, executive director of the Association of Yale Alumni. He expects to work closely with UCS staff in developing alumni networks and strengthening ties between students and alumni. In the past, UCS coordinated alumni career advisers, but the program ended after a period of neglect and a lack of funding, administrators say. Jones says alumni can play effective roles as both mentors and career advisers.
Upgrading alumni networks at the AYA and increased collaboration between the alumni office and career counseling services are among the long-term changes Yale hopes to implement with its overhaul of UCS, says Brodhead. He would like to see a “tightening of Yale’s links to alumni as a source of wisdom and knowledge about different careers and career paths” as one way of broadening the base of career information available to students.
Goldblatt has no doubts that alumni are interested in current and recent students and, with today’s technological advances, these alumni are easier to tap then ever. For example, Goldblatt contacted about 200 Pierson College alumni via e-mail to elicit their interest in discussing careers with students. “The response was quite remarkable,” he says. “We had a 35 percent response within two days and a 50 percent response overall. This indicates the kind of commitment that Yale graduates feel toward their college.”
Attracting more alumni from various fields is one way to broaden the base of career information available to students beyond medicine, law, business, and finance. For instance, says Murugappan Ramanathan '99, a member of the UCS Review Committee, many of the recruiters who visit Yale represent consulting or investment banking firms. Students interested in other areas, such as publishing, public service, or the nonprofit sector, often feel left out, he says.
Brodhead concurs: “There’s a lot of interesting work that falls under the category of 'other.' We need to strengthen UCS’s knowledge base of the range of careers in the world. The names of many professions haven’t changed, but the nature of the work has changed tremendously. Twenty years ago, you could expect to start and finish your career at the same company. That’s not true anymore. The workplace today requires a degree of flexibility and resourcefulness. Some may say that’s bad because there is greater uncertainty in the workplace. But it’s also a good thing because there is more opportunity.”
While opportunities abound, it’s still up to students to take charge of their lives and futures, say Yale students and administrators alike. Changes under way at Undergraduate Career Services are only a first step in developing an ongoing dialogue with students. Says Ben White: “Students need to take an active role in looking for the advice they need. No one is going to track you down to make sure you get your questions answered.”  |
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