Say good-bye to the Office of Cooperative Education and the Office of Career Development, and hello to the brand-new Stevens Career Center. Over the summer of 2015, the staffs of the OCE and OCD joined forces in an effort to provide improved services to Stevens students. Students in the cooperative education program who were out on assignment during the summer of 2015 came back to a swathe of programming held by the new Career Center, giving them a crash-course in using Castle Point Careers and explaining the staffing changes and new office protocols.
The students who went out on assignment this fall will be the last Stevens students to ever go through the old Co-Op experience. As of this semester, there will be no more clipboard-signups, more accessible information on the opportunities available, and less stress for the students involved. Beyond that, the Stevens Career Center has already succeeded in growing the employer base – the October 12th Co-op interview day will host over 80 companies (up from last year’s 73). One of the new attendees, the American Bridge Company, is one of the country’s leading civil engineering firms, currently in charge of constructing the new Tappan Zee Bridge along with several other large projects.
Building new connections to employers and providing continuous and student-centric services are two of the core tenets of the Stevens Career Center, according to Director Lynn Insley, with the third being automating the processes for all students. Insley is dedicated to continuous improvement to the programming available to students to provide them with skills and expertise in career planning, job searching and interviewing. A clear example is the “Own It” undergraduate workshop series, during which students not only learn the kinds of questions that companies ask during interviews, but how those interviews are scored.
With that said, the student-centric services go well beyond the seminars and information sessions held by the Career Center. By providing guidance to all students, the Career Center will improve the process of future co-op students entering the full-time job hunt during senior year. Though every senior’s resume will still need refinement and adjustment, the former difficulties co-op students often encountered in redrafting their resumes for full-time applications will be drastically reduced. Since co-op students will now have the same counselors helping them throughout their whole five years, making that transition will be much smoother.
The swipe system that was new to the OCD last year is being extended to cover all students, and together with a new full-time administrative assistant on staff, these changes are helping to make the transition to the new Stevens Career Center feel complete. That swipe-card system, it’s worth noting, is another integral part in the quality of service offered at the Career Center. Whenever a student swipes in, it alerts the counselor they want to see that that student is there, not just that some student is there. It allows any counselor to pull up a record log of the student’s past interactions with the Career Center, and will aid in providing the fastest, most efficient, and most effective counseling possible.
Any student who hasn’t seen the new office (even if they never saw the old one) can go visit the Career Center and get to know their counselor. It may feel a little empty at the moment, but several more staff members are inbound. You may think that the whole career-search is too far off to even consider, but the sooner you start learning what the center has to offer, the better off you will be. Trust me, at some point in time you are going to rely on the hard-working staff of the Stevens Career Center, they have made it their mission statement to not disappoint.
