Teaching and Learning Tip #29: Helping Graduating Students in Their Transition
Tip #29: Helping Graduating Students in Their Transition
Contributed by Loren Collins, Academic and Career Advising Center
I've had the privilege of working with graduating students from almost every program on campus in the past seven years and have worked with capstone courses from at least a dozen majors. These students all shared one thing in common, a mixture of expectation and anxiety about their next steps and their life after college. Many of these capstones were already embracing a number of high-impact practices by allowing students to share common intellectual experiences, participate in intensive writing, research, take part in collaborative projects, and complete a culminating project. There is another high impact practice that is a perfect fit for this kind of experience and has the potential to complement these other activities and that is working on professional portfolios and capturing the professional accomplishments of your students through compiling them in resumes, cover letters, collections of their best work, and mock interviews.
Our faculty in the CAHSS Career Curriculum Committee have been engaged in and creating curriculum that targets career development for their students and have prepared a variety of these kinds of assignments to give graduating seniors an edge in the job market, plan for their next steps, and begin to articulate their college experience in a way that does their disciplines the justice they deserve. Of particular interest for the capstone experience are assignments that help them to survey their experience and market that experience to potential graduate schools and/or employers. These include lesson plans and assignments for:
- Portfolios
- Mock Interviews
- Resumes and CVs
- Cover Letters
- Statements of Purpose
- Networking and Informational Interviews
- Reflection Essays
Thanks to the work by Dr. Alison Holmes and Morgan Barker, we have a selection of rubrics available in Canvas for working with students on their resumes, cover letters, and mock interviews. It is easy to add these components into your course as "flipped" classroom exercises, optional assignments, or embedded requirements for your students. The Academic and Career Advising Center has begun surveying students to gauge the value they place on these kinds of classroom activities, and although the results are yet to be fully analyzed, the overwhelming response has been that these kinds of activities help them to make sense of their time here, plan for their future, and are essential to them in preparing them to embark on their next journey.
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