Enhancing Career Services For Graduate Students

News Article By The Gwen M. Greene Center Communication Staff

The Gwen M. Greene Center for Career Education and Connections is committed to enhancing individual career readiness, connecting organizations and talent, and transforming our communities through education and collaboration.

Over the past academic year, the Greene Center has enriched its advising model through the design of Career Communities. These communities allow students to independently explore different career trajectories by identifying programs, events, resources, alumni, employers, and opportunities that are available to them. The Career Communities provide students with the ability to build upon their career competencies, discover their potential, create a personal brand, establish networks, and engage in self-guided exploration in ways that allow them to connect their academic focuses to their career aspirations.

A recently developed partnership between the Greene Center and the Dean of Graduate Studies has established a new focus on graduate career services, positioning the Greene Center to better serve all of the student populations. With the growing number of graduate students enrolled in The College each year, the Greene Center recognized the need to expand upon their services and hired Kari Brick as their Program Director of Graduate Career Education and Professional Development.

Advocating on behalf of graduate students, Brick’s position allows the Greene Center to integrate graduate-specific programming and curriculum into its strategic plan to help meet the unique career needs of graduate students. This academic year, Brick pioneered the Green Center’s first Graduate Professional Development series comprising of five workshops covering topics related to job search strategies, networking, interview preparation, and salary negotiations. Student feedback on this series has been extremely favorable, with many students recommending these workshops to their peers.

Brick also worked with the Director of Graduate Enrollment to develop on-boarding materials for the 2018 incoming class. Through this initiative, incoming students will receive content focused on career education prior to arriving on campus allowing them to understand the services that will be available to them at Rochester while also gaining a head start in the career development process.

Moving towards 2019, Brick plans to establish new partnerships across campus to better serve our graduate students while building upon the services that have already been established by the Greene Center.  These targeted initiatives will allow the Greene Center to grow upon the University’s commitment to provide all students with exceptional services related to career education and development.

Tracey Baas | 4/17/2018