Restructured Career Center appoints director

The Career Center has gone through a thorough restructuring of both staff and services in the past year. The center has been shifting its model to focus more on career academies than career counseling.

Former director Trudy Van Zee left the position in October and Anne Garner has been appointed the new executive director of the Career Center, effective May 2016. She has had experience in forming and implementing career academies at universities.

This time of transition has limited the services of the Career Center, which has received negative feedback from students, especially current seniors who are looking for jobs.

Dean of Academic and Student Services Andy Wilson has been leading the transitions at the Career Center.

“Our new model really focuses around career academies and core employers. So the career academies are communities of faculty, alumni, employers and upper division students coming together around particular career interests and... offering career preparation for students in ways that are centered around interests,” Wilson said. “So for example, health sciences, arts and media, consulting, finance, innovation technology and design and non-profits are the career academies that we are piloting right now for the fall.”

Wilson then elaborated specifically on what students will go through with these career academies.

“You would, as a new student, participate in what is considered a foundations academy and an exploration academy where you go and make sure you have all the basic career development skills like building a résumé, basic interviewing, general broad foundational skills that you would need in any particularly career,” Wilson said. “Then, if you knew what your career interests were, you could be a part of various career academies and those career academies would give you a lay of the land, so basic information on that particular career path and then they would help prepare you for your internships and networking activities so that when you are ready to job search or apply to graduate school, you would be able to have not only the best preparation. Through your relationships with alumni and faculty and employers you would have a network you could rely on.”

The Career Center is implementing a model with core employers.

“We are looking at employers who students want to work for and employers who want our students... So we’re looking at really focusing on deepening the relationships with those employers so that we can understand the opportunities that our students can provide them and the talent pool that exists here at Johns Hopkins,” Wilson said. “We are also focusing on the local partnerships, specifically the Baltimore market, and we’ve had really good success.”

The center has also started a student advisory committee to get more input from students on their services. Junior Liam Haviv, who serves on the committee, had high hopes for the coming changes.

“Administrators, namely Dean Wilson, spent a lot of time looking critically at what our deficiencies are. They saw that the Career Center is incredibly successful for the students that they reach... but it only reaches 30 percent of the student body. Thus, they needed a more comprehensive and expansive way of reaching the entire student body and better preparing everyone for success,” Haviv wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “We are analyzing their models, looking where we can improve on them, mold it to Hopkins.”

This change has brought about significant staff turnover to perform the center’s new functions. Monica Butta, director of employer and market development, explained these changes in an email to The News-Letter.

“Our team now consists of four full-time career coaches and one part-time coach, three employer engagement specialists and one internship specialist and an operations team to support events and IT infrastructure,” Butta wrote. “The team has a good mix of industry experience and career services experience.”

Dean Wilson spoke of his excitement for Garner’s expertise with career academies.

“The most exciting piece of that hiring is the hiring of our new executive director, Anne Garner from George Mason University. She was the associate director there and she’s worked at a couple of different universities and career services as well as a decade of working in the HR division of the CIA,” Wilson said. “So the one piece of this that I’m most excited about is that George Mason has a similar career communities model to what we are trying to transition to at Hopkins so her experience in helping George Mason transition is something we are going to rely upon here.”

Despite these changes, some students like senior Amelia Gavurin, remain unsatisfied with the Center’s services.

“They essentially offer nice options for people who want consulting or engineering jobs and then any students who are any bit creative are left with City Year [a national service organization],” she said. “It isn’t even their options that are bad, they just don’t offer any resources for people to find what jobs out there exist! As a Writing Seminars major, I had to do a ton of research, on top of school work and my extracurriculars to find positions that are actually not writing positions that I would still qualify for.”

Senior Agastya Mondal agreed that the Center caters to a small number of professions.

“I think they’re just mid allocating resources in a way that ultimately doesn’t help students. They focus a lot on internal restructuring and services, but they should be focusing on industry connections in my opinion,” Mondal wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “I think we’re elite [enough] of an institution to have better connections with companies, but we really don’t. It’s getting better but realistically a lot BMEs go into consulting because the connections just aren’t there into biotech/med devices companies.”

The Career Center addressed this discontent and encouraged current seniors to reach out more and take advantage of the Center’s services.

“To students who are feeling a certain level of discontent, I encourage them... to communicate what they feel like they need from the career center,” Wilson said. “We welcome that two-way communication and we are constantly refining how we offer those basic services. I think the additional capacity of our staff have cut down on wait-times and has allowed us to provide more proactive services to students.”

Butta also wrote of the Center’s efforts to assist seniors in finding jobs.

“Seniors were given priority appointments with career coaches until March 1,” she wrote. “Additionally, we have been regularly communicating employment opportunities directly to seniors, through Handshake emails and through announcements.”