Career Center Creates New Opportunities for Students
The Career Center at Yeshiva College has announced new programs and initiatives for this year. CAPS, which stands for “Connections and Partnerships for Success,” is the overarching Career Center initiative dedicated to ensuring that students have a place to turn to for leadership opportunities and to become a part of an ever-growing network that will guide their career path. Susan Bauer, executive director of the Career Center, explained that the ultimate goal is to “create opportunities to build future leaders.”
It is with this goal in mind that the Career Center has developed a number of new programs to be launched soon. One such program is YU-MVP. MVP is a Mentoring Volunteer Program that aims to connect students with alumni who can advise them and help them find internship and career opportunities. To do this, the Career Center has adopted an online platform, PeopleGrove, on which students and alumni fill out a profile about themselves, and an algorithm finds a number of alumni that students can connect with. Before a student can be entered into the system, they must attend an hour-long onboarding session, which will be held once a week on both the Beren and Wilf campuses, where they will learn how the system works and the proper protocol for correspondence.
Currently, YU-MVP is in the testing phase, with the help of a controlled group of sophomore finance students. The testing will end in November and the program will be launched to all Sy Syms, Stern College and Yeshiva College students in early 2020. The Career Center also hopes to launch a similar program for current upper-level students to advise first time on campus peers in September 2020.
Another new program, which is slated to be launched this November, is the Employer-in-Residence (EIR) program. Each month, the Career Center will choose two employers from an industry, one for the Beren campus and one for the Wilf campus. The chosen industry will be based on student interest. The employers from the selected industry will be available for a portion of the day on campus to meet personally with any students who would like guidance and to learn more about that industry.
Additionally, programs are being developed to give current students more opportunities to play a unique role in the Career Center. One such program is the Career Liaisons program, which will train students to help fellow students with essential career-related tasks, such as writing resumes and cover letters and creating a LinkedIn profile. This program is designed to create an environment of “students leading students to success,” as Bauer puts it.
Similarly, the new Student Ambassador program will enable students to help not only themselves but other students as well. Inspired by a student who was appointed to lead a group of students on a site visit to Google, the Career Center is allowing students to apply to be Student Ambassadors. If accepted, a student will work with the Career Center to plan a site visit related to their field of interest. Student Ambassadors have an incredible opportunity to build meaningful professional connections, and even to land a job, while also extending this opportunity to fellow students.
With these new programs, all under the CAPS initiative, the Career Center hopes, as its executive director says, “not just to find jobs and internships for students, but to connect students to people and opportunities that can help them build their own futures.”
