Leading Career Services in a Decentralized Model

Erica Kryst:

For students, connection to their school or college, the affinity they feel to the school and the college, the small field that the schools and the colleges can have compared to the larger whole of Cornell. There’s a real benefit to having career resources right there, right down the hall from where their core classes are when they’re a first and second year student, a career office that understands their major deeply and understands the curriculum deeply, that also has connection to alumni who have graduated before and might feel affinity to their College of Arts and Sciences. So I think that’s a real strength of that model to have the career offices in the colleges themselves because of that connection. I think in terms of Career Everywhere, right, the connection to faculty, the connection to the departments. When you’re in the building, you have such a better understanding of what that experiences like, who those people are.

And as a central career office, we’re not as closely connected to the academic departments, and we’d have to have an incredibly large team in order to do that work well. We already have folks who do it. So it’s about those partnerships and the strength of a college and school office and where they’re positioned and what they’re able to do in terms of moving the whole mission forward, and as a central office with our connection to student and campus life, we’re thinking about the large scale efforts and all of the student life oriented ways, whether it’s through their residential experience or through their fraternity and sorority experience or campus activities, what are the other ways that we can also infuse career and partner with our campus partners to make sure that students are aware of their resources and can connect with folks in the various centers who they may already have a personal connection with to have conversations about their careers.

Meredith Metsker:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker, and today I am joined by Dr. Erica Kryst. She’s the executive director of career services at Cornell University. Thank you for being here, Erica.

Erica Kryst:

Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I am super excited to have you, and I am looking forward to talking to you today about how you’re leading, as you call it, a decentralized but highly collaborative career services function there at Cornell. And for context for the audience, Cornell has a central career center where Erica works, and then each college has its own career center as well. So today, Erica will talk more about what that decentralized model looks like, why it’s set up that way, and how you as the leader of career services keep everyone connected and collaborating across campus. And then I also want to dig into a functional review that you are currently working on about reimagining career services at Cornell. It sounds like you’ve done a lot of research and info gathering in your almost three years at Cornell now, and I’m curious to hear what you’ve learned and what your goals are for the future of career services there. So before I get into my questions though, is there anything else you would like to add about yourself, your background or your role there at Cornell?

Erica Kryst:

Yeah. Thank you so much, Meredith. I’m really excited to be here. I think you’ve covered a lot just in your intro. I think I’ll just add a little bit of context about Cornell. It’s a really exciting and unique institution as both a private research institution and an Ivy League institution, but we’re also the land grant institution for the state of New York, so we have a lot of responsibility to make contributions to the field of knowledge, fields of knowledge in a way that prioritizes public engagement, that improves the quality of life for the people in our state and in the world. So we’re a private university with a public mission. We also are a relatively large institution. We have over 16,000 undergrads and over 10,000 graduate and professional school students, and they really span so many disciplines. Part of Cornell’s founding principles were about breadth. Any person, any study. And so being a land grant and having that mission of breadth, we just have a lot of academic disciplines that we’re trying to support as career services.

The other thing that I really wanted to mention more to understand my approach and the way I look at career services and higher education, I’m a first generation college student and I grew up in a rural area in Pennsylvania, and I just didn’t grow up with a lot of exposure to different career paths, so it certainly shapes, it shaped my research, it’s shaped my approach as a higher education professional and definitely as a career services leader. And the other thing I wanted to emphasize or that you’re going to hear me emphasize a lot today are kind of three values that are central to me in terms of how I approach this work. So really thinking a lot about collaboration, about context and enthusiasm, which is just one of the pillars of the work that I do. So wanted to share that and definitely excited to just dive in a little bit more.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. So what did you say, collaboration, context, enthusiasm.

Erica Kryst:

Yes.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Love it. And then I was glad you kind of touched on your background a little bit, and I wondered if you could share with the audience what your undergrad is in a little different.

Erica Kryst:

Yeah. I attended a great small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, and this is also good context to have. I went in as a music major, changed my major throughout college about six times, but ended up graduating with a double major in musical theater and communications, and I think I use both of those, the skill sets I gained through those programs every day. Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. I’m like, I want to make sure the audience gets that context because I think it is unique, and I can just tell from our prep call and our conversation so far today that, I mean, you can see the skills that you gained in musical theater and communications.

Erica Kryst:

Thanks. Yeah, and it’s that lifelong learner, too, I think for me as a student. It was always hard to pick, what am I going to study? I like to learn about so many different things. So I covered a lot of that during college.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, I think that gives you some important context for your work now, too, like when you’re working with students who may not know what they want to do. Be like, “Look, I took a nonlinear career path. Here we are. It’s possible. You can do it.”

Erica Kryst:

Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. Students need to hear those stories, right?

Meredith Metsker:

Yes. Yes, they do.

Erica Kryst:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. Well, before I get into my more specific questions about our topic today, I do want to kick us off with a question I ask everyone here on the podcast, and that’s what does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Erica Kryst:

I love listening to the different answers on the podcast to this question in particular. I think Career Everywhere is first the recognition that everyone has a role to play in students’ career development, and we know from the data that students are going to a lot of different sources on campus and in their communities and in their personal life to ask questions about career or to gain insight into different paths, so faculty play an important role and staff play a role. At Cornell, peers play a significant role in informing the way that students approach career, the career path that they dig into a little bit more or explore. And so I think in the terms of Career Everywhere, our role as career services is to be the thought leaders and the experts that really try to move this whole community, mobilize the entire community and try to move it forward so that students are, no matter who they’re talking to, right, they’re being connected to the opportunities and the resources that will help them be successful no matter what their goals are.

So we have to build those partnerships across campus to make sure that all the Cornell community who’s influencing and impacting our students in terms of their career, have those tools, have that information, know where to point students when it gets to a point that they can’t answer those questions anymore. So it’s really our, what is that phrase? A rising tide lifts all boats. I said sinks all boats recently, but it lifts all boats. We’re trying to be that tide, I think, to elevate all students, but we have to have all the boats working together to do that.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great answer. I think that’s a nice segue into our topic today because you have a lot of boats to work with and keep track of there at Cornell in terms of career services. So again, I would love to dig into how you are leading a decentralized career services model there at Cornell. So for context, can you just share about what the career services structure looks like there and why it’s set up that way?

Erica Kryst:

Yeah, sure. I think I can speak to the current setup. I don’t know if I can speak as much to the why because it predates me a little bit, I think. But when I think about our model, so we are the university-wide career services office. We sit under student and campus life at Cornell, and we provide support for all undergraduate students as well as research graduate and doctoral students, and then each of our schools and colleges also has a career office, a career team supporting the students in their college and doing exceptional work. The way that the collaboration has worked so far and has worked really well, I think, for Cornell, we have tried to collaborate as much as possible in the spaces where there’s real benefit to the institution and to our students to do that.

One of the more clear examples, uConnect being one of our main platforms that we recently brought to campus in August. One instance, one place, one virtual career center that students can go to where they’ll be connected to the resources in their college, but also all of the resources that we have and the career pathways and affinity communities and all of that. It’s the same with our job and internship platform. One job and internship platform for all undergraduate students. So I think for our system, our highly collaborative decentralized model, we’ve really tried to approach it in that way. I think the other thing about Cornell, and maybe this speaks to a little bit of the why is it set up that way. I think the model that we have really plays to our strengths for students connection to their school or college, the affinity they feel to the school and the college, the small field that the schools and the colleges can have compared to the larger whole of Cornell. There’s a real benefit to having career resources right there, right down the hall from where their core classes are when they’re a first and second year student, a career office that understands their major deeply and understands the curriculum deeply, that also has connection to alumni who have graduated before and might feel affinity to their College of Arts and Sciences.

So I think that that’s a real strength of that model to have the career offices in the colleges themselves because of that connection. And I think in terms of Career Everywhere, right, the connection to faculty, the connection to the departments. When you’re in the building, you have such a better understanding of what that experience is like, who those people are, and as a central career office, we’re not as closely connected to the academic departments and we’re not a… We’d have to have an incredibly large team in order to do that work well. We already have folks who do it. So it’s about those partnerships and the strength of a college and school office and where they’re positioned and what they’re able to do in terms of moving the whole mission forward, and as a central office with our connection to student and campus life, we’re thinking about the large scale efforts in all of the student life oriented ways, whether it’s through their residential experience or through their fraternity and sorority experience or campus activities, what are the other ways that we can also infuse career and partner with our campus partners to make sure that students are aware of the resources and can connect with folks in the various centers who they may already have a personal connection with to have conversations about their careers.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense, and I know you and I were talking in our prep call kind of about this, but even just thinking back to my college experience, I was a journalism major after switching from English, and I personally never went to the central career center, and now I kick myself for not taking advantage of that resource, but I could also see how it would’ve been a benefit to have a career center either in the College of Arts and Sciences where the journalism department was, or within the journalism department itself. As it was, I think my professors were kind of the career center, and I think journalism is just kind of unique because the professors have recently worked in industry. They knew the game. They knew everything about that. But yeah, I could definitely see how it would’ve been a benefit to have a specific career center with folks who really, really were in tune with my field of study.

Erica Kryst:

Yeah, yeah. And I had a similar experience to you. I feel like we could all confess that if we didn’t use career services, right, as a college student. And I was a first gen student, and I actually worked in the college radio station, which was right across the hall-

Meredith Metsker:

Hey, me, too.

Erica Kryst:

… in the union. Oh my gosh. From the career center. So I looked at it all the time, but I just really never knew that was for me that that resource was for me. But I did use my faculty in the theater department all the time to ask questions about what to do next, and is grad school an option and all those things that you have a personal connection with somebody you feel more comfortable and can talk to them. So it’s playing to strengths, right?

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I am curious, so I can imagine what each of the college specific career centers do for students, but as the central career center, what all do you do? Are you doing advising? Are you taking appointments, things like that?

Erica Kryst:

Yeah. We are doing advising, and that’s definitely something I wanted to touch on. What we’ve tried to do with our advising model, especially over the last few years, is really think about what are the career paths that based on our data that a lot of our students are going into are interested in. And with Cornell’s focus on our breadth, right? Any person, any study. We’re trying to think about it as any career, right? And we know career paths are not linear, and you can go in a lot of different directions no matter what your major is. You might have interest in tech and interest in consulting and interest in the public sector. And so our career coaches have aligned to a few different industry areas, so we have a career coach who’s focused on finance and consulting, a career coach who’s focused on public service. We have a career coach who’s focused specifically on career exploration, and so she’s doing coaching, but also thinking about initiatives that allow students to explore a variety of career paths. And then we also have a career coach who’s focused on international careers and supporting international students.

And so we’ve tried to provide both breadth in terms of, if I’m a student in the College of Human Ecology and I want to go into a career in finance, where can I go for that support? Let’s say my college career office can’t cover all of the myriad of career paths, so students have this office to go to when they want to dive a little deeper into certain career paths, while also of course being career readiness, job and internship search generalist. We’ve tried to structure our approach in that way. We think about that programmatically, too, right? How can our public service or social impact career coach bring together other folks on campus in the career centers, in the colleges to strategize and to work together on a social impact career week or a career fair career expo that’s specifically focused on that industry area, so to try to lead some collaboration on these really high interest career paths for our students.

We also have an employer relations team, and we generally work right now with a lot of those employers who are recruiting campus-wide, who really have a broad reach, and again, based on data right on our post-grad survey, we also manage the post-graduation survey or FDS for campus here in this office, and then compile all of that data into a dashboard so students can use it and manipulate it to see what career paths are out there. And then we also manage a lot of the systems. So like I mentioned, we have one job and internship platform. We manage that for the campus. When we are considering new resources like uConnect, we’ll usually take the lead on vetting that resource, thinking about what that implementation would look like, and then we’ll pull in campus partners either in the vetting decision-making, is this the resource we want stage?

And then again when we’re talking about training and onboarding for that system, so we’ll do a lot of that through this office as well, and that enables our college partners to really focus on the students and to really focus on the relationships with faculty and departments and the employers that are most connected to their college as well. So slightly different than some other decentralized models in that we’re still providing services through the office, but also taking maybe a lead collaborator role in some of these other spaces around programming and managing systems and things like that.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah. You all are the ultimate facilitators, too.

Erica Kryst:

Ooh, I like that. I like that.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. So kind of on that note of collaboration, as the executive director of career services there at Cornell, how do you keep the central career center in all of the college specific career centers connected and being highly collaborative?

Erica Kryst:

And it’s certainly evolved. So as you mentioned, it’s been almost three years since I’ve been here, and there were some things in place I think that have really set us up for success. I think there’s so much strategy in how you kind of make this work the way that I also think about a lot of this work, especially with the Career Everywhere concept, right? We can do a lot as a central office and we can be really good at collaborating and having relationships and partnerships on campus that help us do this work well, but it kind of falls into a silo if we’re not helping elevate everybody to do it together, right? I can be a strong career center and do great work, but if some of the college career centers are struggling or need resources or need support and we’re not doing that, how does it really help the students, right?

So we were trying to, again, lift everybody together, make the whole network really strong. So there were some things in place even before I started. The career network had regular all staff meetings, so we’ve kept those such that once a semester we bring together the entire career network. We actually do it twice a semester. We do a virtual one in August, so we’ll do a one hour virtual all staff meeting to kind of kick off the semester. So that’s typically announcements, anything that we need to dive a little bit deeper on in terms of maybe a change in a process or a new system coming on board and highlighting that. And then we’ll usually have a half day or a full day in person or hybrid all staff meeting, and that might cover a range of topics. So this past fall, we had an employer panel coming in to share with us. We just got through, it was mid-October, so we had just gotten through a pretty busy recruiting season and we wanted to hear from them, what did you think of our students? What were you hearing from the students in interviews or how did they present themselves at the career fair? And so they shared a lot of really helpful feedback with us and also a lot of really great feedback about how students are using AI, which was fascinating for the career network to hear.

We also do, again, deeper dives in those meetings, and then we might also engage in some professional development topics. At our most recent all staff, we had a session on generations in the workplace because we’re a very multigenerational team if we look across the entire network, so that was really beneficial as well. So very professional development, keeping up on what’s happening in the field focused. There was a listserv for all career staff that predates me as well that had been in existence. And then some other things we’ve tried to do are more consistent celebrations, so we’ll do an end of the semester celebration in the fall where we just bring folks together to, let’s share some food, let’s share some desserts and share some appetizers, and we did a dessert potluck for a couple of years, but just a way to bring the community together so folks who are interacting maybe on email a lot of the time or teams a lot of the time, right, have an opportunity to share.

Then in addition to those more celebratory the entire network, we also have some really strategic meetings. So the career directors have a standing meeting every week. We meet for an hour. We cover updates that are happening from all of our spaces, and then we usually dive deep on some sort of pressing or strategic topic. It’s been really instrumental. I know we’ll get into a little bit more about the functional review idea in a bit, but especially for me, when I was coming into the role that first six months really doing the listening and trying to understand each college’s context well, those meetings really helped me understand what are some of the core challenges that we face, and so we have that time to kind of dive in. We just had one of those meetings today, and we covered some strategy around what are the commitments we’re asking for volunteers during the career fair this year, and then each college shared out what they’re doing in their first year seminars that’s related to career, so they can all learn from one another, too, right, and take best practices away from how each college is handling things. So those recurring director meetings are key.

Our recruiting coordinators across campus also have a regular bi-weekly meeting, so these are groups of people that partner a lot that rely on each other, exchange emails or trying to work in collaboration, and so those regular meetings have really helped. And then we also have some shared committees. So we have a professional development committee that’s made up of folks from across the career offices. They meet and plan out professional development for career staff each year. We’re finishing up a series right now on pre-grad and pre-law. We have a couple of fellowship sessions, so lots of different topics. We have a programming committee that’s made up of folks so we’re not over programming and career services and not duplicating efforts. So these kind of multiple points of people working together and diving in on a topic or taking the lead on a topic that really impacts the whole community. Those really intentional moments of regular connection I think have helped keep this network moving together.

We also use Teams and we’re like a big Teams group, and that was something we introduced about a year and a half ago. We did not have a CCS wide or crew network wide Teams channel. We had one that we had implemented in the central office, but we have channels on different topics where there’s a lot of information exchange happening that folks can, when you have a question about… We just launched a new summer experience survey for the campus. People are posting their questions right into the Team so we can all learn from what the frequent questions are that are coming up. So those tools are really helpful in terms of, again, the regular connection and collaboration among the network.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I love that, and I imagine especially with having teams, being able to instantly connect with each other as opposed to just having to send an email and wait, or having to walk to a different career center, I imagine that makes a big difference, and having that regular face time with each other probably makes it easier or just more comfortable to ask questions of your peers across campus.

Erica Kryst:

Definitely. Definitely. And I think you’re right. Just more accessible, right? Everybody’s more accessible in those spaces. Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

I think we all know that it can be easy to just get stuck in silos and higher ed, and it sounds like you all have figured out a way to break those down, at least within the overall career services function, so that’s really cool. I am curious, just for, again, more context, how many career services staff?

Erica Kryst:

So in terms of the career staff that we’re working with, our network is all of the career teams that are serving the research graduate and master’s, our professional master’s students, doctoral students, the undergraduate students. There are other teams for the professional school, so our med school, our law school, vet school, MBA, they’re somewhat separate. Their populations are just so different, and a lot of their work is very different from ours, but close to 80 professional staff in that network, and quite a few student staff in that network, too, so it’s a fairly large group. I think we have a lot of great resources here and a lot of support and the collaboration, I think, and the continuing collaboration really helps us make the most of it.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So that’s quite a lot of people you have to keep track of and keep sort of rowing in the same direction, to continue our boat analogy.

Erica Kryst:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

I’m curious, in your almost three years there at Cornell, what have you found to be most impactful for keeping that collaboration going, keeping that connection? Is there anything new that you’ve tried that you just, you’re like, “Wow, that was great. I wish I had started that earlier”? I’m just curious.

Erica Kryst:

Oh, man, that’s such a good question. Well, you know what? The first thing I’ll say is what do I have been really astounded by, and not shocked or surprised, but just like, “Wow, it’s incredible.” This is just a really great group of people. I’ve worked at a lot of different universities. I’ve worked with wonderful people in my career, and I can’t speak highly enough about other places I’ve worked, but the career leadership here at Cornell and then the entire network of career staff have really been eager to collaborate and warm and enthusiastic about the work the way we’re working as a team, really from day one. Like I am so grateful for the partners that I have in career services on campus. It really gives me energy every day to not only come into a great team in our central office, but to have great colleagues across campus that I feel like the approach isn’t to put up walls, right?

We might disagree, or back to one of the things I mentioned earlier, the context is so important, right? I spend a lot of time and I continue to spend time trying to understand the context, and so we have healthy debates and there’s a lot of learning that has to happen on both sides when it comes to why we’re making the decision we’re making or why we’re making the choice to go this direction or this direction. But I think the way that we’ve approached it is really from a place of learning and curiosity, and it’s not necessarily about really juxtaposed goals, like opposing goals. It’s really understanding what is the intention, where are we trying to have impact, and really trying to dig into people’s context. But this team is amazing. I’ve just been floored and I feel so lucky since I started in this role to have such great colleagues across campus that have been open to questions and open to figuring it out together, which is great.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Leading with curiosity makes all the difference. I love working with colleagues who are like that, too. It makes it more fun and you just learn so much more from each other.

Erica Kryst:

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And everyone likes to share their experience and share their story, right? Back to the learner and lots of different topics. I mean, what I love in the role that I’m in is, again, the breadth of Cornell is pretty incredible, and so I can talk to my career director and engineering about the different fields and the employers and what they’re recruiting for, and then I get to talk to my amazing colleague in the art architecture and planning school about what the architectural firm hiring timeline is and what is a portfolio review. And so I get to continue to learn because we’re all connected and because folks are so willing to share what is happening in their space and share their challenges and share their opinion, too, on the direction that we’re going, right? So trying to create a space where that back and forth and that inquiry is really valued, too.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. That kind of leads me to a follow-up question I had about one of your committees. You mentioned there was one dedicated to events, which makes a lot of sense. If you have all these different colleges, I imagine you’re probably not all doing career fairs and you don’t want to duplicate efforts, so could you share a little bit more about how you all sort of balance different event needs across all the different career centers across campus?

Erica Kryst:

Yeah. I would say it’s one of those great challenges and career services that I think… I feel like we’re closer every semester to figuring out the way to do it that’s not tedious or cumbersome, right? We have our programming committee. A call will go out from the amazing committee chair, Jess, about, “Okay, we’re going to have a meeting and we’re going to talk about what are our intentions this semester,” and then they have an open conversation where there’s some kind of, not necessarily parameters in place, but what do we really want to focus on this fall and what career fairs are happening that might also influence what programming that we’re doing and trying to be focused in that way. And then folks will come back with, “Okay, here’s the programming we’re doing in this college or that we’d like to propose.”

We do have some collaborative groups. The social impact group I mentioned a little bit. We also have, pre-law advising sits within career services, and so we also have a pre-law advising network, so it’s a team of folks from across campus who do pre-law advising, and they’ll come to that programming committee with, “Okay, here’s what the plan.” We love acronyms in higher ed, right? Here’s what the plan group wants to do. Here are their proposed programs. Some of the, I would say, core principles we try to approach programming with are to have programs open so to any student to attend. There are instances where that’s not possible, or maybe an alum is involved and they want to talk to just students from that school, but oftentimes those events also get opened up more broadly, so we really try to ensure that we’re making the most of those opportunities when we are doing programs.

Our strategy the last few semesters has been to try to whittle down the amount of programming that we’re doing and really focusing on opportunities to partner, so really emphasizing that we want to do programming that brings more expertise into this space, so engaging employers, engaging alumni, working in partnership with faculty to offer programs that maybe will have a class in attendance to kind of boost the audience and the engagement in those programs. So it’s definitely still a work in progress. You should see the spreadsheet with all of the programs in one place.

Meredith Metsker:

I was going to ask how you keep track? So a spreadsheet.

Erica Kryst:

Oh, it’s a spreadsheet. Yeah, yeah. But we are really mindful, that committee is really mindful, too, about timing and dates, and we don’t want to have four or five career services programs on the same day and really trying to spread things out in a way that makes sense and doesn’t tax students. Cornell is very student well-being and mental health focused, and our students are so motivated and so engaged. They’re incredible leaders on campus, and they take a lot of this work on themselves, too, right? They’re the peer-to-peer influence and planning events for their fellow students on different career topics. We don’t want to add to that. We think about this with career fairs, too. We don’t want to add to the stress or add to the number of things that students need to attend. So trying to have those conversations within that committee, too, and being really intentional in the planning process. It’s not easy though.

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, I can’t imagine it is. That’s a lot to keep track of. On a somewhat related note, how do you all coordinate with student outreach and communications? I know you might do some of that through the uConnect platform, but I’m just curious how you all make sure there’s not a bunch of emails and stuff going on at the same time.

Erica Kryst:

That’s a great question. We send a lot of our communication, or we have, through our job and internship platform. We’re a Handshake school. This has been one of those topics I think that has really evolved and will continue to evolve, too, with our reimagining project, but we have really tried to put a process in place, especially for communication that is going to a broader audience. So with schools communicating with students in their school, they know what other messages are going out through the communications teams that are in the colleges. We have a communications team in student and campus life, too, and we work with them really closely. But we have put a process in place, if you have an event that’s open to a lot of students, let’s talk about the timing. Let’s talk about how we could target that communication a little bit more, and then let’s look at the other messages that are going out during that timeframe to try to be as intentional as possible.

We know students get a lot of emails, and we’re always in this place of, like they don’t read our emails, but then when we ask how they found out about an event, it was through email, so trying to find that right balance. We use social media a lot too, and we try to be really strategic with that as well in terms of when we post things that are going to happen on campus to try to drive engagement in that way.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. And are you all using a spreadsheet for that as well to kind of keep track of what emails are going out?

Erica Kryst:

I think there is a spreadsheet for that, too. Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Cool. Well, just a little bit ago, you mentioned the reimagining career services project, and so that’s the functional review, and so I kind of want to pivot us into that topic here. So you mentioned that when you started there at Cornell about three years ago, you were tasked with doing this functional review of career services across the institution. So can you share more about what that has entailed and why you’re doing it?

Erica Kryst:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So as you mentioned, it was something I came in knowing that this would be part of my role, and what a functional review is, it’s really just a strategic deep dive into an area or a function that exists across the institution. So career services is a great candidate for something like that at Cornell because it exists in both the central capacity as well as in a decentralized capacity. What motivated it I think has a lot to do with the student wellbeing and mental health, but also equity and Cornell’s student population has evolved. We have a lot more first generation college students now, but like any campus, right, the population of students changes over time, and this idea of equity has been the guiding principle of this functional review of the reimagining from the beginning. How do we ensure that there’s equity for students in terms of access to career resources and opportunities? So regardless of what school or college they’re in or their background, that they have access to the things that they want to pursue and resources that will help them get there.

So that’s really what motivated it, which is very exciting, right, to have that be the impetus for it, right? We can do this better. We can ensure that all students have access to resources. And so the reimagining started just about two years ago. We kicked it off. We have a steering committee that’s comprised of some campus leadership, a dean of one of the colleges, some folks from the vice provost for undergraduate education leaders sitting in student services spaces in the colleges, a colleague from Alumni Affairs and Development. So trying to think strategically about the partners in the room, and it is very much across campus effort in that sense, and so the steering committee, we started with a landscape analysis of just kind of what are the key things that we know we need to address that really helped organize us in terms of where should we start? Where should we dive a little bit deeper?

And so we have worked through this process by launching working groups in various phases. Our first working group to launch was charged with coming up with career success priorities and learning outcomes for the entire career services function. So not every office has separate priorities and separate learning outcomes, but how can we come together and say, “These are our priorities for students. This is what we want them to learn through their Cornell experience here with career development.” And so that group launched first. We have a working group that had been focused on the structure. Right? So you mentioned we’re decentralized and really looking at is that the structure we want to have or do we want that structure to change or does it need to change as we move forward and really solidifying what that would be.

And then one of our key challenges is employer relations and really figuring out, in a decentralized model, how do you manage employer relations in a way that doesn’t drive employers crazy, right? If you want to recruit at Cornell, and because of the breadth, again, of study, right, how do we make it so that you don’t have to reach out to eight or nine different schools? How can we make this work? And so we had a one Cornell approach to employer relations working group that worked over about a six month period. And then we had a working group focused on branding and messaging, another one focused on support for graduate students and one focused on alumni career support, and those groups really did the deep dive. They did benchmarking with other institutions, focus groups with students, focus groups with alumni, and then each group came up with a set of recommendations and a final report that has gone back to the steering committee. We’re at the point in the process now where we have a pretty good sense of what our initial recommendations are for the functional review.

But again, back to context, we spent the earlier part of this semester meeting with each college dean and their student services leadership, individual meetings with each one to talk through these recommendations. What did we miss about your college? How would this work or not work? Does it align with your priorities? So trying to dive a little bit deeper versus going in front of all of the college leaders at one time and everyone’s… It’s complicated, like a lot of institutions, right? Like the needs can really vary and it’s a complicated place. And so those conversations were great. So the steering committee is still kind of wrestling with some of the conversations that we had and working towards a final set of recommendations that we’ll start to share and evolve the work that we do and how we approach things like employer relations and career advising. What does that structure look like in a model like this? Which is evolving more to be a hybrid model than a decentralized model as we move forward.

But it’s been really exciting. I think the great strength of our process has been the involvement of so many different people. So across the working groups, we’ve had over 50 staff and faculty who have been involved in those groups from across career services, but also our partners in Alumni Affairs and Development. Our partners in marketing and communications have stepped in to join some of these working groups. So it’s been such a collaborative effort and a process that has benefited from the amazing creativity and expertise that exists in the career community at Cornell already.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, it sounds like it. And I was thinking, too, as you were talking about getting feedback from the deans and other leaders and the colleges, I’m like, “That makes a ton of sense to do that now and try and get their feedback and their buy into the process now rather than finishing your recommendations and then just talking at them.” It’s like we all know that’s probably not going to be received as well as if they feel like they have a say in the process.

Erica Kryst:

That’s the benefit of having amazing experienced leaders on the steering committee who can give that guidance to somebody who hasn’t been at the institution that long. Right? Yeah. I feel so, again, very fortunate with the partners that we have and the real willingness that exists on campus to evolve and to think differently about the way that we do our work. That’s something that has really been a deal breaker or a major factor in whether or not this process would be successful is just a real willingness here to think about how we could do it better and how could we do it differently, and how could we get to this goal of equity?

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, absolutely. So I know you mentioned that you’re still kind of in the process of putting together your recommendations, and I don’t know if you can share any of those yet. If not, could you just share maybe if there’s any general directions you see your team moving in or just any learnings, anything like that?

Erica Kryst:

Yeah. Some of the recommendations are, in terms of our structure, are really solidifying some of the things that are already in place, like the management of… Here’s a very basic example, right? Like the management of all of the systems and the way that we evaluate tools and bring tools to campus. That has primarily been handled through our team, but now we’re saying, “This is the process. This is the way we’re going to manage this moving forward.” We’ll continue to do it in a really collaborative way, but it also says you don’t have to do it, right? You see a system out there, you’re at a conference and they’re talking about a new platform or something that you think would be beneficial to your students, bring it to us. We’ll vet it. We’ll figure out the process to really understand what that tool could offer here, and then we’ll make that decision based on the data that we’re able to pull and feedback from campus partners.

So in some sense, it’s solidifying things that are already happening, and that will help us avoid duplication of efforts, because that’s certainly a part of this conversation, too, right? How do you realize the aggregate investment? We talked about the staffing size. How do you realize the aggregate investment that we’re making as career services? And so some of it is parsing out this kind of who does what so you can focus on talking to faculty and building relationships with faculty and departments. So that’s been a key part of it in the employer relations space. This one Cornell approach was kind of the language that’s been used for a few other things at Cornell, because it is such a large, diverse institution in terms of disciplines, and the recommendations from that group are certainly going to guide how we do employer relations moving forward, and really trying to think strategically about how to simplify it for our employer partners, creating that one point of contact that can open the door to them for the entire institution, right?

So you could talk to your main contact in the School of Public Policy, but they’re not just going to talk to you about public policy. They’re also going to ask you about your hiring needs for maybe other areas of your business or other needs in your organization, and then help you figure out how to recruit those students so that we’re not constantly sending them. “Okay, great. You talked to me and now you need to go talk to this other college and talk to this other college.” And so hopefully that approach will also help us diversify our employer base and allow us to be more proactive in the employer relations space, because we do have students that want to go into so many different directions, and I think we can do more work to bring a larger variety of organizations to campus. And our alumni are everywhere, right?

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Erica Kryst:

And we know that’s where a lot of it starts, too. You have the breadth in academic discipline. You have alumni that are out there in so many different fields, and our alums are such a huge strength of our model. They’re generous with their time. They are so enthusiastic about the institution. And that was one of the things we talked about in terms of another recommendation that is already moving forward, which is about these career success priorities and the learning outcomes, and one of those priorities is connection, because we really want students to feel part of that Cornell network when they graduate, and not from a go big red part of it, but that they can reach out to anybody in this network for help or for support or for insight into different career paths, and then it’s a normal part of what the student experience is at Cornell. So we want every student to feel that connection with alums, with faculty, with peers, all of that as part of their Cornell experience, so we’re really excited to those priorities and learning outcomes are really solidified. We’re thinking about metrics and assessment now for them, but that’s a big part of moving forward and also changing how we measure success. It’s not just the post-graduate survey outcomes that success rate at graduation, but it’s the whole story for students.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I feel like I’m going to have to have you back on the podcast in a year when you’ve implemented some of these things and be like, “Okay, Cornell 2.0.”

Erica Kryst:

Yeah, I’d love that. I love that.

Meredith Metsker:

“Where are they now?”

Erica Kryst:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s great. That’s great. Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, sort of on that note, I mean, you’ve touched on a few of them already, but what are your goals for the career services function after this review is officially complete? And what are some other ways you’ll apply what you’ve learned?

Erica Kryst:

Wow, that’s great. What are the goals after the review is complete? I mean, the implementation I think will take a while for some of these goals. I think it’s determining how do we sustain success, and I think the other KPI that we’ve talked a lot about is student confidence, their career path and career readiness. Right? I was just at a graduation event right before this over in the bookstore talking to students about what they were doing after graduation, and it’s normal. I mean, I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I graduated, so I feel like I can empathize with them. There’s still a lot of students that are uncertain, and so we want to help students figure out how to explore career paths more, how to make that very doable and have those measures in terms of student confidence with the path that they have chosen and feeling really equipped to pursue the path that they’re interested in through the skills they develop or through the connections that they have. So that’s a big part of it.

I also care deeply about the success of this entire network as we move forward. Right? Does every college career office have the resources that they need or the support? Where can we step in to help with that? Are they meeting the goals that have been set for them and their college and how they feel about their overall connection to this community and the collaboration, right? I want that collaboration to continue forward so that among the staff there’s that feeling of belonging, the enthusiasm for the work, the motivation to keep doing it, and that tie back to the mission of the organization. So I think my hope would be that at the end of this, we are coordinated and collaborative and working together to serve students in new and different ways, but really doing it together and folks feeling that we can do it, right? Like we’re structured to do it, we have the tools to do it and the resources to do it so that we can move forward together.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I love that. So Erica, earlier you mentioned that you thought that the career services function there at Cornell might be moving more to a hybrid approach versus decentralized. Can you explain more what you mean about that and what that might look like?

Erica Kryst:

I think for me it really means formalizing this collaboration, that it is our mission and our goal to approach this as one Cornell network, knowing that every college has their own priorities and pressures and initiatives that are unique to them in their situation, so having a network where we are all moving together towards the same mission with the same goals, and recognizing that there are nuances, and some folks might do it in different ways. But for me, it’s the boat’s all going together again, but now we’re all tied together. But really it is that moving towards the same goal, seeing that there’s strength in doing that, there’s strength in the resources we can provide students and the tools we have, and just in the student experience of it, right? Like for a student to understand, I think this is one of our challenges in a decentralized model, and I’ve only ever worked at institutions, I feel like I have to disclose this, that have had a central office and college offices.

How do we make it clear to students what their resources are? I think about how many times I’ve answered the question, “Well, what do I go to you for versus what do I go to my college for?” Right? So at the end of this, if we can really make that clear to students that they’re really confident in what their resources are and how to access them and how to take advantage of all the opportunities that are here, and the way that we’re going to do that is if we work together, even if we are still working in some of our own separate contexts and maybe have slightly different roles in terms of the partnerships we need to build and what the time we spend in those relationships look like, or who the targets are for those relationships. The goal is to really ensure that students know what their resources are at the end of it, so that work together is so key for that.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s about making their experience consistent from the outside looking in.

Erica Kryst:

Yes, a hundred percent. We talked a lot. We’ve talked a lot about, uConnect was a big piece of this. Like the digital pathways are really important to us. If there’s various information on separate websites that are in no way connected, that’s not making it clear to students where they need to go to get the information that they’re looking for. So it takes that. It takes that kind of coordinated effort working together in order to make that happen.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. To clarify for the audience, so for the virtual career center you’ve built on uConnect, is that intended to be the kind of one-stop shop for career services across Cornell?

Erica Kryst:

It is. Yeah. It intended to be that. And if you go to our page, you’ll see our schools are all represented on there, and they each have an individual landing page. We just talked about this in our director’s meeting today. We’re like halfway to that point because the working group that was focused on branding and messaging and career services and messaging to students hadn’t come out with their recommendations yet that we will all move to that as our, not necessarily the landing page for your school’s career office, but that’s where all the information is, right? So if you are a student in arts and sciences and you want to learn more about, I don’t know, the internships or internship search strategy, right? Let’s pick a topic. That I’m not on the arts and sciences page and reading that information on that page. If I want that topic, it’s on the career page. So all of the career education content lives in one place.

Meredith Metsker:

And then if they just want to know where their career center is physically, they go to that page.

Erica Kryst:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay.

Erica Kryst:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. And for anyone watching or listening to this, I’ll make sure to include a link to Cornell’s virtual career center so you can go and explore and see how they have it set up. So Erica, I’m curious, what advice would you give to other career services leaders who are in a similar model, it’s decentralized and they want to help all of their peers across campus stay connected and collaborative?

Erica Kryst:

Yeah. I think that I’ll talk about the context thing. I think the context is so important, and I referenced when I first started the traditional listening tour, but I continue to do that. I think that both in our group directors meeting, but then in individual meetings and being in these all staff meetings, too, and talking to recruiting coordinators and really understanding the context, the challenges that maybe a college is facing, what makes their college or their students unique? What are the unique pressures that they might have? Are rankings important? Is accreditation important? Right? Like there are these other really tangible factors too that impact how a college might need to approach career support. And even if that’s not your context, if you’re trying to pull this whole group together to support students in this way, you have to really understand the context so that you’re not putting pressure on doing things in a certain way that will really service one school or another, right? So looking for those moments of synergy, but you’ll only be able to really support all of these different teams if you understand what their contexts are, and that’s just constant learning, right? Like constantly going back and forth.

The other thing I would say is pilot partnerships. We talk about piloting. I love a pilot. That’s kind of been my favorite thing. I was fortunate to have worked at an institution before here where that was really normalized. Like, try it. Try it once, right? If it’s not successful, it’s fine. We’ll learn from it. We’ll make changes. And so trying to try out structure, right? So we have great structure in terms of the meeting, the cadence of meetings that we have and things like that, but those checkpoints have really helped, so just piloting consistency and piloting those structures and partnerships. But I think at the end of the day, it has to keep coming back to students. How do we support students? How do we keep the work that we’re doing centered on the students? And even in maybe the most challenging decision making point or the contexts are so different in each college, right? If we can bring it back to students and supporting students and that equity imperative, too, we’ll get there. We’ll get that clarity or the give that needs to happen in whatever case it is.

But I think even in terms of the tension that can exist sometimes, right, between a central unit and college unit, like let’s just name it, right? It’s the student piece of it that’s the most important and not the power decision, the power dynamic, or make the decision for the sake of the decision or the policy that we had in place at one time. Does it serve students to do things the way that we’re doing it? And I think you just have to keep coming back to that because that’s the one thing we all care about. Like we came into it for that for the most part, so I think it’s critical.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I think that’s a great North Star, and that’s great advice for other career services leaders in similar models. Well, Erica, I’ll kind of start wrapping us up. I want to be mindful of our time here, but is there anything else that you would like to add?

Erica Kryst:

I don’t think so. I didn’t talk as much about… I talked about collaboration. I talked about context. I didn’t talk as much about enthusiasm, but I want to go back to it because I think it’s such key piece of leadership as to have that enthusiasm, and that doesn’t mean being extroverted or being the loudest voice in the room. I think it’s just the energy that you feel about the work, and I don’t know. I just come back to it a lot when we’re in challenging times, right? What is your point that motivates you in terms of continuing to be enthusiastic even when there’s a challenge, or even when the environment’s tough? Like some of the times that we’re in right now in higher ed. And so my grandfather used to say, “You have to have enthusiasm,” and he meant for anything that you do, but especially for work, right? So I think it all comes back to that. And so it may be there are specific pieces of this work that you feel particularly enthusiastic about, and so use that to motivate you, right? Keep coming back to that. We talked about the North Star, but sometimes it’s not always the North Star that gives you that energy, right, for the work. But yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Erica Kryst:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s a great reminder.

Erica Kryst:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

And I do feel like while you talked about the context and the collaboration, the enthusiasm came out naturally in how you communicated.

Erica Kryst:

Thanks. Thanks. I do care.

Meredith Metsker:

It was the vibes.

Erica Kryst:

I love it. I love it.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, Erica, if people would like to connect with you or learn more from you, where’s a good place for them to do that?

Erica Kryst:

Definitely LinkedIn. We have to practice what we preach, right? Definitely LinkedIn. But I also would welcome an email, and I feel like I need to give a shout-out to… The last three years I’ve reached out to a lot of folks in career services, and I think one of the amazing things about our field is how generous people are with their time, and so I’ve benefited from multiple folks across career services who’ve been willing to talk to me or share what’s happening at their institution and have a quick 30 minute chat about some specific topic that they just need more insight or I need more insight on, so I’d also welcome an email if you want to connect at a future time or connect at a conference or something like that.

Meredith Metsker:

Great. And again, for everyone watching or listening, I’ll be sure to include Erica’s email and a link to her LinkedIn page so we can make that easy. All right. So Erica, at the end of every interview, I like to do this answer a question, leave a question thing. So I’ll ask you a question our last guest left for you, and then you will leave a question for the next guest. So our last guests were President Rodney Rogers and Steve Russell of Bowling Green State University, and they each left a question for you, so you get two questions.

Erica Kryst:

Oh, okay. Fun.

Meredith Metsker:

So President Rogers question was, what was the first paid job you had that you never put on your resume?

Erica Kryst:

I grew up in a farming family, and my uncle owned a dairy farm, but we lived in the farmhouse when I was younger, and so my first paid job was doing barn chores for him with my siblings a couple nights a week, and I think he gave us like $7 or $8 in an envelope at the end of the week, so that was my first take home pay. I’m not sure how helpful we were. I think I was seven years old. I was pretty young. So that was my first paid job, but I don’t think I’ve ever put it on a resume, but it definitely taught me some things about work ethic and all of that, too.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Oh, I love that.

Erica Kryst:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

President Rogers will appreciate that too. He is also from a small farming community.

Erica Kryst:

Oh, nice.

Meredith Metsker:

So he will love that.

Erica Kryst:

Nice. Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. And let’s see. Steve’s question was, if the new age of career services was a movie genre, what would it be?

Erica Kryst:

I love that. I want to say it’s like a action hero, a Marvel movie where the whole team is there and they’re ready to work together to fight off a foe. But often I feel like it’s more like a rom-com. You know what I mean?

Meredith Metsker:

Ups and downs.

Erica Kryst:

Ups and downs, and we’re trying to build relationships, and you need humor in this work. Like you need humor in any field, I think. It’s so critical. And there are times where the lead is doing it really well and times where they’re not sure what’s happening. So I feel like it’s more like a rom-com. And the other thing I’ll say, and I think I spoke to this a little bit, the people that I work with love what they do. They love what they do, right, which is so important, so I think that’s what made me think of the romantic comedy. We’re not always doing it the right way, but we do love what we do, yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

And typically there’s a happy ending.

Erica Kryst:

That’s right. See, here we go. Perfect. Perfect. Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s great.

Erica Kryst:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, what question would you like to leave for the next guest?

Erica Kryst:

One of my favorite questions, I was tempted to say it should be like, did you use career services when you were in college? Gosh, our field has shifted so much. But I think one of my favorite questions to ask folks in career conversations is when you were in kindergarten and first grade, what was your answer when someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grow up?

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, that’s a good one.

Erica Kryst:

Yeah. Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

I don’t even know if I remember mine. The earliest I can remember thinking about it… Well, yeah. In my eighth grade yearbook, I put that I wanted to be a computer engineer, which looking back, I’m like, “What? Why?” That is so far away from the path that I have gone down.

Erica Kryst:

Yeah, yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

But I mean, I didn’t ever write it down, but when I was in middle school, I would create my own radio show using a boom box and like a cassette tape. I had segments. I wrote advertisements. It was a whole thing.

Erica Kryst:

Yeah. I love that.

Meredith Metsker:

So I feel like that was the pretty clear indicator of where I would go in life.

Erica Kryst:

I love that. That’s perfect. Yeah. Someday drop a new episode, but it’s really your tapes from when you were a-

Meredith Metsker:

It even had a name.

Erica Kryst:

… little kid.

Meredith Metsker:

It was KBOI Kids’ Show Broadcasters.

Erica Kryst:

Oh my gosh. It sounds so legit.

Meredith Metsker:

I know.

Erica Kryst:

I love that. Yeah. I love hearing what those answers are.

Meredith Metsker:

What was your speed? What did you want to be?

Erica Kryst:

Honestly, I was the kid that could never… I think I said teacher, but I knew I didn’t want to be a teacher. I was the kid that never knew, and that followed me into college. And when you were saying you wrote software engineer in eighth grade, when I was applying to college, I applied to pharmacy school. I applied to computer science. I applied to, auditioned for music programs, applied for communications a few places. I just really never knew what I wanted to do until someone told me that you can work it after college, right? Like have you thought about working in higher education? It was like a light bulb moment of a mentor saying that, but I never knew as a kid what I wanted to do. I just liked too many things.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, I think it worked out really well that you are in career services now.

Erica Kryst:

Yeah. Yeah. I’ll take it. I’ll take it. I feel good. I feel good. Yeah. Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. Well, that’s a great question. Cool. Well, Erica, thank you so much for taking the time to join me on the podcast today. This was such a fun conversation. The time flew by. Like we’re a few minutes over because I looked at my clock a few minutes ago and I was like, “Oh my gosh. We’re over time.”

Erica Kryst:

It was great talking to you, Meredith. Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. I appreciate it.