How Oregon State Integrated Career Development Into Core Curriculum

Brenna Gomez:

You know, a lot of our students are great self-advocates, and so they will come to the career center on their own, they’ll ask questions, but not everybody has time to do that. And so by having it in the classroom in these different ways, we are kind of making sure that students don’t get to last term senior year and say, “Oh, okay, what comes next?” We want them to have these touch points throughout their journey where they do have to sit and think about it and engage in categorizing and cataloging their skills and experiences and having a few new experiences to just do that gut check. Am I on the right path? Do I know where I’m headed?

Also, knowing that we really tried to build into these courses that career is a lifelong piece. It’s not something you do once and you say, “Okay, I earned my communication badge. I know how to communicate forever. I am going to be in the same job forever.” We know that the world doesn’t work like that anymore. So trying to get folks to think about this as a cyclical process that you do every few years, every year, whatever makes the most sense in their lives, but knowing that it’s not kind of a one and done piece.

Meredith Metsker:

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker, and today I am joined by Brenna Gomez, the director of career integration at Oregon State University. Thank you for being here, Brenna.

Brenna Gomez:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I’m really glad to have you and I’m excited to talk to you today about how Oregon State is integrating career into the core curriculum. I know it’s been a huge project there at OSU to revamp this core curriculum over the last few years, and it officially launched this summer, and it sounds like career services was involved super early in the process to find those ways to embed career development into those courses. So I’m excited to dig into that process with you today and learn what that career integration looks like, how you built it all out, and how this all fits into the career center’s overall strategy. But before I get into my questions, is there anything else you would like to add about yourself, your background, or your role there at OSU?

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah, thank you. I’d love to talk a little bit about my background and my role. I think it’ll be helpful for our conversation today. So I have a Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico, and I’m really grateful for this training because it’s made me a really adaptable, creative person who thinks outside the box. It also means that I was trained in how to teach by faculty within the department when I started my grad assistantship, and that background has been really essential to my work as director of career integration here at OSU. A big part of my role is leading our Career Champions program.

So what makes our Career Champions program unique is that we run it as a six-week professional development program for faculty and each faculty member who participates brings in a specific course that they’d like to work on, and we map out the curriculum in that course to the NACE competencies and take a look and say, okay, what specific projects are students working on to build each of these skills? Let’s take that map and write a really specific syllabus statement with the NACE competencies so that students know that the course will cover this.

And then the faculty also either revise an assignment to add in more career or they create a totally new assignment that brings career into the curriculum. And we’ve been doing this since 2020, and so far 115 faculty have participated, which we’re very excited about. We know six weeks is a long time for faculty to dedicate to this work, and it’s a completely opt-in program. So we’re excited that they have joined us on this journey. And it’s been going well. We’ve now expanded our program out to pilots with advisors and supervisors of student employees where we take that content and tailor it to those roles and interactions that make sense with these other populations in terms of how they interact with students. And that’s been going really well as well. So not something we’ll probably go into too much detail about today, but I always want to be sure to plug our Career Champions program.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. So y’all are no strangers to the whole Career Everywhere thing.

Brenna Gomez:

Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. Well, that’s some great context and I, maybe we’ll have to have you back on for a separate episode about Career Champions program. So it sounds like there’s a lot there. But before I get into my more specific questions about our topic today, is there any, or I wanted to kick us off with a question I ask all of our guests. What does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah, I love this question. To me, Career Everywhere is really about taking career and infusing it across the university. So meeting students wherever they are, whether that’s in the classroom, whether it’s in research, whether that’s at their student job, and making sure that they get access to career resources and support. So from my perspective, it means supporting students, but it also really means supporting the people who support students. So does everyone on campus know that career resources are available to students? Do they know how to make a referral? Do they know what the resources are? Do they feel comfortable talking about transferable skills as related to research or student employment? So making sure that everyone feels like they’re a part of that student’s career journey is really what Career Everywhere is about to me.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that, and I also love how you phrased it. It’s not just supporting students, it’s supporting those who support students. It’s a great way to put it. Okay. Well, now I would love to dig into our topic today, which is again, how you all are integrating career into the new core curriculum there at Oregon State. Just to give us some context for the conversation, can you just share an overview of this core curriculum revamp and what the initial goals were?

Brenna Gomez:

Absolutely. So our former general education was implemented in 1990.

Meredith Metsker:

Wow. Okay.

Brenna Gomez:

It was a while ago. And there were some reviews in 2002 and then again in 2010, and they decided not to make any changes at those times because the curriculum, it’s still a good curriculum, our former gen ed, and at the time it really felt like it was working for folks. In 2018, our university strategic plan called Four Reform and an implementation and leadership committee was created. And at that time, they really wanted to take what was still a good curriculum, but make sure it was updated to meet the changing needs of students of OSU and of the world, right? Making sure that we’re firmly planted in the modern day and we’re thinking about a variety of different guiding principles and goals. So some of those guiding principles were really keeping students at the focus. This is for students, this is to better prepare them again for the world and for their futures.

So keeping that in mind the whole way through the process and really centering that. We really wanted to be rooted in best practices and high impact practices, and then we also really wanted to be thinking about our transfer students. So how can we make sure that OSU is a place that transfer students can come and really get what they’re looking for? So to some extent, that does come with making sure that the credits feel balanced, because some of our majors do require a lot of credits. And so if the gen ed also requires a lot of credits, that can be a strain on folks transferring in. So balancing some of those pieces with some of our other goals, which were really to help students understand how gen ed is relevant. It’s not just a checkbox that you have to make your way through. Your gen ed courses can help prepare you for your career as well.

And we also really were interested in thinking about some of those kind of modern day pieces that I was speaking to. So inquiry and innovation, navigating a complex global world, so our gen ed should help students become adaptive, proactive members of society. And then with the career piece in particular, I think we all know in terms of the folks who listen to this podcast that the majority of students are going to college for career advancement, but research also shows that developing career skills is a top academic priority for students. So they are thinking about that in an academic light. They expect their courses to help them be able to build these things. So we really wanted to again, meet students where they are and make sure that career development was there in the classroom. So we had a lot of things in our minds as we started this multi-year long process.

So again, in 2018, the strategic plan cited that this should happen and a committee was formed. In 2019, and then for several years, folks did a lot of listening sessions to get input from a variety of stakeholders. They also surveyed students and heard from students, so they met with students, faculty, advisors, alum, and then they also met with and industry partners to just broadly talk about this gen ed. So over the course of several years, they did 35 road shows with about 700 different people to get input on everything that might go into this. And then from there, in about 2020, an ad hoc review committee was put together to start doing that research piece to look into the best practices around gen ed in the country to see what other universities were doing. How were they including high impact practices, how were they reforming their gen ed in general?

And then as we started to move along, a reform committee was created in 2021 that helped push things along and eventually the curriculum development started to come out from that committee. And in April 2023, our faculty senate voted and approved the new curriculum. And from that point, we started moving much more into lots of implementation pieces, so making sure that faculty were aware of changes, that they were trained, that they had support, all of the fun back end logistics that come from changing your courses. And now we’re in summer, fall now. We’re almost in fall. Today is actually our move-in day-

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, wow, cool.

Brenna Gomez:

… since we’re on the quarter term, so it’s our first day of move in, and we’ll have all of our students engage in this gen ed. There were some classes in the summer of course, so those were our first round of students too to take these new gen ed courses, and we’re really excited that it’s finally out there after this Herculean endeavor to really get this done.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I’m sure a lot of folks listening can relate to just all of those logistics that go into this kind of campus-wide endeavor. And it’s so important too. And hopefully, I mean, given how long the previous gen ed curriculum was in use, hopefully this one will last for a long time as well. So as I mentioned earlier, you were telling me before that career services was involved really early on in the process, which is just awesome. I know a lot of our listeners are probably jealous about that. So can you just tell me a little bit about how career services has been involved in the process and what the process looked like?

Brenna Gomez:

Absolutely. We are really lucky that having a really collaborative process was a value for Oregon State. Very early on, they knew that they wanted members from Student Affairs, which is where the career development center is located, to participate in these conversations around curriculum needs. And I know some other folks have been on your podcast talking about how we kind of have to break down those silos between different areas on campus. And so I’m really grateful that we were pulled in very early and are executive director who is now also the Associate Vice President for Student Affairs, Brandi Fuhrman, was able to be involved in these really early on conversations and advocate for career to be included. And we were also lucky because our director of core education, and core education is the new formal name for our gen ed, but McKenzie Huber is the director of core ed here, and she also has a passion for career in the curriculum.

She did some of her grad research on this very topic, and so she and Brandy would actually go on walks around campus and just kind of dream about, okay, how can we incorporate this into the gen ed? And in those big committee conversations, there were lots of conversations about should we do it this way? How can we go about incorporating it, and how do we want to think about personal, professional and civic success in building out these new curriculum requirements? And along the way, the idea of what if we have an actual career class or a set of career classes that are required? And once they kind of located that target, as actual implementation was moving along, myself and our executive director, Brandi, and then our senior director of career development, Elizabeth Simmons, all applied to actually work on a faculty working group where we were helping to build out the criteria for this requirement, the learning outcomes that would be associated with it.

And we worked with faculty from all across the university to do that part of the process, and they did this with all of the other categories in the gen ed as well. So there were these big groups of folks working on this. And then once those outcomes were approved by Faculty Senate, I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with a lot of folks on campus to do some of the support pieces. So again, this was a huge collaborative process. This doesn’t belong to any one person or one office. It really belongs to the faculty since it went through shared governance. But I worked with our Center for Teaching and Learning, our director of core ed, folks from the assessment office, and then some instructional designers from our e-campus because we have a large online population of students as well, to build out some of those support resources for faculty who would be working with or teaching these courses.

So we created some Canvas modules that really spoke to the why, why is career infused into the gen ed, how can we think about teaching it? What are the areas that make the most sense to kind of pull from in that teaching? What are some of the pedagogical underpinnings? What are the NACE competencies, if they hadn’t heard of those before, and what assignments are folks able to choose from to be able to teach these courses? And we also, we held drop-in hours for faculty to come and ask questions while they worked on their course proposals. And those were all kind of going through the administrative system. And then my department, the career integration department actually developed some plug and play assignments for faculty to download and use as is or really tailor to meet the needs of their class and departments and majors. So we were involved all the way through the process, and it’s been a real blessing to be so integrated into it.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. That must have been a really cool professional experience for you too.

Brenna Gomez:

It was really wonderful to feel like it was sort of the perfect nexus of the things that I’ve done, because I was able to bring my teaching background into it, which I think really helped get buy-in from the other faculty that I was working with, but also to bring all of the work that I’ve been doing in the career center with me as well. So everything braided together in a way that was really exciting.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, yeah, it sounds like it. Okay, so we kind of set the foundation really well here. So now I would love to know what this looks like. So what does this Beyond OSU, I think that’s what it’s called, what does that career integration into the new core curriculum look like?

Brenna Gomez:

Yes. So we have sort of a macro and a micro Beyond OSU. So Beyond OSU is OSU’s signature approach to career development with four pillars, and the first pillar of that is career integration, and that is the Beyond OSU actual courses in the gen ed curriculum. So macro Beyond is the four pillar strategy. Micro is kind of this actual curriculum piece, and that is integrated into the colleges itself in these Beyond OSU classes. And so there’s Beyond OSU One, Preparation, and in a Beyond OSU One Preparation course, students will build out some kind of career document. So that could look like a resume, it could look like a LinkedIn profile, a CV depending on the major and the fields that they’re thinking about going into. If faculty know that students in a certain major are much more likely to go to grad school, this might look like content for a grad school application.

If they’re going into teaching, it could look like working on a teaching portfolio. It really depends on that specific major and college’s needs. And then regardless of the major, students will reflect on transferable skills like the NACE competencies and where they’re building those throughout their OSU experience. Then we’ve got Beyond OSU Two Engage, which is where students engage in some kind of a career experience. So again, there are a variety of things to choose from here. That could look like a site visit, it could look like required attendance at one of our career fairs. It could look like a job shadow in their local community. If they’re an e-campus student, they can go through the process of what does it look like to cold call an employer and say, “Hey, can I come see what you do for a day?” If they’re an on-campus student, maybe it’s also a job shadow, but here in Corvallis. Or if they’re at our Cascades campus, perhaps it’s a job shadow out in Bend in the wonderful mountains.

So it can look like a lot of different things. Some of our majors also have required internships, so those folks had a really easy place to slot in this Beyond OSU Two Engage class. It could be a capstone, it could be a mock interview, it could be so many different things. And then once they’ve done that experience, they might also update that career document to incorporate all of the things that they learned throughout that experience, all the skills that they built. So functionally, this looks really different depending on where you are within the university. Some majors have combined those two courses and students will take a single course somewhere in the middle of their journey. So for example, I teach in the School of Writing, Literature and Film. I teach creative writing sometimes since I do have that graduate degree. And students who are in that major will take a single Beyond OSU class kind of around their junior year that really looks at careers related to writing.

In other colleges, it made more sense because of the way that their credits laid out to keep them separate. So for example, in engineering, we have a first-year sequence of engineering courses called Engineering Plus, and the Beyond OSU One Preparation course will take place during that initial first year series. And then the Beyond OSU Two course for many engineering students is in their capstones. So it’s really located depending on the need of the college because we’re a decentralized university and so that each college has different needs. We also know that career is not one size fits all. So we wanted to, especially since the career center was sitting on this committee, building out the criteria and the outcomes, we really wanted to make something adaptable that wasn’t every single student has to do X, even if it doesn’t make sense for their major and where they are in their life and their career path.

So we gave faculty a list to sort of pick from that they can still riff on. As long as the curriculum committee was like, yes, that sounds like a career document, that is something that will work for that requirement, then it worked for us so that they can tailor it to what makes the most sense. And one of the other pieces that’s also a little more tailored is that some courses are credit bearing and other courses are actually zero credit. So in some of those majors where we do have a required internship, there’s a zero credit piece that attaches, that takes students through the build your resume before you go to your internship and apply, find your internship site, now update your resume now that you’ve done your internship and reflect on it. So looks like a lot of different things across our campus, but we’re really excited to have this rolling this year.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s really cool. Can you remind me what the Beyond OSU One is labeled?

Brenna Gomez:

Preparation.

Meredith Metsker:

Preparation, okay. So you got Preparation and then Engage, correct?

Brenna Gomez:

Yes.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. So every student now who goes through OSU has to complete those two assignments at some point during gen ed?

Brenna Gomez:

Yes. So these courses are integrated into their majors, and so there’ll be required classes for them at some point beginning, everyone who entered beginning summer 2025 and beyond will be taking these classes.

Meredith Metsker:

Sorry, just to clarify, are they each standalone classes or a standalone session that is worked into the curriculum over the course of the semester? How exactly does that integrate?

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So for the vast majority of our colleges and majors, most people took what was required of Beyond, what you might call like a standalone Beyond OSU course, and some folks said, “Hey, we’re doing something that’s pretty similar to this already. We’re just going to incorporate it in.” There were some places across the university that weren’t doing career at all, so they did need to create kind of that standalone new career course. So again, a little bit of variance there, but all of this is integrated into required major coursework for the most part.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Okay. So let’s say, I need a visual example here. I’m a visual learner. So let’s say we have a faculty member there trying to integrate Beyond OSU One, so the Preparation part, would they say, “One day during the semester, okay, we’re going to sit down and we are going to work on resume or your grad school portfolio or something like that.” Is that how it would work, or is it kind of throughout the semester or quarter in your case? Would they work on it at different points throughout the quarter?

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah, we are looking to have it as much more of a backbone to the class rather than one class session or class day. While we know that that can be helpful. It’s really supposed to be a sustained approach in terms of how folks are thinking about it. And so some of the Beyond OSU One Preparation courses are integrated into what we call orientation classes. So students who are early on in their OSU journey who are kind of learning about the different things within the college that they could major in, what those different career paths look like, the class already had some of that already, so it was really easy to take it a step further and say, “Okay, now we’re going to also do a little more research on what is interesting to you and have you reflect on the skills that you’ve built towards any of these paths, and then perhaps make a resume or a LinkedIn profile as well.”

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, cool. And then for the Engage one, so the experiential learning element, so again, just as an example, what would that look like for someone majoring in, I don’t know, engineering or whatever major comes to mind for you?

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah, yeah. So in engineering, a lot of folks will take this in the capstone and actually graphic design is maybe a better example that we have not chatted about yet. I’m going to pull up one of our graphic design examples. So a lot of some of the capstone classes, actually, this is good for both graphic design or engineering, they already have that sort of working with industry partners component already where the capstone students in engineering might be actually building something out. If they’re a computer science student, say they might be working with a company on a tool as a solution, and that’s part of their capstone. Or for design students, I know that they have a day where they’re evaluated by some employers in Portland, and so those pieces were already naturally in some of those majors, and so they just expanded on a little bit with the Beyond series.

For some other majors where it maybe wasn’t more present and it was much more about maybe a specific project that they were completing, faculty are really encouraged to say, “Okay, what skills does this project help them build? Let’s get them reflecting on this more.” Can they also perhaps, if they’re a psychology major, get in touch with a psychologist and have an informational interview on what is the day in the life of a psychologist like? Does that sound like a good fit? Are you thinking about maybe not doing direct service work with your psychology degree or going into something like marketing or HR or some of those other fields?

Meredith Metsker:

It’s like a built-in, almost a forcing function to get them to start thinking about how they will apply what they’re learning after graduation out in the workforce.

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah, absolutely. We really want, a lot of our students are great self-advocates, and so they will come to the career center on their own, they’ll ask questions, but not everybody has time to do that. And so by having it in the classroom in these different ways, we are kind of making sure that students don’t get to last term senior year and say, “Oh, okay, what comes next?” We want them to have these touch points throughout their journey where they do have to sit and think about it and engage in categorizing and cataloging their skills and experiences and having a few new experiences to just do that gut check, am I on the right path? Do I know where I’m headed?

Also, knowing that we really tried to build into these courses that career is a lifelong piece. It’s not something you do once and you say, “Okay, I earned communication badge. I know how to communicate forever. I am going to be in the same job forever.” We know that the world doesn’t work like that anymore. So trying to get folks to think about this as a cyclical process that you do every few years, every year, whatever makes the most sense in their lives, but knowing that it’s not kind of a one and done piece.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s a really good point. Even just thinking about, like with the resume building for example, you’re never just going to make one resume, so it’s not just how to make a resume. It’s probably thinking through how do you make a resume and adapt it for this type of role or this type of company, how do you make it a part of your ongoing process to keep it updated? I imagine it’s skills or teaching students tools on how to do this forever, not just that first job, not just that first internship.

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah, and I think getting used to that feeling, right? Because that might be a little bit surprising for some folks of, okay, I am going to sit with how uncomfortable this feels to know that this is something I’m going to be doing throughout my life. Even when things are good, even if we stay on at a company, we might go up for a promotion, and it’s not a great feeling to say, “Wow, I haven’t updated my resume in four years.”

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, or your LinkedIn profile, because yeah, you never know when an opportunity will occur. Okay. Is there anything else you wanted to add about how this integration looks or any other examples before I move on?

Brenna Gomez:

I don’t think so. Yeah, I think we probably went pretty in the weeds there for some folks, but I think it’s helpful for them to get a sense of all the different ways it’s working.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I think this audience will appreciate in the weeds details. Okay. Well, you mentioned earlier that you have worked with faculty very closely, especially you personally. So how have faculty responded to this new core curriculum, especially these career development elements?

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, I just want to recognize that this was so much hard work. It’s a big lift to do something like this over a period of so many years, but I’m really proud of how involved faculty have been in this process. We really went through shared governance with this. It was passed by the Faculty Senate, so there was a lot of support for the reform in general. With the career integration piece, I think the response has been quite positive. In some of those initial conversations that were had as soon as the strategic plan came out about this change and Brandi and McKenzie took the idea of career and the curriculum to that group, there wasn’t pushback in the sense that some people might have expect of like, oh, well, why would we want to do that? The questions that they got were more complex of how, how do we want to do this?

So we’ve had a lot of buy-in along the way, and I’m grateful for that. I think also this year, we did a community of practice for faculty who will be teaching these classes, and it was a time to really get folks to brainstorm about what they wanted to do in these career classes to share assignments with each other, and we saw a lot of excitement from the faculty who participated in the community of practice. And we’re very excited to continue that for this academic year, this first year of core ed, to see, okay, what actually happened while we’re teaching these classes? What are some of the challenges that we’re coming up against, especially for folks who’ve not taught career before, and what are they really excited to try out and test with their students? So we’ll be doing that again this year, and it’s been great to see the excitement there.

Again, like I mentioned, we didn’t really get a lot of pushback in the sense that I think a lot of people would expect that we might. We did have some faculty that said like, “Hey, I’ve been doing this for a long time,” and so we just tried to honor that because it’s true. There are a lot of faculty at our university who have taught courses based in career who have been doing this work for many years, and I think that’s true across the country. There are a lot of people who are really trying to champion this work. So we really tried to be intentional and recognize that and say, “Yeah, you’re right. It makes sense to just plug these classes into the work that you’re already doing in your particular college to honor their perspectives.”

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I’m sure they appreciated that acknowledgement too.

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah. I do think that makes a big difference.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that’s really interesting. I love this community of practice concept that you mentioned. So what does that look like? Is this a regular gathering of folks or is it an email chain? What does it look like?

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah, yeah. So it’s run by faculty, myself, and then McKenzie Huber, our director of core education, and Kara Clevinger, who is part of our Center for Teaching and Learning. We provided sort of some back end support, but we had two faculty, we had actually this year three or four faculty facilitators who we worked with to kind of set the tone of what do you want this group to be? And so they landed on meeting four times throughout the term on topics that were important to them. So we talked about things like AI in career education, we talked about some of the specific requirements of these new Beyond classes. We talked about experiential learning. We did an assignment share.

So we met in winter and spring term of this last year, and then we also had a Canvas site for everyone who was interested, and folks could share articles that were interesting and relevant related to these topics. There was a discussion board that the faculty facilitators created that asked some questions to set the tone before each next session, and so yeah, we’ll be doing it again this year. I’m not totally sure the topics that we’ll be covering. We do have two faculty who will carry that baton this year as facilitators, so they get to really help set those topics that we’ll be working on at least for these next couple of terms.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, that’s a really interesting way to approach it, and hopefully that helps faculty members feel more comfortable with any changes with this new gen ed curriculum and they can share ideas and keep any assignments that they’re plugging into their classes timely and relevant to what’s going on.

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah. I think whether it’s with this community of practice or with the Career Champions program that I run, that ability to get faculty from all different disciplines into the room to brainstorm together and really share and almost do a really informal peer review of each other’s work, it’s really meaningful for them because the energy in the room just is so excited and people bounce ideas off of each other and just I think get reinvigorated about the work. So it’s one of the things that we hear in our programming that is the most meaningful to folks, is being able to develop those connections through the work that we’re all doing together.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. That’s a really cool element of this. So I know you all just launched this new core curriculum, so it’s all pretty new still, but have you seen any early results that you’re excited about? Any early feedback?

Brenna Gomez:

Because the first session of classes took place during the summer, we don’t really have a lot of early feedback. Assessment will be in the works for the next couple of years to see how this is going with folks. I know I’m really excited for this fall as the classes really launch and we have our full population of students taking them. I’m really excited to see that happen and to begin to hear from students and faculty, how does it feel to take this? How does it feel to teach this? And to just keep engaging with that community of practice to kind of drive some of the work and resources for the broader community forward.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, it sounds like you all have a really good system in place for evaluating how it’s all going in real time and making adjustments on the fly and measuring success, so maybe we’ll have to check in in another year or two.

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah, definitely.

Meredith Metsker:

See how it’s going. Well, earlier you mentioned that integrating career development into this new gen ed curriculum is part of your career center four pillar strategy. So would you mind sharing more about those pillars?

Brenna Gomez:

Absolutely. So we’ve been talking about the core curriculum piece in the new core ed, so that’s our first pillar. The second pillar is tailored career support. So we have professional career advisors who are embedded in seven of our undergraduate colleges, and they are the traditional career advisor that so much of the field is familiar with, but the way that we have approached this is to really partner with colleges on providing this role. And so the career advisor has a dotted line into the college itself, and their office is actually located there so that they are closer to where the student population is and the students start to think of the career advisor as a member of that college team. And so those folks are available to do one-on-one support, like many career advisors. We also do a lot of workshops in that space throughout the year. So we are the Beavers. Our signature workshop series is Getting a Damn Job.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that.

Brenna Gomez:

We love a pun. So those workshops go throughout the year and are very well attended, very successful. Students love puns as well. We often do a, Oops, I Still Need a Job workshop. And so those are a highlight for folks. And one of the things that we’re doing that’s new because of the Beyond OSU curriculum changes is that the career advisors have aligned the workshops that they do with the outcomes of the Beyond OSU courses so that faculty know if they send a student to those workshops that they’re going to be learning things in line with the core curriculum itself. Our career advisors also support faculty in other ways and go to do presentations in their courses, so we’ve got a lot of integration on that end as well. Our third pillar is alumni and employer networks. So like all career centers, we’re trying to provide as many opportunities as we can for students to build those networks that will be meaningful for them in advancing their goals.

So we host over 20 career fairs a year and bring a lot of employers to campus to recruit for internships and jobs with some employers coming back for a second day to do interviews on campus. Our students at OSU can work with our career advisors up to a year after graduation, and then after that, they can work with our alumni association, and we have a wonderful alumni association with a great career director there who actually used to be a part of our career team over here, so we know her quite well and have a wonderful working relationship. Another piece of this that I’ll always really like to tell folks about in terms of our third pillar is that we have a job shadow program. And so that program is open to all students, but it’s especially useful for first and second-year students who are looking to do that gut check that we were talking about, explore a field early and make sure it’s right for them.

So it’s a half-day or a full-day experience where students can go and meet with an employer, see what a day in the life is like, meet any other interns or staff at a particular employer site and get to have some conversations about what it would be like to go into the field. A lot of our alums like to participate in this program, and some of them even do virtual options for our e-campus students or students who aren’t able to travel to a job shadow. So that takes place in the summer and we work to match students with employers in the spring term. So that’s a really exciting employer network piece that we’re excited about. Our final pillar is our newest one, so it’s all about embedded co-curriculars. So last year, we really started to formalize a partnership with university human resources to embed career development into student employment.

So I now have an assistant director who reports to me with a dotted line into HR, and together we are working on workshops that help integrate transferable skills into student employment and talking with supervisors about how do you rewrite a position description for a student role that really helps reflect this transferable skill language so that a student doesn’t just say, “Oh yeah, I just answered the phone here. I don’t need to put that on my resume,” so that in these jobs, we’re helping students understand these are all the wonderful skills that you’re building and how you can talk about them. In addition to that, working with that population of folks, students, supervisors, we’re doing workshops on setting expectations, around skill building with students, helping them think about reflecting on their work and how that can be part of that career mindset of how do I improve and how do I go forward?

And we’re starting with student employment with this, and I’m working with a couple of programs within student affairs as well that are not necessarily connected to the employment piece, but just this more co-curricular piece of no matter where a student is on campus, how are those transferable skills embedded and how can we be helping them think about how this is preparing them for their professional life no matter what they’re doing on campus? So that’s our newest piece, more to come eventually on that, but we’re really excited about this partnership with our university human resources.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s a really cool way to approach it, and I love all four of these pillars, all very in the Career Everywhere realm. So that’s super cool. Thank you for giving us that context. I think our listeners love just to hear what other career centers are doing and how they approach things and their broader strategies, so that was really helpful.

Brenna Gomez:

Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

So having gone through this process of integrating career into the new core curriculum, are there any lessons or advice you’d like to share with other career leaders who are interested in doing something similar or just at least getting career more integrated into the classroom?

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah, absolutely. I think for me, it’s helpful to think about this in a framework of what questions would it be helpful for folks to ask themselves? So starting in the traditional place, I would say. Who are your champions? Who are the people at your university that already see the value of career and how you can work together and making sure that you’re collaborating with those folks. But with that, what’s the culture of your institution? Do you have those people who are doing this work in their own spheres of influence, or is career integration something that would be totally new for your university? So here I like to draw back to what I said at the beginning of our talk, which is we have this Career Champions program that’s been going since 2020, but we’ve also had these faculty who’ve been doing career for a long time within their own courses.

And so those two things happening kind of parallel to our core ed reform really made it easier for us to launch into this. If we didn’t have those other pieces, it would be harder to jump from zero to a gen ed reform. So are there small things that folks can do to start to build that trust with the academic side of the house, especially if you’re not interacting with them a lot? We partner with the academic side of the house because of our career advisors all the time, but if you didn’t, is there something smaller that you could do to get in front of them and get them used to seeing your face and used to the idea of working with you? Maybe starting with a workshop on the NACE competencies or maybe starting with a workshop on, hey, this is what we can come and present in your courses. Would you be open to that? So just getting folks used to seeing you as a partner.

And then I think the other big one for us is really thinking about, again, your own university context and how many campuses do you have? How will you need to serve those campuses differently? Are you like us and you have an e-campus or a large online population? One of the things that we had to think about a lot is that for our e-campus students in particular, they are adult learners, so they have a career, they’ve maybe had multiple careers, and they’re trying to get ahead by getting that bachelor’s degree. So the language of career readiness, that’s not going to land for them. They’re looking for career advancement.

And so making sure that you’re thinking about those language pieces that for someone who’s already got an established career, they might tune out. They might not listen if you’re just speaking to career readiness. And so with that, a good way to start getting that at any of these things, I would say, is to ask people questions. If you’ve not done focus groups with students, with faculty, with stakeholders around your institution, that’s a great place to start to get to answers to some of these other questions and see what is starting to feel possible.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, that’s some really good advice. And also what you said about looking at the language you’re using, especially with older students, it’s really smart. Because yeah, if I went back for an MBA now or something and someone said career readiness, you’re like, “I’ve been in my career for 12 years now.”

Brenna Gomez:

Right. It’s not the only frame.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, it’s advancement. So that’s interesting. Okay. Well, before I kind of start wrapping us up, Brenna, is there anything else about our topic that you would like to add?

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah, I would just say that I think it’s helpful if all of us are thinking about how to be for career development in higher ed regardless of what our roles are. So maybe a faculty member is really passionate about this, but maybe their department isn’t necessarily working towards this yet. Each of us in our own spheres of influence can help do this work even if individually we’re not all equipped to have that one-on-one advising session with a student because we don’t have maybe the best practices in our mind of career advising, or maybe we don’t know all of the nuance about the job market in this moment in 2025. But we can reflect with students. We can all sit down and say, “Where are you building skills in your experience here?” We can also share our own career paths. I think in working with a variety of different employees, sometimes folks are really nervous to share about their own career journey and their own career choices, but students really like to hear about that, and I think it’s really important to normalize all the different ways that things can look.

So if someone went from school straight to the faculty because they knew what they wanted and they were really passionate about it, great. Share that. If somebody has a really winding path and they made really interesting choices along the way, students are really going to want to hear about that too. And I think sometimes the windy path folks get a little more nervous to share, but I’m a windy path folk. If any of you are, I would encourage you very much to share with students, because that’s really helpful for them to hear that things are going to change, they’re going to make choices in the moment that make the most sense for them. And it’s all about how you talk about it when you’re in interviews and on the job market.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s a great point. I’m also kind of one of those windy career path people, and I often speak to journalism classes at my alma mater because I got my degree in journalism and I’m like, I’m example of somebody who went in and got the degree in fully intended on going to the big leagues, like working for all the big newspapers in the major markets. And then I did a complete pivot and went into marketing, first worked in higher ed and then in the private sector. And I do think students appreciate kind of knowing that it’s not always going to look linear, it’s not going to be perfect. It might be messy. You might change your mind, and that’s okay.

Brenna Gomez:

Absolutely. I am so glad that you’re sharing that with people.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, Brenna, if people would like to connect with you or learn more from you about Beyond OSU or anything else we’ve talked about today, where is a good place for them to do that?

Brenna Gomez:

Yes. If folks would like to reach out and be in touch, LinkedIn is a great way to start a conversation with me.

Meredith Metsker:

Perfect. And for anyone watching or listening, I’ll be sure to include a link to Brenna’s LinkedIn profile in the show notes so you can go and check her out. Okay, Brenna. So 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 guest was Joretta Nelson of Credo, which is part of the Carnegie family. And she left this question for you. When you think ahead, what do you want your legacy to be in higher education?

Brenna Gomez:

Okay, so I just want to say I love this concept. I love the ask a question, leave a question. This is so cool, Meredith, but mine is so hard.

Meredith Metsker:

I know. She left you a deep question.

Brenna Gomez:

It’s a really big question. So when you sent these, thank goodness you sent these ahead of time. I think this one was maybe the one that I thought about the most, but I think for me, I want my legacy in higher education to be that I help folks understand that all disciplines are career disciplines, that all majors lead to careers. I think especially as someone who went to a small liberal arts school and has a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in creative writing, there are certain disciplines that folks just don’t think of when they think of careers. And I’d like us to lean away from that. Our classes, regardless of subject matter, are opportunities to help students build strong transferable skills that are going to help them in their careers and make them a better citizen. And I think those two things together are really important.

We all need to know how to work on a team, we all need really good communication skills, and in the moment that we’re living in, we all need to hone our critical thinking and our ability to use technology. So how can we help students connect the dots from the courses that they’re taking to what they’ll do next? And that can be from a philosophy class that allowed them to practice their archival skills or an engineering class or a student job or leading a student club. It can be anything. So I’d really love for us to be expansive and to start thinking about it in that way and just knowing that it’s about helping students hone their career stories and how they’ve built these skills, not that they have to come from a specific place.

Meredith Metsker:

Well said. I love that. And it’s funny, in that answer I can just kind of visualize the intersection that you’re in. Being in career services, being a faculty member, coming from a creative writing, liberal arts background, that all just came through in the answer, especially at the very end where you’re talking about helping students tell their career stories. As a fellow journalist, I relate to that.

Brenna Gomez:

Yay.

Meredith Metsker:

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

Brenna Gomez:

Yes, I think it’s a good question. Maybe not as deep as the one that someone left for me, but I would love to know for your next guest, what is your favorite piece of art that you have engaged in this year and why? And I’m going to leave that really open, like book, movie, TV show, play, performance, whatever it might be, whatever stands out to them. Why was it your favorite?

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, that’s interesting. I like that. Do you know what yours would be?

Brenna Gomez:

My favorite book that I read this year was a book called The Ministry of Time. It crossed a lot of different genres. It’s like sci-fi, but also historical, but also romance. It just did a lot of different things, and it’s about a woman whose government job becomes shepherding a time traveler to see if he can survive being in a different time and all of the kind of chaos that ensues from that. It was really great.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, it’s called The Ministry of Time?

Brenna Gomez:

Yes.

Meredith Metsker:

I’m going to have to go check that out. I just keep rereading Harry Potter. I need a new book.

Brenna Gomez:

Yeah, highly recommend this one. It’s fantastic.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, very cool. That’s a great question. I’m trying to think how I would answer that. I’ve seen a lot of concerts this year, which is kind of new for me. I’m typically not a concert person because I’m not a big fan of crowds.

Brenna Gomez:

Fair.

Meredith Metsker:

But I have seen a lot of live music this year and they’ve all been great, and it’s just been fun to engage with music again in that way. It makes me want to pick up an instrument and learn something new or start singing at a choir again or something like that.

Brenna Gomez:

That’s awesome. I love that you’re doing something new this year. That’s great.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I’m calling 2025 the year of concerts. All right, cool. Well, that’s a great question. I’m excited to hear the answer from our next guest. And Brenna, just thank you so much for taking the time to join me on the podcast today. This was a great conversation, a lot of good details, and it was really interesting to hear about the overarching strategy in this process and how you all revamped your gen ed. So thank you for taking the time and for sharing your wisdom.

Brenna Gomez:

Thanks so much for having me. It was so nice to chat with you, Meredith.