How to Engage First- and Second-Year Students with Career Services

Meredith Metsker:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere Podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker, and today I am joined by Kelli Smith and Lexie Avery, both from Binghamton University. Kelli is the Assistant Vice President for Student Success, and Lexie is the Senior Associate Director of Student Engagement and Career Readiness. Thank you both for being here.

Kelli Smith:

Thank you. We’re thrilled.

Lexie Avery:

Thank you.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I’m so excited to have you both here today and I’m excited to talk to you about how your team is engaging more first and second-year students with career services there at Binghamton. I know this has been a focus for you for a while now, and it sounds like things are going really well. In fact, I was just reading this story that Inside Higher Ed just did about your team’s success, so I’m excited to dig more into what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and then how you’re doing it.

But before I get into my questions, is there anything else either of you would like to add about yourselves, your backgrounds, or your roles there at Binghamton?

Lexie Avery:

I think you covered it for me.

Kelli Smith:

Yep, I’m good. Thank you.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, great. All right, so I’m going to kick us off with a question that I ask all of our guests on this podcast and that’s what does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Kelli Smith:

Lexie, are you good with me taking this one? Fabulous. And certainly, please chime in after. This is a great question, Meredith, and I love that you ask this question of everybody on the podcast.

When I was thinking about this, you sent the questions in advance and then I know it’s part of it, it took me back to when I interviewed, which was almost exactly 10 years ago. And in fact, it made me go back to my original job talk presentation and what I had talked about there was really the importance of institutional ownership and that this really does need to be something that leadership takes part in, it needs to be part of the financials, how it’s set up organizationally, externally.

And I was really inspired by a visit to Cerner Corporation in Kansas City back when I did a lot of employer relations in the way they look at electronic records and how patient care is set up and that there’s this team approach, and it’s really not all that different in the work that we do. Parents play a role, alumni play a role, our employers, faculty, institutional leadership and prioritizing it, and then naturally, a lot of the people that do this work day in and day out, and that it really does need to be something, not just really only part of the ecosystem of the university, but even external to that.

And keeping that in mind, the center, Lexie could talk to this even more than myself, made a choice a few years ago to really take out a bold vision of wanting to have 100% of our students engaged in an aspect of career and professional growth. And to do that, we need it to be this real, true, team approach where it is truly Career Everywhere, and your product, honestly, has really helped us in that too.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, I’m really glad to hear that, for sure. Yeah, that’s great and it makes sense that in order to reach everybody, you truly need everyone on-campus and off-campus, honestly, to be on board. So that makes a lot of sense.

Lexie, anything to add to that?

Lexie Avery:

Yeah, I think all the things Kelli says definitely resonate, and I think I’ve thought a lot the last few years about just the language that we’re using around even career services. A service is sort of this perception it’s optional, it’s something you have to go and do, and so reframing that to more so career development as a life skill. And so when you frame it like a life skill and you think about exploration and networking and skill-building, those aren’t career center things. That is everybody’s thing. Students are making connections in the classroom, they’re developing skillsets in everything that they do. And so I think even changing that language, and if you talk about yourself as a service, you’re going to be seen as a service versus something that is sort of this integrated model in the campus community.

And so I think for me, when I think about Career Everywhere, it’s those life skills, those things that students need that they’re getting anyways, that feels more like everybody’s responsibility.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. The last bit of what you said reminded me especially of the third tenant of Career Everywhere, which is moving career services from the provider, from the sole provider of career services to a facilitator, like a partner, a true partner across campus and beyond. So I love that.

Great. Well, I think now we’ll go ahead and dig into our topic today. So to get us started, and I know this is kind of a big question, but can you just give me an overview of what you and your team have been doing to better engage first and second-year students?

Lexie Avery:

Yeah, so I’ll start and then Kelli will loop in.

I think for quite a while, I’ve been here about nine and a half years, and so we’ve always done a lot of really good work around first-year and second-year engagement. And so we’ve got partnerships with Admissions. We’re the first stop on every Admissions tour, and that’s something, since Kelli was leading the team, that was a big piece of a lot of the work is starting that culture early. If it’s on the Admissions tour, it’s probably important and probably important that we work on it early. We talk to every first-year student and their family at Orientation. We have partnerships with Residential Life and our Opportunity Programs.

And so a lot of things that I’m sure other schools are doing too, but I think our sort of transition was really to the intentionality behind it. I think we were doing a lot of programs. We started a pre-arrival program called Kickstart. And so we were doing sort of all of these one-off things, and I don’t think we had a lot of intentionality that they looped in together or that we were tracking the students’ progress or that we were being intentional in how students early on think about career development and career exploration.

And so in Summer 2021, I had a lot of time at home to do lots of research, and so really my role had sort of shifted to the early engagement work at that point. And so I did a lot of research on students and how they engaged with career centers, what first-year students are thinking in general and combining that with my background in education and thinking through how students first learn letters and numbers, and a lot of that comes down to awareness.

And so that really started what we have now, which is the Strategic Plan. So it’s four phases, two phases per year focused on building awareness and exposure for students in their first year, and then their second year really focused more onus on them in terms of the engagement and career planning. That’s a very broad, I’m happy to dive into anything else, but it’s a very broad perspective of what we had been doing and what we started, really in Fall ’21, really tracking that monthly.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, Kelli, anything to add before I ask any follow-ups?

Kelli Smith:

No, but I think I’m ready for a follow-up.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Oh, I have lots of questions. This is the former journalist in me always has questions. So you mentioned that this is a four-phase approach. I would love to hear more about each of those phases.

Lexie Avery:

Yeah. Phase one is really around that awareness piece. So the idea that students are just going to find the career center and know exactly what you do, even if you talk to them at Orientation, even if you are the first stop on every Admissions tour, it’s just not super realistic with all of the other noise and things that are happening. So that awareness piece, and so students being able to know where we physically are on campus and be able to know one to two things that we can do to support them is that initial phase one.

Phase two is around exposure, so it’s us going into student spaces. It’s classes, it’s student organization presentations, it’s Residential Life programming. It’s things that students are already participating in and we’re sort of invading and going into that space. Year one is really about us and really being intentional and having the ownership to get out there and create this culture that it’s normal to engage early and that it’s important to engage early and all of this stress and anxiety that students think about really can go away when you engage early and you have those steps in place.

Year two, it’s a lot more onus on the student. So in their first semester of their sophomore year, we want them to engage in some capacity. So whether that’s coming into an appointment, whether that’s logging on, reading blogs on uConnect, whether it’s using Big Interview, attending a program or event. So really just them taking that step to initiate on their own.

And then the last step is really career planning. Do they have an exploration plan? Have they taken a career exploration course? Have they met with a career consultant to talk about career planning? Have they attended a program around creating an action plan? Those sorts of things. So that intentionality so they’re going into their junior, senior year, “I have a plan. I know who can help me. I have a plan. I’ve explored.”

And so that’s the breakdown and we have metrics that we’re looking at for each phase along the way as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, great. I have even more follow-ups now. For the first phase, this awareness phase, how are you going about driving that awareness?

Lexie Avery:

Yeah, so some of it’s partnerships and then some of it is sort of the narrative that we just believe that this isn’t a transactional center, this isn’t a service, this is an intentional transformational experience, and we’re working with students. And so I think that mindset for our own staff is helpful because then we’re talking about it. We’re talking to academic advisors about it. We’re talking to Residential Life and our Opportunity Program. So the language, I think, helps.

I think the other thing too is around being fun with it a little bit. We have an internship position in our office called the Student Career Influencers, and everybody loves influencers right now. And so if we can leverage students who are excited, who have used our services before, have had a positive experience, and create some fun, engaging tabling events. We have a green wagon that they walk around campus with and they come up with unique and fun ways to weave career development into a fun experience. I think that helps too.

We’ve also done a lot of work with Residential Life and a lot of positions where, again, that awareness piece can be fun. It doesn’t have to be a program, it doesn’t have to be this big campaign, but when you act and walk a certain way, others start to notice and believe that. And our student staff, which we have a very large student staff, they also support that. So those are just some of the fun ways that the awareness piece comes up.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, I love that you’re having fun with it. I imagine that makes it more fun for your team too.

Lexie Avery:

Yeah, it’s a lot more fun and it’s a lot more palatable for a student. I think when they come check us out in front of our office, our whole wall is glass, so you can look in. It’s sort of intimidating sometimes, but when you have a wheel with prizes and just learning about different resources, it removes that barrier a little bit. And sharing student stories on our TV that’s outside our office, so it feels like I can go in, it feels like I can engage.

And so we’ve got even down to marketing that you’re doing, so the windows have stickers on them that have all of our career clusters and all of our affinity communities. So as I’m walking by, I can see that, “Oh, I identify with this group,” or, “I have this interest,” and it feels like if it’s listed there, I can come in. And so those are things, just as we’ve had uConnect over the past few years and things like that, that we’ve started to try to figure out how to make the space feel like the online platform feels like and how do we make the space feel like we talk about it?

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, I love that. Now, I’m curious about phase two. So you were talking about going into classes, being a part of the experiences that students are already having. Can you just tell me a little bit more about, again, what that phase entails?

Lexie Avery:

Yeah, Kelli, do you want to talk a little bit about just the faculty engagement piece and then I can go into some of the logistics stuff?

Kelli Smith:

Sure. Yeah, something that we’re in a situation where we don’t have a requirement for a class or anything like that. So it does require for us to do a fair amount of outreach and strategy and making sure we’re partnering with faculty. And so there are a couple other staff that are within Lexie’s team that have created a new initiative called the Career Collaborative, and they really launched that more formally this year. They’ve had a couple of town halls, for example, inviting faculty in to really just think about and build in almost pre-made assignments, but also the ability to tailor those if they’re interested, and creating a Fellows program where we incentivize the faculty too with some stipends.

But that’s sort of a phase two after something that we did several years ago that since that time, a lot of institutions have done where we really do try to celebrate faculty as well as others that are providing mentorship and support for students through our Career Champions program. In my mind, it’s a little bit of the Career Champions 2.0. How do we go to that next level? How do we make sure we’re intentionally reaching out, especially to faculty that have those large 100-level classes?

And the thing that is so exciting for me is that I think seeing some of the conversations that have happened in those town halls, seeing the types of faculty, ranging from music to anthropology, and some of those that we maybe traditionally haven’t had as much engagement are actually sort of like our poster faculty who are extra excited and are helping us message out the importance of this and how we can work with them individually to build this into some of their classes. And so the work that especially has been done in this past year is really exciting, and so Lexie can talk about that at a deeper level, but it is.

And I think the one thing I’ll add to that has been, I think, a lesson learned for all of us is our hope and our approach has been really from a lens of equity and I think that that’s important because we want all students, regardless of their social capital or other access of any kind, to have the opportunity to have this knowledge and support and career development. And that’s really a large part of why we’ve developed this new Career Collaborative Initiative.

But it’s been interesting because while of course faculty, for the most part, have that same value, it’s important for us to realize that some of them are coming at it from a different angle. It might be that they are struggling with enrollment in their major and they understand students in that major mean faculty support and budgets and keeping lines and that kind of thing. So I think it’s been a really great education, two-way educational opportunity for all of us and a reminder that not all faculty come at this for the same motive or reason or some motives might be a little higher than others, and that we can kind of look at this approach in a multifaceted way. Lexie?

Lexie Avery:

Yeah, I think just two things to add. I think especially with the 100-level courses, we’re not asking for a ton of time. We’re just trying to build that awareness and get into their space. So I always pitch like, “Hey, can I come in and do a mini-session?” It’s 15 to 20 minutes on a specific topic, and what we don’t do is Fleishman Center commercials. So we don’t go into classes and say, “This is all the things that we do,” because it’s sort of, “woop,” right over their heads. So we try to figure out what are the things that are most relevant right now for a student and capitalize on that. So whether that’s teaching them how to build connections in their first semester, or how do I build skills through a student organization I’m a part of, or how do I explore careers in economics or in anthropology?

So we’re trying… And 15 to 20 minutes is very digestible, and faculty, especially in the first couple of weeks, are more willing to give that time. And so I think that’s really important.

I think the other piece is our partnership with Residential Life and getting into those spaces. So we have a graduate position called the Residential Student Engagement Specialist, and their role is really to get the word out about what we’re doing in the residential communities. And so they’re doing fun things as well, but getting into those spaces, building that trust helps with that exposure piece too. So it’s not just on the team that is in the office, it’s our student staff that are out and about. It’s our staff that are in the classroom and things like that.

And it’s also taking student organization program requests and allowing those students to invite us in. Most of them have a requirement for some professional development, and so we make it really easy to say, “Hey, request us. We can talk about any number of these topics.” And so again, it’s going to spaces they already trust and believe in and so that helps with that exposure piece of it.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Gosh, that’s so many things that you all are doing. I imagine that keeps you very busy.

Lexie Avery:

Yes, we’re all very busy, but it’s good because you see the results. Very quickly we saw the results and students really responding and families responding and staff on campus responding, so that helps keep you motivated to keep going.

Meredith Metsker:

I bet, I bet. So now I’d love to move on to the phases three and four where it’s really, like you said, putting that onus on the student, having them get involved with the career center, coming in for appointments or workshops, doing that career planning. Can you just tell me a little bit more about, again, what those phases entail and how you’re motivating students to take part?

Lexie Avery:

Yeah. I think it’s, again, sort of two parts. I think part of it is tailoring messaging. So I think a lot of offices do a really good job of telling students what they offer, but they don’t necessarily tailor the message to the different groups of students. The message about a job fair is very different for a junior or senior than it is going to be for a first-year or sophomore student. And so we’re intentional with how we talk about experiences students can participate in and why they’re important. Especially for younger students, the why is so valuable because they’ve already had it ingrained in their mind, “I don’t go to the career center until I’m a junior or senior. I don’t have to worry about that,” and so we’re debunking the myth as we go.

But the job fair, as an example, it’s a great opportunity to explore. It’s a great opportunity to just listen in on what other students are saying when they’re doing their elevator pitch. It’s a great opportunity to just test things out, walk around, see what the format is so that when things are a little bit more intentional in your sophomore, junior, or senior year, you’re prepared versus surprised what it’s going to be like. So I think the tailoring of the messaging is important, and that’s for walk-in services, that’s for appointments. We’re intentional about why you would make that appointment type. It’s not just saying that we offer it, but here’s why it would be helpful.

I think the other piece, when I initially started this, I knew it was not going to be something we could do alone. We’re only so big, there’s a lot of students on this campus, and so we’ve created an Early Engagement Guiding Group. And so we meet just twice a year and it’s representation from all across campus. It’s advisors, it’s representation from Opportunity Programs, Residential Life, Athletics, Orientation. It’s all of these people who have a relationship or hand in students in their first-year and sophomore year. And so we’re sharing what we’re working on. We’re talking about and brainstorming, what are things you are doing that this can just be integrated into, or what are events that we should be going to? How is that messaging?

So I think that piece helps, and then we have an internal group too that monthly, we’re looking at what engagement looks like, we’re tracking engagement, we’re pulling pockets of students and doing intentional outreach. So whether it’s our Educational Opportunity Program, we’re sending a list of students who haven’t engaged to that office and they’re helping us with that, or we’re letting Residential Life know, “Hey, it seems like this one building has less engagement than all of the rest. What can we do?”

So it’s not widespread. It’s really intentional, piece by piece, and I don’t necessarily always get to every group that I want to each month, but I think that tailoring and then the purposeful relationships and that sort of thing has really helped the exposure and the career planning happen because we’re engaging people who already, again, have built-in relationships and have trust in it, and we’re tailoring the message to debunk their own thought process on things.

And Binghamton students are really special and they really want to continue to engage and do more and have experience, and so that helps too. They’re curious really early on, and that curiosity, we just leverage it.

Meredith Metsker:

That sounds like you’re really building that into part of the school’s culture is this early curiosity, this early engagement, thinking about life after college early on. So I imagine a lot of that is coming from your office, so that’s really cool.

So earlier you mentioned metrics, that you’re measuring metrics for each of these phases. Can you tell me a little bit about what some of those are?

Lexie Avery:

Yeah. Go ahead, Kelli.

Kelli Smith:

Okay, good. So really, because of all this work that Lexie and the team spearheaded, it’s been pretty remarkable to see the impact. I’ll give you a couple of examples.

In 2021, keep in mind we all remember that was a different time, the first-year engagement of the office, which is what they’re looking at, whether it’s a student had an appointment or they attended a program that really is a Fleishman Career Center program, minus Orientation so we’re not counting Orientation for any of the future ones either, although we do monitor and watch that, but it was 28%. And that’s probably pretty typical for first-year engagement for a career center. And flash-forward two years, so just two years later, this past year, Lexie, where we at 71 or 72?

Lexie Avery:

71.1.

Kelli Smith:

Yeah, so the drastic change in that short amount of time, and I really… There probably are other career centers out there that have that level of a metric. I just don’t know of any, I’ve not heard of somebody having that level of engagement when there’s not a requirement of some kind for a first-year student, especially at a larger university like ours. And so certainly, the goal is even more. And what’s also incredible is that this year, we’re monitoring from this point in time compared to last year, just at staff meeting the other day, it was shared that we’re already 7% higher at this point in time than we were last year, so we expect this to go up.

It’s very exciting to watch that. I think it’s motivating, somewhat like Lexie was alluding to, for the team to see, hey, the work that is being done and it is, it’s a lot of work, it’s no joke, the work that Lexie and others have really taken on to make this happen, but it’s working.

And then from a longer-term perspective, we’re not there yet. We don’t know yet will this impact participation in internships? Will this impact career outcome rates with placement and graduate school placement? We don’t know, but I’m hopeful. I can’t wait. And that’s certainly something we’re going to be looking at, but I anticipate we’ll also see an impact in that way.

So to see the first-year students from last year, that 71%, and then looking this year, which we expect to be even higher, will we see over time our ability to see that longer-term impact as well? Which in the end, we’re all hoping in this line of work, that we see a large, significant, if not all students participating in either an internship and/or, let’s say, undergraduate research, but something that they know will be helpful for them later. Even though, to be honest, our placement is quite strong. It’s part of our Strategic Plan in terms of the metric here so it’s gone up over time quite well for a variety of reasons, but I anticipate that will be even stronger too over time. We’ll see.

Meredith Metsker:

Wow, that’s amazing. So to confirm, you went from 28% engagement among first-year students in 2021 to 71% last year?

Kelli Smith:

Yeah. And that doesn’t include Orientation.

Meredith Metsker:

That is incredible.

Kelli Smith:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:28:58], right?

Lexie Avery:

Yeah, that doesn’t include Orientation. We sort of feel like Orientation would… That’s a great metric in terms of awareness, but there’s a lot of noise at Orientation, and that’s not always a good indicator that they’ve actually processed or will be able to utilize any of those things. So certainly, that would be 98, 99% of students, but I don’t include that in the full picture. Yeah.

And I’ll just add a couple practicality things because I think as people are listening, they’re like, “Oh, can I do this?” sort of thing, and I think from a metric perspective, we pull data that we already had. We just weren’t using it in the way that we are now. So between Handshake and the data we get from uConnect, all of the things were already in place and we are just tracking it and looking at it differently than we had in the past. So it’s not necessarily this huge, huge, huge lift. There’s polls that happen monthly, there’s reporting that’s just built into the structure of things, so it’s really something that others could do.

And then I think that the other thing to pay attention to is the modes to which students engage is also important that we’re looking at because not every student is going to want or need a one-on-one appointment, and we can’t expect them to, nor do we have the capacity to serve 18,000 students one-on-one, but utilizing online resources so having uConnect, having this virtual career center, having the one-on-one, but also having smaller group things and then having larger group things. And so really figuring out the different modes and tracking those and eventually sort of seeing do they also have an impact on… Does a student come back again if they only utilize online resources? So tracking those sorts of things I think is going to be the next fun phase of it.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, that sounds great. You’ve mentioned a few different pieces of technology, of course uConnect, our virtual career center platform, Handshake, Big Interview. Can you just talk to me a little bit about how you’ve used technology to improve this engagement among first and second-year students?

Lexie Avery:

Yeah. So I think uConnect in particular, one of the things we did pretty early on in terms of a check that were students engaged was that every first-year student, we map them to our Exploring Career Cluster. And so that way, as they’re engaging with us throughout the year, we can go in and track when they change to a different cluster. So we have seven clusters, six are industry-based, one is exploring. And so they all start in one spot so we can tell as they move into different clusters that my hope is that they’ve had some sort of either engagement with us, awareness of us, their own self-reflection, their own development along the way that they made a conscious choice to log in, go in, opt into a different cluster. That’s just one of the ways that uConnect has been really helpful.

I think too just the access to information, utilizing uConnect is there. So we have our Exploring Career Guide on uConnect, that’s a PDF that students can download. We’ve got all of those different pieces, and so it helps just that accessibility piece, that 24-hour access to information.

I think from a Handshake perspective, we want students to be able to go in, create a profile so they have access to things. So my expectation is not that a first-year student goes in and utilizes it immediately for the job search, my expectation is they go in, they create a profile so that they have access and they’re aware of how to use it. So even with the technology piece, we’re using things but in ways that are, what I feel like, are developmentally appropriate for students at that time and that is going to prepare them for the long-term. They’re never going to engage on Handshake, if they don’t have a profile. They’re never going to come into the Fleishman Center if they aren’t aware that we exist. And so there’s these initial phases that I think are helpful.

And also, we use Focus 2 as an example. We’re able to go in and see students who have logged in but not completed the assessments. And so we reach out to those students like, “Hey, you logged in. What’s going on? How can we help you get going with that?” And so that intentionality, it takes time to follow up and to do that, but it makes a difference ultimately.

So we’re using technology, yes, for reach and scale and all of those things, but we’re also using that information to go back and say, “Hey, this is giving us a pocket of students that we can do something with and be intentional with.”

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. It sounds like a really great supplement to the more in-person work that you all are doing.

Lexie Avery:

Yeah, definitely.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. So I know we’ve talked a lot about what you all are doing, and I think we can all agree that engaging first and second-year students is important,= but can you both just tell me a little bit about why it’s so important to engage students early?

Kelli Smith:

Yeah, I’ll hop in. One of the things that I don’t think will be a surprise or a mystery to any of our colleagues out there that might be listening to this is that we’ve all had those experiences and I had a couple that still stick in my mind my first year when I was here and I was doing walk-in appointments. One was in April. I had two students who came in just before graduation and they wanted to meet together and said that they were wanting to get a job. And so when you ask those questions such as, can you tell me about any of the experiences you’ve had? And you realized they’ve not yet had an internship and that they didn’t feel that within their curriculum, it was really all that encouraged, that makes for a difficult conversation when they’re about to graduate.

And then I had another conversation with a student that was also about to graduate in a month looking for graduate school. And when I asked, “Well, okay, what are you thinking career-wise? You’re going to get a master’s, what in and what do you want to do?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t know. That’s why I’m going to graduate school.” I said, “Well, it’s helpful to think about career before going to graduate school sometimes because of the expense and the time and everything.” She said I was the first person in her four years that had ever said anything along those lines because they just kept nudging her to go to graduate school.

And when we’re able to connect with students earlier, we all know that it can be very overwhelming when you think about all the different steps that are really important to take your time too, to be thinking about your choices, doing the things that you need to do to be marketable over time. And if you get to students earlier, that’s going to alleviate that anxiety but also help them become more successful.

So I go back to those stories when I’m also explaining to other people on campus that may not necessarily be within our typical line of work. And then they’re like, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense,” and then they also buy in to the why behind the importance of getting to students earlier.

But Lexie, do you have anything to add?

Lexie Avery:

Yeah, I think the only thing I’m picturing when I talk to first-year students in our university one-on-one class, I ask them, “Have you thought about classes you’re going to have to take in the future?” And they’re like, “Yes.” I’m like, “Have you met with an academic advisor and planned out next semester or planned out next year?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” And that feels very logical to them, I plan out my academics for one to two years. And I’m like, “Imagine if each semester, you also had a career experience. So it could be an actual experience, it could be joining a club or organization, it could be utilizing our mentoring platform and reaching out to one mentor a month.”

So when you frame it sort of that way and, “Let’s match your academic preparation and planning with planning for career experience,” for some reason, it makes sense to them and it feels a lot more reasonable than them under this impression that I need them to make a career decision in their first semester. And so again, in changing that, and I don’t really use career decision-making language anymore. I talk a lot about curiosity. I talk a lot about we’ve created what we call the Path to Career Confidence and Clarity. So I don’t need you to have a career decision at the end of school, but I want you to be confident and clear about what your next steps are and what your goals are. And it feels lighter. It doesn’t feel like I have to make one decision.

So again, I think that language piece is really valuable and really important and speaks to students are nervous to make these decisions. That’s not a surprise to anybody, but we keep talking about it in the same way and expecting different results. And so adjusting that language helps campus to better understand too about how we can’t wait. You can’t wait to think about your classes for next semester, just like you can’t wait to have these career experiences that are really important in the grand scheme of things.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, I love both of those answers. Thank you for sharing. That’s a very clear understanding of why it’s so important. And I’m just thinking back to my own college experience. I wish I would’ve started thinking about this my freshman and sophomore year. It might’ve saved me from changing my major sophomore year if I had had better clarity.

Lexie Avery:

Yeah, definitely. I think that resonates with a lot of people, “I would’ve had time.” And you sort of think about it, if I was on a sports team or if I was in a musical or if I played an instrument, you don’t get good the first time you do it. You have to invest time and practice and it’s the same sort of concept that we’re trying to instill in them.

Meredith Metsker:

Gotcha.

Kelli Smith:

The one thing that I’m just going to hop in and add that I think we all recognize, and that might be a thought of some that are listening to this, and I’m thinking especially of people that work outside of our field, and it’s really coming off of I was riding in the car yesterday with our middle child who’s a high school senior, and on NPR was the story about the pressure that even kids in middle school now have to make these decisions and even create a LinkedIn profile in high school.

And so really, part of what Lexie was talking about before too was balancing the approach so that it doesn’t cause more anxiety. The goal is to lessen it and to do it in a way that creates fun and also clarity. And so I just want to throw that out there because I do think it’s important that we keep in mind the importance of not doing it in a way that overwhelms the students. And I think when we talk about it in that way too, sometimes some of those faculty that we work with, that we all have worked with, that might feel like, “We can’t career-ise our curriculum or anything like that,” and, “this is not why students are coming. They’re coming for the sake of learning.” And naturally we’re seeing a shift in some of that thinking, but also acknowledging that the goal is not to make it all about this and to overwhelm students.

Meredith Metsker:

Right, because we want them to come into the career center and they won’t do that if they’re feeling overwhelmed.

Kelli Smith:

Right.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. I would love to hear a little bit more about how you set up the processes needed to better engage first and second-year students, how you got that buy-in. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Lexie Avery:

Yeah. I think it started with us internally. So I was the buy-in, and I was lucky that our Director and AVP and Kelli was supportive. I think I remember sharing the plan and anticipating there would be, not pushback, but just a little bit of questioning. And they were sort of like, “Yeah, try it. What is the worst thing that could happen?” And so I think our team really early on was onboard and I tried to make it, even with the Early Engagement Guiding Group, I didn’t want it to be an additional thing on someone’s plate. And so twice a year seemed very reasonable, had lunch for them, and so it felt really reasonable.

So everything we’ve done, I’ve been thinking about I’m not going to do it if I don’t have the capacity to do it. I think that’s important too. And I don’t expect other people outside of our office to care to the level that I do or our team does about the intricacies of it. But when you’re able to just weave it into things people are already doing, or you’re able to automate reporting, and you’re able to utilize data that already exists, and you’re able to just take a marketing message, with a little bit of a twist, it can be utilized in a different way. There was a lot of things we were already doing that we just gave it a little bit of a spin, and now two and a half years in, things are more automated, and I know when I’m going to meet with the group and I know pockets on campus that I need to be thinking about and reaching out to.

And so it’s pretty cyclical at this point, honestly. We look at the senior survey data. I see who has never engaged with us in any capacity during their four years. I try to see if there’s pockets or similarities in those groups that haven’t engaged, and then I make an assumption that that’s likely to also be a group in their first year that struggles in that same way, and so we reach out to them initially in their first year. And so I’m utilizing things that already exist to inform the next step and keep going. So it’s very operationalized at this point. And I know monthly when my data poll comes, I meet with my internal group, we make decisions about outreach, they spend the month doing that, and so on and so forth.

So the processes are in place and we’ve made it as easy as possible for us, but still have an impact.

Meredith Metsker:

Gotcha. Yeah, it sounds like it’s more just about the small tweaks here and there at this point.

Lexie Avery:

Yeah, definitely.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, great. Well, I know we’re coming up close to our time here, so I want to be mindful of all of our time, but what advice do either of you have for other career leaders who want to better engage first and second-year students?

Kelli Smith:

Lexie, do you want me to start? I know you were going to have some things, for sure, that will be great nuggets.

A couple of thoughts. One is coming off of what Lexie was just talking about. Another thing that was happening in tandem when she really started the group that she brought together, we were coming off COVID and trying to figure out, there’s a lot of worry and concern about are students going to be academically prepared? So there was also a different group really focused on first-year students that I was co-chairing with another colleague in Academic Affairs and brought Lexie in. And that was a helpful way to ensure we were getting out there to other people, key stakeholders on campus, to understand the strategy and it was a great way for her to really showcase some of that initial work and strategy. So taking advantage of maybe other structures in place.

And then another thing would be just thinking about your campus culture. For us, one of the things that I just remember early on thinking was a little bit unique, at least for our campus culture, is that focus on the residential community. For us, we tend to find that our students, when they go to graduate and they’re alumni, they often will identify more with the residential community than they might their college. And we are a very residential campus, and we have a model too where we have collegiate professors within the different residential communities. So we really took advantage of that model already in place in the initial phase, which it’s since been really revamped and really credit it to Lexie and how it was, but the idea of getting staff much more integrated within residential life. And for us, that really was a helpful strategy and we started to see some great results early on, and naturally, a lot of those students are first and second-year students.

So knowing your campus culture and then doing the best you can to reach out to people that you didn’t necessarily have relationships with before. We have found some of our newer faculty coming to campus and having a different kind of mindset about this have also been helpful. And at the same time, we have faculty that have been long-time faculty that have been some of our greatest champions too that we maybe didn’t expect, maybe would’ve made an assumption about, but have been tremendous partners for us.

But Lexie, what else do you have?

Lexie Avery:

Yeah, I feel like the biggest thing is never underestimate the power of awareness. I think that is fundamentally probably the only thing that matters in the case of what we’re doing. So that awareness piece, investing in it, making it fun, making it accessible has really for us, has been, I think, the key. So awareness and it’s very manageable to be able to do. There’s lots of versions of what that could look like to your campus.

Kelli Smith:

I’ll add one other thing if okay. One thing that I think sometimes we take for granted is that you really do have to have your house in order first because if you don’t have that credibility, if partners on campus don’t see you as knowing what you’re doing, that makes it much more difficult to get buy-in. We are so lucky. I just came off of a round of meetings with our deans and they all were just so positive about the work that’s being done, and they kept commenting about the transformation that they have seen over the years.

And so even at that highest level, we have a lot of respect for the work we do, and that’s really, honestly, truly a credit to the team that we have in place, the students that we have in place that are peers that are trained so well, and the amount of time and investment that go into that. But I do think it’s something that probably sometimes we take for granted. Our team works extremely hard, they have a shared mission, they do really great work, and that’s really important to be successful, and same with students wanting to take advantage of the work that we do. I just don’t want to not acknowledge that.

Meredith Metsker:

Sounds like what you’re doing is not only helping more students, but is helping your office get a better seat at the table too.

Kelli Smith:

Absolutely, yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

It’s the cherry on top.

Kelli Smith:

Yes, it’s very important.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. Well, is there anything else either of you would like to add before I start closing us out?

Lexie Avery:

I think that was a comprehensive overview, but yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

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

Lexie Avery:

LinkedIn is probably the best way. I’m always happy to talk to career centers about how to do something like this at their campus, share our plan, things like that.

Kelli Smith:

Yeah, agree. Same for me. I’ve started to move away a little bit from another platform I’ve used in the past and really try to focus a little more on LinkedIn. And I would love to connect with anybody that might be interested and also hear about other things, other strategies are colleagues are doing out there that might help in this particular area of our work.

Meredith Metsker:

Great. Well, for anyone who’s watching or listening, I’ll be sure to include links to both Kelli and Lexie’s profile so you can go and connect with them on LinkedIn. And to close this out, I like to do this thing at the end of every interview where it’s this answer a question, leave a question thing. So I’ll ask you a question that our last guest left for you, and then you will leave a question for the next guest.

Our last guest was Manny Contomanolis of Harvard University, and he left this question for you: what’s the single best piece of leadership advice you’ve ever received?

Kelli Smith:

Lexie, do you want to go first?

Lexie Avery:

Yeah. I think it was definitely around that in leadership, you can’t always provide transparency, but you can always provide context. I think that has been very helpful.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s a good one. I like that. Kelli, how about you?

Kelli Smith:

Yeah. Well, I love this question for many reasons. One, I know Manny well and look up to him as a leader, so it’s such a great question. And his podcast also, hopefully everybody was able to catch. And my PhD is in Leadership Studies, and so it’s a particular area of interest in a little bit more nerdy way. And our particular institution was sort of the birthplace of my favorite theory, which is Transformational Leadership Theory.

But going off of that, I think the best advice that I’ve heard really was around it’s really not about us; it is about us trying to create change, create support for those within our charge, and then to create those individuals an environment and support so that they themselves can become real strong leaders. And that’s really the way I tend to try and operate.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. It’s like that selfless leadership. Very cool.

All right, well, thank you both so much for joining me on the podcast today. This was such a fun conversation. There’s so much actionable stuff in here that I know our audience is going to just love and hopefully be able to apply to their own work. Thank you so much again.

Kelli Smith:

Thank you, Meredith.

Meredith Metsker:

Thank you. It’s been great.