We found 151 results that contain "#career #careereducation #careerservices"

This article discusses common mistakes applicants make in negotiating a job offer and suggests ways to avoid them. While pitched to a non-academic audience, the principles are applicable to anyone engaged in negotiation around a job.

Dr. Chris Golde outlines the process of applying for academic positions, gathering information, and negotiating job offers.

A discussion from three mental-health researchers about the main mental health concerns of graduate students. This article notes that one important way graduate students can take care of their mental health is to maintain a good support system of friends, family, significant other/partner, etc.

Alison Green from the "Ask a Manager" blog discusses what an informational interview is and isn't and offers tips on how to approach one effectively. She emphasizes that an informational interview is not the same thing as networking and should not just be a flimsy excuse to ask for a job.

 
“It’s not what you know, but who you know.” is one of the largest colloquialisms when it comes to career trajectory. In addition, a big part of attending higher education is to help propel student careers. While we may want to prepare students by just giving them the necessary knowledge for their future endeavors, we should also strive to take this time to help establish connections and reasonable paths forward for them as well.   
 
Engagement/Participation:
Student engagement is defined by how actively and enthusiastically students are involved in the learning process during class.  Meanwhile, participation refers to actual involvement of the students. So, it is possible for:  

A student may participate and not be engaged,
Or a student to be engaged but not participate.

This is important to consider when defining your pedagogical approach to classroom engagement and participation, and how you define it within your class. If you plan to award student participation, or your class heavily relies on discussion and active student engagement, you may even want to provide these definitions in the syllabus.
 
However, you may not directly explain these ideas and instead focus on whether ask these questions of your syllabus:

Does your teaching style facilitate your views of participation/engagement?
Is your syllabus communicating whether you want students to participate?
Is the syllabus itself engaging for students?
Do your assessments reflect your goals for participation/engagement?
In what ways is your syllabus contributing to student participation and engagement?

 
Peer-to-peer Interaction 
Students working together is crucial for learning and development. It helps students build necessary social skills, establish relationships between current/future colleagues, increases active participation and engagement and often increases student self-efficacy towards the course topic.
 
Therefore, it is encouraged that you construct course materials that facilitate peer-to-peer interactions and foster some sense of community within your classroom. As far as what to include in the syllabus, you should specify what types of activities you will hold that require peer-to-peer interactions, and what expectations you have of students during these interactions.
 
For example, the syllabus may contain:

A list of classroom rules that you or your class develops:

Developing them yourself lets you be in control of exactly what values you want accentuated in your class.  
Developing them as a class can communicate that students have autonomy over their learning and increase classroom engagement.  


Examples of peer-discussion techniques you use:

Whole Group Discussions:  

Ask your class to consider a question/topic and facilitate a group discussion on the topic, allowing students to speak freely and challenge one another.


Think-Pair-Share:

Ask students to individually consider a question/topic, discuss it with a partner, then share their insights with the whole class.


Mingle-Pair-Share:

Similar to think-pair-share, except students can move freely about the class and have discussions with multiple students.


Discussion Groups:

Breaking students into smaller groups to hold discussions on a question/topic, which can then be brought into larger group discussions.


Jigsaw:

Break down a larger topic into smaller pieces and allow each group to focus on an individual piece to share out in a whole class discussion.


Collaborative Assignments:

Students work together in small groups to develop material specified by a rubric or find solutions to laid out problems.


Socratic Seminar:

This is an open discussion based on an assigned set of readings. Instead of generating a question or specific topic you want students to consider, just allow them to openly discuss the material and explore at their own pace.





                               
There are numerous other ways you may facilitate peer-to-peer relationships and communication, but however you choose to do so, it is helpful to communicate that to students upfront and through the syllabus.
 
 
Instructor-Student Interaction:
Fair or not, how students reflect on course material, or a specific subject, largely depends on their (impression of)/ (relationship with) their teacher. For this reason, it’s important to have a positive relationship between an instructor and their student. The syllabus, again especially as a first impression, can help facilitate this relationship and help an instructor feel more approachable. For this reason, it’s important that your syllabus:

Sets a welcoming/positive tone:

Clearly communicate your enthusiasm for the course and the students participating.
Set expectations but don’t dictate them.
Include words with positive connotations

As an example, instead of describing student work as “acceptable” consider saying it is “valid” or “commendable”


Avoid negatives (such as “do not” or “unable to” as much as possible)


Encourages engagement:

You’ve explained what types of engagement you’re looking for, but now it is important to encourage that from students. To do so:

Give examples of your interactive content.
Engage in storytelling by sharing personal details you feel comfortable sharing.
Ask for and encourage student feedback.
Be authentic.




Promotes your own availability:

One of the leading reasons students don’t attend office hours is because they feel they are “awkward.” To break through this barrier, you might:

Explain the value office hours provide students:

Promote the benefits such as improved understanding and better test scores.
Highlight success stories


Offer flexible scheduling for office hours.
Consider Location/Modality:

Are you available via video or only in-person?
If in-person, where are you available to meet and how accessible is that to the students?


Set one-on-one meetings during the semester.

These can be informal and short to get students familiar with the process, or perhaps there is a specific purpose tied to the meeting.







 
Students who feel more comfortable with their instructor tend to perform significantly better in a course and have a stronger sense of confidence in their own ability. Fostering this relationship is one of the most crucial for the educator to create a positive classroom environment.
 
Provide Connections:
With the goal in mind that students attend college to increase career success, it is important to use our abilities and connections to help them achieve it. This will appear vastly different depending on the field of study, and possible career paths, but here are some forms this may take:
 
Connect students with other faculty: Perhaps another member of the department or institution you know has better connections that align with a student’s career aims, or areas of interest.
 
Have guest speakers: You can’t know everything, and having a guest speaker can help students gain exposure to the community around the topic they’re studying and form meaningful connections with them.
 
Utilize connections in the field: You more than likely studied this material at your own university/had a job in the field. Consider connecting students to relevant contacts or having them be a guest speaker.
 
Ask Alumni: If you’ve had students who have gone into the field, especially if you’ve stayed in contact with them, consider having them be a guest speaker or asking them to explain how your class helped prepare them for industry. What types of things could you change in your class to help make this transition more effective?
 

Diversity Employers is a career database with the goal of providing professional and career information to African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latino/Hispanic Americans, Native Americans and women.

What's next to learn? If you're interested in learning more about jobs and careers, try the "Using Transferable Skills in Your Career" playlist or the "Managing Professional Transitions" playlist.
 
If you're interested in more resources about the move from grad school to career, try the "Financial Planning for Early Career" playlist or the "Working Professional Networks" playlist.
 
If you want to consider a totally different facet of grad life, try the "Managing Stress" playlist or the "Using Your Teaching Skills" playlist.

For their work as part of the Leadership Academy 2020 cohort, the Professional Growth Group aimed to develop a series of workshops to provide professional development opportunities to their fellow graduate students based on community feedback. In the process of narrowing the focus of their efforts for the eight week period of the Academy, the Professional Growth Group determined that not everyone has access to information about pursuing alternative academic careers. Being that the current academic job market offers increasingly fewer opportunities, more graduate students are seeking information about alternative options. As such, our group decided to produce a series of workshops for students across all departments that prepared students to pursue alt-ac careers and allowed them to be exposed to alt-ac careers before leaving graduate school. Through this work, we hoped to destigmatize the process of seeking alternative careers to academia and provide a safe space for students whose networks may not be as supportive of this decision.  While we wanted to target our workshops at graduate students, we also wanted to network with people on campus who either already provide workshops and spaces for more professional development or those who have the authority to help further this work. As such, in addition to the widely circulated flyers for two workshops that we would host during the period of the Academy, we developed an online space on iteach.msu.edu for graduate students to connect and access alt-ac resources.
On February 25, 2020, the Professional Growth Group hosted two workshops: 1) Leveraging your Membership, which focused on teaching students to leverage their service experience to transferable skills to add to your CV or resume; and 2) Translate Your Thesis to the World, which helped students learn to describe their research in three minutes using only a single powerpoint slide. We had a total of five students attend, and received generally positive feedback. Both presentations were recorded and uploaded to our iteach.msu.edu page so students who were unable to attend the workshops in person could have the opportunity to interact with us and each other virtually. We also began to reach out to campus offices who might want to connect with our group and help us circulate existing campus resources. Looking forward, if we have the opportunity to continue our work on this project we would develop a series of interviews of podcasts of MSU grad student alumni who have careers in alt-ac,  host additional workshops, and extend our recruitment of our online group to encourage more active discussion about pursuing alt-ac careers among students. 
 
Powerpoint with Short Video Presentation: https://iteach.msu.edu/posts/preview_attachments?post_id=1507