Career Design Center prepares students for life after college

First and foremost, I love the Buffalo community and appreciate all that’s been happening here at UB. Despite being a really large place, the university has a clear focus and shared aspirations to support students. SUNY, university leadership, academic departments and support staff are committed to partnering with this center and investing in the education, development and success of our students.

At UB’s Career Design Center, we support students in four different stages of their journey by helping them:

• Meaningfully explore career possibilities based on their unique focus, interests and values.
• Apply their skills and their academic learnings in a work environment so they gain real experiences — such as paid internships, research projects and on-campus employment opportunities — that either reinforce their current path or inspire them to change their trajectory.
• Craft their personal narrative as they focus on what they would like to pursue after they leave. That includes resume development, LinkedIn profiles and interview prep. But even more than that, finding their authentic voice and ability to communicate so they can stand out in an AI-driven world lending itself to a generic voice.
• Make meaningful connections with alumni, employer partners and community connections so that they can build their team while they’re at UB. Examples include our various employer career fairs and events, and the popular Connect-a-Bull alumni networking platform.

We are focused on helping to make UB’s vast and impressive portfolio of experiential learning opportunities more accessible to students. If you think about the range of opportunities that students have, that can be confusing to navigate at times. We are working to bring those many experiences into one portfolio of offerings that students can select based on their personal interests and goals.

I’m a big proponent of the Designing Your Life/Designing Your Career approach to career coaching and programing, which was developed at Stanford University. We also have very robust on-demand resources that student can utilize at any time. At UB, we use that approach to help students not only meaningly explore professional paths based on their interests and values but gain agency and develop a sense of purpose and ownership over their experience and aspired career path during their journey at UB.

There have been a lot of people in the workforce who have been displaced from roles, so our graduating students sometimes face competition for roles with those who have more experience. One way we help students face that challenge is by ensuring they are pursuing experiential learning opportunities while they are at UB because those can really make them much more competitive in terms of what they can offer and what experiences they can draw from. We also help them make those meaningful market connections to build their team so there are people who know them and can serve as guides and advocates for them in industry spaces.

An important area of our office is our experiential learning programs, which we’ve significantly grown this past year. We partner with Undergraduate Education, Experiential Learning Network and Research and Economic Development to pair students with faculty for experience and mentorship.

We also have established an Internship Equity Fund, which provides financial support for students participating in an unpaid or low-paid internship experience at nonprofit or government organizations. We want to continue to provide financial support, so more students have the opportunity to graduate from UB with meaningful work-based experiences that provide confidence, self of purpose and a path.

Across all of our offerings, we’re focusing on creating a structured work and learning environment for students where they have a meaningful sense of preparation for that role and can show up and have the most impact, as well as an opportunity for meaningful supervision, mentorship and feedback from the people they are working with.

In addition to the various large-scale and industry-specific career fairs and information session events we host for recruiters on campus during the year, we’ve also been developing more customized experiences for company representatives and recruiters to engage with our students at UB. For example, we’ve invited recruiters to participate in career skill panels to provide advice for students and company-specific “takeover days,” where hiring managers come to campus to meet students at a mini career fair.

We’re really working to broaden and deepen the geographic footprint of UB’s employer relationships within and beyond Western New York, which includes strengthening UB’s brand as a source of talent. That includes partnering closely with entities like the Office of Alumni Engagement, where we can really engage with advocates of UB, alumni and other stakeholders and help them understand how they can contribute in meaningful ways, such as mentoring, participating in our career education programs and advocating for hiring UB grads in their organizations.

In addition to the clear support from leadership, there’s a really talented, dedicated team here. We have a really good mix of folks who bring different perspectives and experiences to the work we’re doing with students and our partners. Together, we’re all committed to staying in tune with shifts in the higher education landscape and continuing to evolve to prepare our students for a rewarding life and careers after college.