In her experiences with career coaching, Brandi Smith has learned that students often feel uncertain and anxious as they get close to entering the job market. She wants them to be excited and confident about their futures.
Smith recently discussed her challenges and successes, and plans for the upcoming academic year and beyond.
Question: How would you describe your first year in your role?
Answer: It was full of activity. There was a high demand for the graduate career support put into place, and that sparked pretty immediately. There was no trouble filling time or filling available spots for student meetings.
There was plenty to understand in terms of the current state of support services. There are several existing graduate career support services on campus, several people who are already providing support. Yet, with the decentralization of career services across campus, I was noticing variations and differences in terms of what those support services look like.
Q: You said you wanted to listen to students, staff and faculty, gather information, and identify support gaps. What did you learn?
A: Students have a wide variety of nuanced needs. We can group them into categories or themes, but there is still a lot of variation in questions students are asking to get their individual needs and goals met.
It was clear in terms of support gaps that there were programs with no direct career support line of service, and there was a need for solutions. Also, there were programs with robust services where students have many opportunities.
Students also expressed to me directly that they were looking for a safe and neutral space to do the exploration they needed so they could make more confident decisions about their next steps or identify goals they felt confident about.
I also noticed patterns in terms of where people get stuck. They are, “How do I?” or “What is right for me?” type questions.
Q: An IUB 2030 strategic plan goal is to ensure that graduate and professional students are prepared for diverse career opportunities. One metric is to increase the percentage of graduate students accessing career services each year. How do you accomplish that?
A: Increasing the percentage of students accessing career services comes from them being comfortable to reach out or participate, and then supplying them with an experience where they feel some movement in their goals, or in getting needs met. A lot of students are seeking career services support and getting them pointed in the direction of the right kind of support is important to me.
Working with career services offices has been a goal. I started participating on the Career Services Council, and within that council I started a committee that has representatives from all career services offices on campus. I am working to establish a referral process. Career services offices have similar yet different services than I can provide, so I’ll send students there when it’s clear that they’ll get that need met right away. Similarly, career services colleagues send students to me when they see something that I’m offering that supports students in a different way than they can.
Additional partnerships have been important, like with the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. We offered an academic application intensive workshop to support students who knew they wanted to pursue a career in academia so they could develop materials for their application process. That was successful.
One of my Graduate School Bloomington colleagues leads the coordination of the Graduate Career Diversity Symposium and the 3-Minute Thesis. I dovetailed on those, with services like coaching round tables or opportunities for students to develop and practice their three-minute thesis pitch. Those services expand students’ thinking about career and professional development and help them get other support needs met.
Q: What results and services can you point to that illustrate the benefit of career resources for graduate students?
A: When students are participating in events or workshops, they’ll often come for one-to-one support afterward, where they may have questions they want to dive deeper into. There’s an increase in participation that way.
Students are reporting increased clarity through the services they’re getting, and now they understand how to approach a problem. They start to see their professional narrative come together, and that increases their confidence.
Several students have reported that they accepted a job offer. It’s an exciting and rewarding time because they put the work into a search strategy, or into discerning which way they wanted to take their career, and they achieve an outcome that feels right for them.
Q: What are your goals for the 2024-25 academic year and the long term?
A: For this academic year, I’m looking at increasing opportunities to support Ph.D. students who are in an exploration mode. The focus is on increasing opportunities in one-to-one support and considering how to make more group support available so they can explore in a cohort manner. I’ll be launching that this fall.
Long term, my overall hope is that grads have clear, seamless access to career support that fits their nuanced needs. That’s something I plan to continue to test at the Graduate School and to work on with campus colleagues, like the Career Services Council committee, in the coming months and years.