Fall 2014
Bowdoin College
Bowdoin Career Advisory Network Newsletter A Note From Mike Moynihan ’89 Chairperson, Bowdoin Career Advisory Network (BCAN) Dear BCAN Members, Career engagement at Bowdoin is the best it has ever been. Students are far better prepared for the career search process, and the number and breadth of opportunities available to them upon graduation are extraordinary. Bowdoin Career Planning deserves tremendous credit for that, but so do you. Our dedicated alumni base is responsible for virtually all campus recruiting opportunities. We all owe a great deal of thanks to Tom Walsh, whose guidance of the Bowdoin Career Advisory Network (BCAN) during the last several years has helped foster this improvement. In taking over the humbling task of succeeding Tom as BCAN Chair, I am in the enviable position of starting from a position of significant strength. Tom will stay on to work with us in the Career Engagement sub-committee while he takes on his new role as President of the Alumni Council. To continue to help increase the value proposition offered by both the BCAN group and the liberal arts education as a whole, we, as members of BCAN, offer other members invaluable insights and opportunities through which to enhance their competitive strength in the job market or graduate school search. With your help, it will be our goal to move this value proposition forward in a few specific areas over the next year. For Students: • Improve the marketing of BCAN on campus. Earlier awareness of the existence and richness of the resource will motivate students to engage earlier.
• Increase engagement with BCAN. There are two primary ways we see this happening: > Reducing the intimidation factor for students in connecting with alums. Demystifying this seems to have potential in inspiring more students to use BCAN. > Better leveraging BCAN further “upstream” in the process. Well before networking for job opportunities, many students need sounding boards in figuring out what to pursue in the first place. For Alumni: • Use BCAN as a resource for career transition. While the primary beneficiaries of BCAN are intended to be current students, it should also be a resource to any alumni for their own career journeys. Perhaps there is an opportunity to raise awareness around that. • Enrich connection with campus through alumni networking. Bowdoin alumni contribute to campus life in many ways. We need your expertise, as well as links to job and internship postings for our students. If you enjoy networking, we encourage you to consider offering networking referrals, mock interviewing, mentoring, and job shadowing to those that reach out to you. To improve the marketing of the group, we will be enlisting the help of recent Bowdoin alumni, current students, and Career Planning staff to do focus groups in order to develop a marketing plan that will help us engage students earlier. The entire community is excited to hear the results of this undertaking. I am truly honored to be taking on this new role. The vast majority of my career has been in consumer marketing, and I’ve been fortunate to spend the last 19 years working in Marketing for The LEGO Group. The reason that I’ve been marketing LEGO toys for that long is the same reason that I have enthusiastically accepted the role of (Moynihan - continued on page 2)
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