7 minute read
The PACE Program Prepares Students for Career Success
By Andrea Kennedy
n January 2020, UMass Boston launched the innovative Professional Apprenticeship and Career Experience (PACE) program, a bold initiative to supercharge students’ professional prospects. One year in—even conducted remotely—it’s a game changer for students and their on-campus employers.
The PACE program employs paid, long-term, on-campus apprenticeships as a means of giving students a competitive boost in the job market after graduation. As early as freshman year, students apply for PACE positions in the field they aspire to join, working with faculty and staff supervisors who act as mentors. Over months or years of increasing responsibility, students amass career-specific experiences of value to outside employers.
The program, created with a visionary $2.25 million gift from Ralph and Janice James, launched with 12 apprenticeship positions and has doubled that number each semester. Today, 51 students are in the program, working in apprenticeships ranging from information-security analyst to sustainability research associate. Each cohort also completes an eight-week, one-credit PACE Success course focused on career exploration, workplace-readiness, and personal-branding skills like résumé writing.
“We have an engaged group of 44 supervisors, many of whom have participated more than one semester. We have gotten overwhelmingly positive evaluations from students about the experience and the course as well,” says PACE Program Manager Amy Weinstein. “The program is on a great trajectory and that’s really exciting.” “I think we’re going to look back ten years from now,” says founding donor Ralph James, “and see this program as a model for other schools.”
The relationship between students and mentors is central to the success of the program. Prabin Tamang ’20 calls the PACE experience “priceless” and parlayed it into a system administrator job with Draper, a Cambridge engineering innovation company.
His mentor, Senior Information Security Specialist Alison Murray says, “We were interested in the PACE program because we knew it would be valuable for everybody. It would be helpful to our department, and it would help a student experience real-world security scenarios.”
As it matures, PACE will help apprentices expand their professional networks and develop the connections they need to find external internships, co-ops, and jobs.
CAMPUS QUAD
Is Taking
The centerpiece of UMass Boston’s 25-year master plan when it launched in 2007 was the development of a central, green campus quadrangle to enhance open space and access to the campus. Today, the project is beginning to take shape.
Construction on the Substructure, Science Center Demolition, and Quadrangle Development project (SDQD) has progressed substantially during the past academic year while most campus operations were conducted remotely. The old Science Center and those areas of the expansive concrete plaza that are not being repaired have been demolished, along with the two levels of garages underneath. These demolition projects have brought the center of the campus to ground level in preparation for construction of the quad. Substructure reinforcement work below Wheatley and McCormack Halls is expected to be completed this summer.
The university community should be walking the new quad’s shaded pathways by 2022.
Shape
Joseph Berger likes a challenge. When he came to the University of Massachusetts Boston in September 2017 to become the 11th dean of the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) in 18 years, the university was in the throes of a budget crisis and had a new interim chancellor. When he became UMass Boston’s 13th provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs on February 1 this year, he did so in the midst of a pandemic that forced the university to move to a vastly changed operational model, with almost all classes and administrative functions conducted remotely.
“I dropped in [here] in the middle of a $30 million budget deficit, but there are really good people here doing really good work,” he says. “It was just clear almost from day one there is nothing but upside in terms of where we could go from here.”
Prior to his arrival at UMass Boston, Berger served as the senior associate dean in the College of Education at UMass Amherst, where he was on the faculty for nearly 20 years. For much of that time, he served in administrative positions working to revitalize the university’s higher education program. He was previously on faculty at several universities, including the University of New Orleans. He earned a PhD in education and human development-higher education administration at Vanderbilt University and an MA in college student personnel at Bowling Green State University.
Having specialized in higher education administration and leadership, he describes a clearly defined approach to his new job: be visible and communicate.
“If you study effective leaders in higher education, one of the things they do well is they set really constructive positive tones,” Berger says. “They help make sense of all the complexity that is going on in the university. You can’t do that if you’re not visible, if you’re not out giving consistent messages. . . . With all the transitions we’ve gone through, it’s really important.”
Soon after beginning as provost, Berger launched a new biweekly email to the campus community called “The Quad,” because each issue touches on four updates. In his second issue, he announced a plan to form the Columbia Point Community Advisory Board to deepen the university’s partnership with the community, including engagement in the development of Dorchester Bay City and the work that the CEHD is leading in the Dever and McCormack public schools on Mt. Vernon Street. The advisory board, he says, responds to Chancellor Suárez-Orozco’s call for UMass Boston to “endeavor to be the university of and for the city and the university of and for the times.”
Berger also believes that UMass Boston is in one of the best positions to push forward and champion the effort to address historical racial and social injustice, not just in Boston but also far beyond.
“I take very seriously this idea that we want to become a leading anti-racist and health-promoting institution,” he says, citing the foundational work of the Academic Continuity Task Force he chaired last summer at the height of the pandemic. “All institutions of higher education have equity problems. . . . [T]hat’s in the DNA of higher education,” he says. “I think, historically, because of our commitment to social justice here, we’re actually further ahead than most institutions. On the one hand, that’s something to be proud of, and on the other hand, we have no laurels to rest on.”
While the coronavirus pandemic has been a particularly vexing challenge for academic institutions across the country, Berger sees a silver lining for UMass Boston. Since moving to remote teaching and learning in March 2020, Berger says, he and his colleagues have been taking a hard look at the university’s pedagogy and curriculum, and “learned a lot.” One area of thought, and action, has been to draw from the lessons of remote teaching and learning to explore ways to provide students with greater flexibility moving forward. A new Beacon Flex pilot program in seven classrooms has half of its students in person and the other half streaming in on Zoom in real time.
“We hear from the majority of our students that they can’t wait to be back, face to face,” Berger says. “But we also hear from some of them wanting to continue to have some of the flexibility that they have now. That makes their life a lot easier, not to have to commute and leave their job, which they need to continue to go here.”
With new technology, possibly funded by federal stimulus money, the hope is to use the data from the pilot to expand it in the fall, and possibly ramp it up further in the spring.
“We now can really clearly see the light on the horizon,” Berger says. “[T]his is an important pivotal moment in history. We’re not going back. . . . We’re going to go forward to where we get to define normal.”
