Classroom to Career

How CLA is helping students turn learning into lifelong success

BY TIM GIHRING (BA ’95, JOURNALISM)

WHEN CLA LAUNCHED its Career Readiness Initiative in 2015, it emphasized something that was there all along—in the classrooms, in the coursework, in the track record of its graduates. “We call it the liberal arts advantage,” says Ascan Koerner, CLA’s associate dean for undergraduate education. “We wanted to make a very explicit claim about the value of a liberal arts education.”

The claim is backed up by data showing that, as their careers progress, liberal arts graduates eventually earn more on average than STEM graduates (science, technology, engineering, math). “Technical skills get you through the door,” says Koerner, “but they don’t advance your career.” Indeed, liberal arts majors are more likely to become the people in charge.

The Career Readiness Initiative was designed to ensure CLA graduates are endowed with this advantage. At its heart is a set of core competencies, essential both to professional success and a liberal arts education: analytical and critical thinking, applied problem solving, ethical reasoning and decision making, innovation and creativity, oral and written communication, teamwork and leadership, engaging diversity, active citizenship and community engagement, digital literacy, and career management.

If these competencies have long been inherent to CLA courses, their connection to life after graduation has not always been explicit, says Koerner. As a result, students sometimes struggled to explain the value of their own education. Now, CLA professors are asked to be more intentional about connecting the dots. Since 2017, more than a hundred instructors have taken part in the Career Readiness Teaching Fellows program, where they create coursework— sometimes entirely new courses—around one or more competencies. Students, for their part, connect the dots using the RATE process, which stands for reflect, articulate, translate, and evaluate.

It helps them understand not just what they’ve learned but how it’s useful, well beyond the classroom. To date, some 43,000 RATE assignments have been completed.

“It provides a language for talking about what they’re doing,” says Wendy Rahn, a professor of political science. Maggie Bergeron, who teaches dance, calls it “naming the unnameable, trying to find some sort of concreteness to the ineffable quality of a liberal arts education.… And I think that’s really important, because the world is not quantifiable or concrete.”

The initiative has also revamped internships, research positions, and other extracurricular work. An internship coordinator was hired, requirements have been standardized and aligned with core competencies, and the RATE process is now part of every internship.

Scholarships to support these experiences are “absolutely essential,” Koerner says, as many internships are unpaid, research costs money, and students of modest means would otherwise need to work to make college work for them. “Those are the students whose lives we’re changing,” Koerner says. “This makes a real difference in the trajectory of their life.”

Here, three recent grads explain how CLA’s career readiness efforts—and the scholarships that support them—have paid off in their post-college lives.

Lauren Foley

BA ’21, ENGLISH AND SPANISH EDITORIAL INTERN AT LERNER PUBLISHING

Lauren Foley was the first person in her family to embark on a four-year degree. So when she left North Dakota for the U in 2017, “it was hard to ask my family for advice because they didn’t have the experience,” she says. “I really had to lean on CLA and my peers to understand what was going on, what to expect, and how to navigate it.”

Her First Year Experience course helped. Although she already knew that she wanted to work in publishing and editing, the RATE process pushed her to reflect on what she was learning and how it could translate into a career. “The core competencies offer a really unique and concise way to talk about the skills you’re getting,” she says, “especially when you move on to interviews later. They help you build a language for them.”

She joined Backpack, a student-run brand communications agency within CLA, which serves clients inside and outside the College with storytelling and public relations campaigns. Foley stayed with it through her senior year, and by then she was the agency’s editorial director.

Foley also joined the Minnesota Youth Story Squad, working with eighth-graders at Northeast Middle School in Minneapolis on their storytelling skills, helping “curate a space” in digital and social media “where their stories are not only being heard but being told,” she says.

My scholarships gave me that room to be able to choose career experiences where the focus could be more on building career skills than having to fully support myself.

— LAUREN FOLEY, BA ’21

It was a clarifying time, as she debated Jonathan Du whether to continue toward publishing or shift toward education. BA ’17, POLITICAL SCIENCE

“I care a lot about storytelling and CONTENT DESIGNER, FACEBOOK how language connects people,” she says. “Classroom teaching goes about it Jonathan Du remembers when he decided in a different way and turned my head what to do with his life. He was in middle for a while.” Ultimately, she came back school. Barack Obama was running for to publishing, but says it was important president. “I liked the idea that a minority to swim in other waters for a while: could get to such high positions of power “Now I can say for sure this is it.” and really inspire a country,” says Du,

Foley was supported by a National whose parents came from China and Merit Scholarship and several CLA raised him in Colorado. He decided to scholarships, including the Bentson- become a lawyer and go into politics. Niblick, Waller, Edelstein, and Stroud Du chose the U based on its political Scholarships. Needing to make ends science program, its law school, and its meet, she says, could have precluded support for pre-law undergrads. But more valuable work. “My scholarships freshman year was “kind of a struggle,” gave me that room to be able to choose he says. His grades were fine, but college career experiences like working at had opened his eyes to vocations beyond Backpack,” she says, “where, even if I was making money, the focus could be more on building career skills than having to fully support myself.”

After graduating this spring, Foley went to work as a full-time editorial intern with Lerner Publishing in Minneapolis, law school, and an interview to work in developing books for the school a congressman’s office that summer had and library market. The liberal arts, gone “horribly,” he says. she says, gave her “a clearer way to He was serving on the CLA Student connect across diverse subjects.… Board during his sophomore year, when It kept me from getting too narrow in CLA Career Services encouraged the my pursuits and only focusing on that board members to apply for the Mulhollem one thing. There are so many doors Cravens Leadership Scholarship, which that are open.” offers career counseling, mentoring, and a reflection course along with financial support for a summer internship. Du got the scholarship and an internship with the Republican National Committee in 2016. “I’d always wanted to work in Washington, DC,” he says, “the fabled place where all the policy gets made, all the backroom deals are made, where the smart people go to play in politics.”

My scholarship had a monumental impact. It kick-started my career and helped me get where I am today. — JONATHAN DU, BA ’17

The internship paid $200 every two weeks. “There was no way I could have made it work without that scholarship,” Du says. “It had a monumental impact. It kick-started my career and helped me get where I am today.”

The following summer, with help from a mentor at the RNC, he got an internship at CBS News in New York. And after graduating early, in 2017, he returned to CBS News and Washington, DC, as a news associate on Face the Nation.

Du recently earned his master’s in public affairs from the University of Texas at Austin, and last summer he interned with Facebook on its Civic Integrity Team, helping audit the internal tools that flag hate speech, disinformation, and misinformation.

Now he’s beginning a full-time job at Facebook, looking at ways to improve content, navigation, and user privacy across its suite of apps —“presenting complex technology in manageable ways,” he explains. At a time when work is increasingly specialized, he says, Facebook likes “bigger thinkers” who can see across disciplines and “wrap it all together” to improve processes.

Du credits CLA with helping him develop as a problem solver. Confronted with situations that aren’t black and white, he says of liberal arts grads, “we can rely on our ability to critically think and build coalitions and bring people together to solve these problems.… I think we need people who can think outside the box. Nobody does it better than someone with a liberal arts degree.”

Christine Cao

BA ’15, PSYCHOLOGY DATA SCIENTIST, EVERLANE

For a long time before going to college, Christine Cao thought about what she would do afterward. She would become a therapist, perhaps, or go to law school. She had enjoyed a psychology class in high school, in Naperville, Illinois, and figured a background in the field was compatible with either career move. So when she arrived at the U in the fall of 2012, she declared a major in psychology.

Then she began a series of internships, research positions, and other work opportunities supported by CLA scholarships. Six placements in just three years. “When you graduate, you can get stuck in this Catch-22 of needing experience to get a job,” she says, “but how do you get experience without a job?” She was determined to avoid the conundrum.

She was matched with a professor to conduct auditory research. She ran a study of her own through the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, analyzing whether advertising is more effective when it shows people or not. She had internships at the VA medical center in Minneapolis, the business school of Columbia University, and the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, scrutinizing data on everything from schizophrenia to visitor feedback.

Major support for Cao’s endeavors came from the Daniel McFadden & Beverlee Simboli Research Scholarship. Of course,

in the midst of her research, Cao learned at least as much about herself. Her “become a therapist” idea became less appealing after a stint as a CLA peer advisor, where she realized that advising wasn’t a great fit for her. Instead, she began leaning toward research design and statistics. “I feel really lucky to have been able to test the

waters,” Cao says. “It wound up being a huge shift in my career path, and made me realize what I want to do.” After graduation, Cao went on to earn a master’s in data science from the University of Chicago, while working for JPMorgan Chase & Co. as an analyst of customer feedback. Last year, she took a new job as a data I feel really lucky to have been able to test scientist for Everlane, the waters [with internships]. It wound up a mostly online being a huge shift in my career path, and clothing company based in San Francisco. made me realize what I want to do. She focuses on data modeling and — CHRISTINE CAO, BA ’15 customer retention, and she loves the work. She credits her internships and research positions with revealing a path to get there. “It really helped when I was looking for my first job out of college,” Cao says. One recruiter looked at her work history— the long list of experience she had accrued in school—and told her, “This is not an entry-level resume.” She had avoided the Catch-22. “It really worked out for me,” she says.