October 20-22, 2016
Chair David Hetzel ’72 opened the meeting, welcomed the committee, and introduced new members.
Roger Woolsey, Director of the Center for Professional Development (CPD), shared information on new initiatives and provided an update on fall recruiting and employment activities:
- Student participation in the Employer Connections Fair and the Graduate School Fair broke records, with approximately 1,100 students attending the employer connections fair to connect with 112 employers.
- While education, technology, and research positons are in the top 5 fields represented among the 6,000+ internship and job opportunities listed in DartBoard, the CPD still faces the challenge of raising the visibility of opportunities outside of finance and consulting.
- This fall’s on-campus recruiting program has more than twice as many applications as past years (726 juniors and seniors filing over 9,000 applications for just under 200 positions).
New initiatives:
- The creation of a donor-funded Women’s Professional Circle with a focus on juniors and seniors and with the goal of increasing confidence, encouraging networking, and creating connections to alumnae.
- The 3rd year of the Professional Development Accelerator program for first-year students has seen an increase in the number of students enrolled and the percentage of students completing the required milestones.
- The CPD has begun to pilot the use of resume books for selected populations of students, with an eye towards expanding their use in the coming year.
The committee’s 3 working groups delivered updates on their ongoing projects:
- The Career Connections Speed Networking event hosted by the Alumni-Student Working Group and the CPD on Thursday evening was a great success, with approximately 70 students in attendance, meeting with 25 members of the Council.
- The Alumni-to-Alumni working group has completed the draft of a toolkit for planning career events that will be shared with the Communities Executive Council and introduced to club and group leaders by CAGOW this winter.
- Earlier this fall, the Special Projects Group completed our third iteration of a resume review project, with 50 resumes of current students reviewed by alumni councilors prior to the busy fall recruiting season.
- The Committee also interviewed 9 alumni councilors, with the goal of producing short video clips with career advice for students. These videos will be edited and produced by the College’s Media production group and then shared in DartBoard and via other channels to students.
The Committee finished the meeting with a discussion kicked off by Vice Chair Cuong Do ’88, who asked members to think about how we could maximize the impact that we can make as a committee and how we can push to make experiential learning work for every student at Dartmouth.
Committee members discussed ways that we can scale our work to reach more students and the importance of connecting directly with students and faculty to inform the work of our committee. We see the House Communities as the perfect vehicle for bringing together students, faculty, and members of the Council in service to the professional development of our students. We will propose our ideas to the Executive Committee and hope that we can harness the talent of the Alumni Council to help support our future efforts.