Entry by Jackson Ding, Peer Career Advisor, Wabash College Career Services
My name is Jackson Ding and I am a peer advisor at the Career Services Office at Wabash College, a liberal arts college for men in Crawfordsville, IN. Here at Wabash, we, Career Services, organize many events throughout the year to help students with career development and graduate school application.
The project I am working on now is a four-week long internship/job class. Prepared by career services staff and peer advisors, these once-a-week classes teach students various aspect of job hunting, including job search, resume and cover letters, and interview preparation. Offered during lunch/dinner time with the company of free pizzas, these classes are often well received among our students. For example, the last session attracted more than 5% of the total student population. We also regularly bring in guest speakers to give lectures. In the next month, we will have speakers talking about negotiation skills, dinner etiquette, and business leadership.
Besides organizing in-house lectures or workshops to help students hone their job hunting skills, we sometimes take students out of the somewhat remote Crawfordsville and immerse them in metropolitan areas. Every year, we take groups of students to large cities such as New York, Chicago, D.C., and Indianapolis to visit corporate sites and make connections. During these trips, students attend information sessions of our host companies, meet with alumni in the cities, and visit tourist attractions. In fact, I will be going to New York in three weeks to visit Fortune 500 companies such as Goldman Sachs, Samsung, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Major League Soccer. How much does it cost? Nothing out of my own pocket.
Those are only few examples of that we do on campus. The staff and peer advisors of the Wabash College Career Services frequently get together and discuss ideas for new events. We always seek new ideas to prepare students to “make a successful transition to the world beyond Wabash.”
