January 18, 2007
Faculty, staff, alumni share experiences with students during Career Discovery Week
Career Discovery Week, now in its eighth year at the UW, is not only an excellent way for students to learn about the professional options that await them, it’s also a chance for UW faculty, staff and alumni to shine by sharing their own experiences.
Just ask George Michael, a staff member at UW Bothell, whose off-campus activities include playing music and participating in the online world Second Life, often at the same time. Michael will hold an information session at UW Bothell on Jan. 25 called “Pursuing Your Passion in the Virtual World.”
Or maybe Carolyn Mason, a 2006 UW Tacoma alumnus now working as a human resources specialist for the UW’s Development and Alumni Relations Office, who will be among three panelists for a session in Tacoma on Jan. 24 titled “Careers in Marketing and Management.” Or Aaron Hoard, the UW’s deputy director for regional affairs, who earned his degree in geography from the UW in 1994 and will participate in a discussion titled “Geography: A World of Possibilities.”
Career Discovery Week, this year planned for Jan. 22-27, will feature more than 120 career-related sessions, workshops, fairs and other events, all dedicated to steering UW students to the finest futures they can find. And it’s happening on all three UW campuses — Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma.
“One of the things we love about Career Discovery Week is the way it pulls us all together,” said Rebecca Levy, associate director for marketing and development for the UW Center for Career Services, which sponsoring the event along with the UW Alumni Association.
“The group of people who put this together is really an extraordinary group — advisers, counselors and staff across many departments and all three campuses.” The planners work from June through January getting the Career Week organized, she said, “and they are really passionate about it.”
Begun years back as a grassroots efforts among academic advisers, Career Discovery Week has grown exponentially since. In fact, it’s now much more than a week. Schedules for the event, available online at http://depts.washington.edu/careerwk/index.php, show that events come both before and after the main week.
Indeed, the list is impressive. On the Seattle campus alone, there will be information sessions about networking, internships, resume-building, gender pay differences and careers in a host of disciplines.
And even though the main focus of Career Week is students, the 11,000 UW graduates now numbering among its employees might be interested in sessions offered through the “Alumni Track.” There, questions of graduate school options and possible career adjustments are addressed in a number of sessions, including such titles as “Engage: Create Your Competitive Career Advantage,” “Land a Job You Love With the Degree You Have” and even “I Can’t Believe They Pay Me For Doing What I Love.”
More faculty than ever before are seeing the Career Week events as co-curricular activities and are encouraging their students to attend. Mary Pat Wenderoth, a senior lecturer in biology and one of the founding organizers of the event, said it’s such a valuable experience that, often, students don’t see the full value of the sessions until they themselves are trying to find their place in the work force. “Then they say, ‘I’m glad I went.'”
