By Tyree Stovall
LINCOLN UNIVERSITY- It’s a new school year and the L.U. Career Center is planning on engaging and helping students with job opportunities and helping students build skills in their future careers. The Clarion met with Director of Career Services Elizabeth Jordan and Career Learning Specialist Gabrielle Hodges to learn more about the Career Center.
The Clarion: What does the Career Center do?
Jordan: “The career center is here to offer services to students. Depending upon whether you’re a freshman, sophomore or junior and senior, we have different skills and objectives that we hope to help students accomplish, as it relates to career readiness and those soft skills.”
The Clarion: What programs does the Career Center offer?
Jordan: “We do different programming, where we offer different types of workshops and different types of activities to engage students. We also have community internships and grant funded internships that are an interest to students to get them skills in their future careers.”
The Clarion: Who is working directly with the students?
Jordan: All staff in the Career Center in some regard, but we’ve trained career peer mentors to work one-on-one with students on demand. Mrs. Gabrielle Hodges, who is our career learning specialist, also works with the students and she does a lot of our on-campus presentations and student engagement activities.
The Clarion: What value does the school place on internships?
Jordan: I think the school places a lot of value on internships (because) a lot of programs and majors require internships for credit. I think that the majors that don’t currently require it certainly encourage their students to take advantage of it. I know that the administration is also supportive of our internship efforts and trying to grow those to be available for students.
The Clarion: How does the career center engage with the students?
Jordan: We engage with the students every chance that we get. That’s a promise I made when I came in because the more visible we are, the more accessible we are, the more students are going to feel comfortable coming to us. What we want to avoid is students coming in their senior year, three weeks before graduation looking for a job. It’s better to start working on those skills sets and develop your resume from freshman year on.
The Clarion: What are some upcoming events?
Hodges: We have our Career Expo Week coming up. That consists of seven different fairs. Sept. 27 through Oct. 1 we’ll be having different fairs for each department. The STEM department, the business program, the nursing program, agriculture, and environmental scientists will all have their own fairs, and will be virtual through a platform we are utilizing called Handshake (handshake.com), where you can sign-up with your student email.
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