It used to be that graduating seniors stopped by the Career Services office, did some interviews and got "placed." It hasn’t worked that way for a while, according to Sheila Curran (below), director of the Office of Career Services at Brown. Her office now helps seniors and a growing number of alums find their way in a Web-fueled network-driven world. Mark Nickel of the George Street Journal stopped by Curran’s office recently for a chat.
Is service to alumni a new area for your office?
We have information going back to 1949 that shows we’ve been working with alumni for more than 50 years. When I was hired in 1996, I was asked to look at the needs of all our constituents and how we might best meet those needs. It became absolutely clear that we could not just serve undergraduates, but that grad students and alumni had become very important in the mix.
Because careers are no longer a one-time choice?
It used to be that you got to the end of your senior year and your parents asked what you intended to do with your life. They encouraged you to go ’round to Career Services, and you got "placed." That model has not been working for a while. You’re not going to be with one employer for the rest of your working life. In fact, you’ll be with more than a dozen employers and maybe change careers three to five times during your lifetime. This has become much more of a lifetime process. In the time I’ve been here, we’ve seen an increasing number of alumni coming back for career assistance, so that we now do close to 1,000 alumni appointments a year.
Has your mix of services changed?
We work with alumni on a wide variety of issues from career changing to career coaching, but two of the most important things we provide are access to information and connections. Alumni Relations now makes available a Web-accessible database of more than 8,000 alumni who are willing to give career advice to both students and alums (ACCess). We take that one step further by building career relationships. A person who is now an entertainment lawyer may have worked previously at MTV. Someone who wants to find an alum with contacts at MTV might never find that person on a network but could make that connection through the relationships we’ve started to build. And when an alum finds a new position, we invariably get a note saying, "What can I do to help you?" It becomes circular.
There was an alum who graduated in 1998 and moved to Europe to work for a dot-com. He e-mailed us and let us know what he was doing. A lot of Brown students want to work in Europe, so we talked about offering an internship. Before that could come to fruition, though, the dot-com bubble burst. He is now out of a job and has come back to us for services. We’ve put him in touch with people in a different industry he’s interested in.
And that’s circular because …?
While we were helping him, he referred us to another Brown alum who needs our services, and that alum put us in touch with yet another resource who was able to assist two Brown students seeking internships. So this is not just someone asking for our services and receiving them. It’s much more viral than that. Everything leads to everything else. It’s not enough just to send letters to prospective alumni employers; you have to meet them in person. That personal network building, involving alumni, parents and students, is fairly unique to Brown.
Where do you travel to develop such connections?
Essentially, my travel is based on the answers to two questions: First, where do students and alumni want to work, and second, what kinds of opportunities are they seeking? I spend time in the most popular destinations, such as New York, San Francisco, Washington and Los Angeles, and build my trips around the type of employers which are not well-represented in on-campus recruitment. If there is the opportunity to work with Alumni Relations at an event for 50 to 100 alums, that’s a really good venue for Brown to build career relationships.
Has the collapse of dot-com brought you more alumni requests for service?
Yes, we have seen quite a few alums coming back who got caught up in the dot-com situation. Often these were people who were extremely well qualified, but ended up going to work for a company which could not become profitable. They come back for services, but they also give us information about what’s happening in the economy and in their industry. The general decline of the economy has prompted a number of alumni to write to us, asking for help for themselves, but also urging students to prepare well, use Career Services and learn how to network with Brown connections.
The Web seemed to be a big push for you about three years ago.
Yes, but we only achieved what we wanted to achieve about a year ago. We wanted to make it a really dynamic site. In addition to designing a new Web site, Career Services staff also developed a Web ’zine, an electronic magazine accessed through our home page that changes weekly, highlighting opportunities and upcoming events. Students tell us that the Web and e-mail are by far the best ways to reach them.
Do students and alums need to adopt new strategies?
They will have to spend a lot more time on their job searches. Advance preparation, research — all of that will be much more important. Students say a good career search requires the equivalent effort of between one and two courses. That’s why some of them leave it until after they’ve graduated. Luckily, we’re open year-round. Technology is a big part of the present and future. I believe there will be more virtual career fairs, like the Ivy-Plus fair that’s currently running. Increasingly, students and alumni will find career information and opportunities on the Web. But they’ll have to be able to marry this information with good presentation and the ability to forge connections. The Web by itself won’t do anything for you.