Career Connections Fellowship

Transforming the way we interact with our students

The College of Arts and Sciences has received a $250,000 grant from the Lilly Foundation to fund finding new ways of dealing with an academic environment characterized by these twin truths:

• Some 80-85% of incoming freshmen make possible career outcomes a key factor in deciding where and what they are going to study.
• Students pursuing Liberal Arts degrees often do not see the connections between what they are learning in the classroom and their pursuit of any number of possible future careers.

The College is using the Lilly Grant to establish a Career Connections Fellowship intended to help faculty make their students more aware that what they are learning in the classroom will be of great use to them in post-college careers. The fellowship is designed to offer long-term faculty the opportunity to workshop -- in a cohort setting -- a course that they already teach or would like to teach, paying special attention to elevating the awareness of how what they teach reaches beyond strictly academic settings. On the most basic level, the Career Connections Fellowship is designed to aid faculty in helping their students better recognize the far-reaching value of what they are being taught.

This fellowship program is part of a larger College equity initiative focused on equipping all College of Arts + Sciences students to better pursue great post-graduation opportunities, not just the students who come from backgrounds that more readily navigate the complex college environment and its career services. The simple truth is that our students will spend far more time with faculty than with any of the College’s career coaches. We want our students to see that what they are learning in our classrooms as critical to their life-long pursuit of meaningful work and service.