For job-seeking Yalies, a new helping hand

Undergraduate Career Services (UCS) has major plans to pad its résumé. Two new directors, hired outside of Yale, have been appointed to UCS and its new spin-off, the Office of International Education and Fellowship Programs (IEFP). Their goal? To energize and expand a career counseling program that many students complain is frustrating to use and biased towards jobs in Wall Street.

JOHN YI/YH Philip Jones hopes to revitalize Yale's Undergraduate Career Services.

As the new director of UCS, Philip Jones wants to make UCS a fixture on campus, so even students without specific career goals feel comfortable coming for guidance. "The key is visibility," Jones said. "We want to be somebody the students know and have some trust in."

Jones plans to hold small informational seminars in residential colleges to increase the students' familiarity with UCS in the hope that students will approach UCS earlier in their Yale careers. "Early intervention is best," he said. Jones wants to introduce workshops called "Personalities" to the colleges. "This workshop helps students think about their personalities and talents and about possible careers," he said.

Emilie Hitch, PC '00, is excited about UCS coming to the colleges. "Students looking for a job right out of school wouldn't feel like their only choices were investment banking and consulting if these information sessions make it well-known that the advisors at UCS can cater to the interests of students," Hitch said.

Erin Johnson, MC '00, also hopes UCS will become more useful to students. "UCS has had a bad reputation for so long," she said. "I took two years off from school and found all the programs I did on my own because my freshman counselors had warned us that UCS was so useless and disorganized." She added that past UCS programs suffered from consistently bad publicity and that "students felt like they had to walk in to UCS with a clear idea of what they wanted."

The new emphasis on visibility and general career counseling will not mean that students with specific career goals cannot get what they need at UCS. One of the goals of the plan to create the IEFP branch of UCS is to allow counselors to specialize their administrative responsibilities. For example, there will continue to be a counselor who specializes in advising premedical students. Another counselor will now be responsible for expanding internship opportunities, and yet another will work on expanding the UCS library.

Updated technology is another UCS goal. The website will offer more specific information about internships so that students can limit their searches before they enter UCS. "A student has been working on our website all summer and some of those changes should be visible in a few days," Jones said.

Plenty of energy similar to Jones' can be found at the IEFP office thanks to its equally enthusiastic director Catherine Hutchinson, the former assistant director of Study Abroad and Education at Harvard. "Our goals are outreach and communication with faculty," she explained. "Yale has decided to support study abroad and is doing so by centralizing the resources." She also said that pairing international education with fellowships is a not a common practice for other universities. Nevertheless, she insisted that both international education and fellowships are academically oriented."The office of IEFP will work together with a faculty steering committee to evaluate international educational opportunities and to try to integrate a student's international study into the overall Yale experience," Hutchinson said.

Sarah Ichioka, JE '01, who is currently in the process of applying to study abroad in France for the Spring semester, praised the efficiency of the new office. "I had a very positive experience this summer getting ahold of [IEFP Student Services Officer] Mr. Levesque," Ichioka said. "Last year it was really daunting, but my first contact with the new system was very encouraging. It appears to be much more streamlined."

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