welcome to the secrets of college planning i'm your host anthony and today we're at stockton university and my guest today is walter tarver is the director of career center for stockton university welcome to the show thank you thank you for having me  problem so usually i start my guests when i went to college so we're going to school ok so i'm going to buffalo state college i'm actually a native of syracuse new york so a lot of people ask well how did you end up in buffalo so that's how i ended up at buffalo state college where i got my undergraduate  political science great so usually i just want to go back in time first in high school did you start thinking about college was a freshman year senior when your parents involved how did it all get started  been really probably started to get serious about it towards the beginning of my junior year oh i started to look at the catalog you know back then everything was snail mail so we were happy when we had any college information in the mailbox at the end of the college to where you are today so i actually was as i mentioned i was a political science major got my bachelor of arts there and i my plan was to go to law school and i found out that there were joint law business programs which i was always interested in business i was also always interested in the law aspect so i figured i can kill two birds with one stone in less time so i actually ended up in a rolling at the university of buffalo j d m b a program and you start t program off in the management classes during that first semester my interest in law dissipated so i decided to focus on the m b a so i ended up getting my m b a at the university of buffalo gotcha ok and then how did you get to stockton university accidentally i call myself the accidental career counselor my resume was actually the only resume that was used to have a program called resume referral program in the university of buffalo career planning office and one of my classmates ironically enough was pulling resumes that day and he said your resume was the only one that was pulled for this job and i remember yelling back and forth throughout this week where is the job and he said stock to no i bought stock in california i don't think i could go live in california it's warm nice weather but i could do that so when i ended up getting a call for an interview and the gentleman on the other end of my former supervisor says yeah you can fly out of the philadelphia with that but so that's how i ended up here ok and how many years have you been this is actually my twenty first year as doctor fantastic so you started in the career center and yes a lot of originally started as the coordinator for career in employment services moved to the assistant director position moved levels within that role and then when our former director retired put my hat in the ring to become a director and here i am i've been the director now for ten years  so now let's get into the students sure about the career center what's the process what what happens at the career so anything you could think of that's related to careers happens in the career center so we assist instead undecided they may not know what they want to major in or what career they may want to pursue it so that's typically the first conversation and then if you think about everything that takes place between their graduation so we can help them even with  search variables or graduate school path so those are kind of really the two end games for most of our students they're going to go to graduate school or go right into the workforce so all of the things that take place in between take place in between their preparing their resume and cover letters preparing for interviews learning how to search for a job you know how to find jobs we have networking events any kid dinners on career fair salon and so forth so anything you could think of that a freshman would need to know that's related to career development and making those crucial decisions in the beginning of their academic careers all the way through graduation so what do you find as the most difficult part on a freshman coming in and saying i'm undecided really the big thing is to get them to start early because actually it's a good thing to be undecided in our world a lot of times students come in and they think they know exactly what they want to do and then they change their mind and then they start to panic and i give you a perfect example i've been teaching a freshman seminar for quite some time now and one of the first things i ask them before we get into the class content is how many of you know what career you want to go and so about ninety percent of them raise their hand and a few undecideds always feel a little bit uncomfortable when i tell them you're actually in a better position and then inform the ninety percent that most of you are probably going to change your majors and were careers at some point in your life times they kind of give me that blank stare and then when i bump into them at graduation four or five years later they're giving me the right mr tarver you were right so i'm probably the biggest thing again going back to your question just getting them to start early and knowing that career development is a process it's not something you wait until your senior year to then start to engage with the career center there are steps that you need to do each year along the process to make sure that you're ready come senior year so if you do get out it orientation and talk to the freshman and tell them about the career center how how does it we actually talk to their parents at orientation so we used to have a panel of different individuals from all of the offices the route the campus and we usually are met our message usually goes out to the parents we don't really get a lot of face time with students and if you can imagine their priorities during orientation you know how seeing financial aid getting their courses obviously not that they're not interested in career services but we kind of make sure they take care of that stuff especially getting classes they have their hands full with that for the day so we don't typically hit him with too much but what our office has done the last two years is we do a summer mailing but we do it to the parents letting them know that you need to make sure that your students get involved in our off early on it's not something that you wait for and i deliver that same message when i talk to the parents during the paranoia and station part of the day grade so now a student that's a sophomore why would they come into the career cent for years actually to forgot and year on fortunately in a lot of campuses throughout the country the software year is really crucial because that's ideally when they should be finalizing that major if they don't finalize that major appearance don't want to hear  your fifth or sixth year because that translates to dollars of course minutes spent on tuition so software year is really the key year because that's when they need to determine what path they're going to take and we kind of flip the script as it comes to that he rest octon we try to get students to think about what career do they want to pursue because you can major in one thing but there could be a lot of different careers that you could do as a result of having that major because we're a liberal arts institution our students are prepared to go into a lot of different areas regardless of what their careers maybe and again if you think about what i mentioned earlier about my major undergrad i was a political science major and then i went on to get a master's in business buffalo state was also a liberal arts institution so we prepared me for a lot of different opportunities and i was fortunate along the way that i got some experience while i was in graduate school that led me to this path so we really want the students to think about occupation or interest and not major they can come up with that we try to match them up with the major that's going to best prepare them for the occupation that they're interested in so so that brings up a good question and what what types of occupations do you see a lot of students interested in that them into a particular major right now of the allied health professions are hot you know the p t this be the old see those are really on fire right now extremely competitive because grad school is required  those are really hot on the traditional business paths on accounting finance there are you know still always popular careers lot of social workers and a lot of people going into education specifically teaching here even though we've seen a spike recently in a lot of students want to get into higher ed in a lot of that can be attributed to the jobs that they hold on campus our campus is known for its community engagement in students working in a lot of our students get some really rich experiences working in the different offices on campus and i know at least the last five years that experience has led a lot of our students to want to work and do what we do want to daily basis so now junior comes first student what do they work on networking like linked in your year hopefully they've been to our office and followed the plan according to script and they probably already have at least a working resume and dave hopefully met with their advisor our job at that point to start thinking about internships because you know most don't have to work these days and they're going to take whatever job they can find we now want to start thinking about finding relevant types of experiences whether it be a job or shadowing or internship and we try to focus on the internship for some programs it's built in which makes it easy yeah but our concern is those students who do not have a built into their curriculum as they don't see it as a graduation requirement so to then what do i need to do that for so our message to them is you really want to start thinking about getting some experience at that point so that we can enhance that resume over the next couple of years and then just as they should have been along all along we really encourage them to start really ramping up their participation in career fairs when you mention networking events we have a lot of career panels where we invite alumni back to kind of talk about their path i think i mentioned business etiquette dinners a lot of different special events that we'll have that that junior year is kind of the time they want to start to dabble and start to participate in the events now do you see a lot of students from a lot of the different years all going to those type of events are you just really just juniors trying to do it yeah the events are open to all we encourage freshman to go as well and just to kind of look around and get the feel for something like a career for example software same thing start to get a little bit more information and depending on where they are developmentally perhaps maybe seek an internship software year but junior year if they have not they need to be a little bit more intentional effort in planning  how they're going to the career fair and sort of just going to looking around making sure that they're dressed appropriately that the resume does market them appropriately they know what to say to an employer you know they have their thirty second elevator pitch ready when they meet the employees for the first time so now do you see a lot of meetings with the students talking about resume and about the interview process and how it all works can you elaborate on short of that sure probably a majority of our appointments are for resume critiques so typically a student kind of skips those beginning steps that they sort of done during freshman sophomore year and they pop up i had someone look at my resume and then we take that as an opportunity to kind of retrace our steps and say hey did you do this did you do that just to make sure that we haven't missed anything and that they're truly on track at that point but most of our points are resumes so a lot of the one on one spend time with resumes and then as it evolves next logical step is a cover letter then they start wanting to apply for jobs but they're not necessarily sure how to look for jobs excuse me and internships so we showed him how to find those resources how to identify those employers and ultimately we start that mock interviewing process great and that is there are a lot of companies that come to the university or israel or the kids just trying to find it all and they were not so we have a lot of different opportunities where the employees actually come to our students so we have to career fairs every a year in the fall in the spring and right now our careful career fairs are up in the one hundred and ten one hundred twenty range for each event so we used to have anywhere from one hundred ten to one hundred twenty employers variety of different occupations and feels is no one that's dominant over any other so that's the first big major opportunity for students to connect with employers as a result of our career fairs a lot of employers will then set up some on campus recruitment event whether it be on campus interviewing actually getting them into some classrooms working with our faculty partners to make sure that not only the students who attended the career fairs are connecting with students but maybe those students who weren't able to attend and we also like to put the employers in front of them we actually have something called an employer in residence program and the way we like to set it up is where the employer actually spends an entire day on campus and part of this day might include one on one mock interview depending on where that employer is in the hiring process he could be actual interviews it's meetings with students one on one outside of that maybe giving them career advice used to getting them into a few classrooms to talk to faculty and students about their company and what they have to offer and then usually if time permits some time for them a kind of speak with us about what's new with the we're going to zation so that when we're talking to students we can accurately send a message about what that company's looking for and again it's another context for us to share with our students when they are looking for contacts within specific companies so it's really a full day in a full gamut of opportunities that students have to connect with employers that is outside of them working the system on their own so now a student gets into senior year what's happening senior first of all panic on their end usually but senior year we're kind of just tightening everything up now hopefully they've already done some internships hopefully they've still had the work they have some jobs that were all of it to what they're trying to do and we're making sure that we have that as a nice package so that the resume is up to date marketing them affectively again making sure that they know how to look for jobs they know about all the services they know about all the events and right at that point it's really just continuing to apply for jobs and making sure that they hopefully have something and before they graduate or are pretty close to getting something now the other avenue that we haven't talked about if we want to rewind just a little bit is for those students going to graduate school that junior year for those students the first part of the equation i mentioned where they're starting to get some experience that's important and that's still in play but that's when the graduate school application process starts that's usually a year in advance in terms of applying which a big part of it is that personal statement making sure that they're again marketing themselves accurately and we help them with the personal statement process so if you take the graduate school avenue and move that senior year hopefully those students are finishing up any last minute applications but our idea situation that they're starting to get some responses at least early spring so that they know where they're going to end up afterwards and you you said that there's a there's a lot of interest in the p t a and things like that and i mean that graduate school so what are the students expecting when they get to the graduate school what's what's the help that they are they're getting once they get there once they get to graduate school well believe it or not law students don't know that just because they're in a graduate program doesn't mean that these two can use their career centers and for our students though they've graduated let's say they've gone to a graduate program at another institution they can still come back and use our services we do try to get them to understand that if they're especially in something a specialized as a p t program that the career center at their institutions are probably going to be a little bit more helpful because that's the particular population that they have in mind in terms of their services but we can also help them as well because again we have a pretty good variety of graduate schools and we do consider our graduate students as our stakeholders in terms of the types of services or programs that we provide  but we've had an influx lately especially if you look at what's been going on with the economy specifically in south jersey because you know we've had some people who've been out of school for a while some alum who've been out that have started to come back to us but  our services are still available today and really that's fantastic and so now at the high school level what does the career center do at the high school level with students that are in high school when they do anything at the high school level we occasionally do get invited out to some of the high schools to kind of give them a jump start on what to expect not just from college but to get them to start thinking about careers so we do some of that from time to time our admissions office does a spectacular job of getting students to come here whether it's through traditional open houses or tour days they also have other special days where they bring different groups of students in and usually we are part of that process of at least letting them know that we're here and what we do and what they should start to think about at that level a lot of our interaction with our high school students take place during one of our four open houses during the year so we have a table there and you see our staff is ready and willing to share any information we have to get them going  kind of really get them thinking about what they want to do if they do come to stockton and again trying to hit the parents because a lot of times when a students come for open house i mean they could be as young as often was in junior sometimes and they don't know what to ask when they gets our table they're not sure about that it's not something they're thinking about but the parents usually have their eye on what these should be thinking about so a lot of our questions especially at those time periods come from parents but when you get the students visiting open house in your senior year then we tend to get a few more career related question now now how big is the part and as you have a big staff we've grown we've definitely grown so there's myself and we have five other professional staff and then we have two administrative assistant and now they're out there actively finding companies what what are their jobs and well the paradigm for employer development is change quite a bit since my time in career development i remember when i first started it was like ok be off campus today i have some employer visits i'm go be know in this region for the day if anybody needs any day and you know shoot me an email or something like that now a lot of it is through our professional associations and kind of just sharing of contacts with other peers in the field a lot of employers contact us directly even so it's not as much going in doing these pitches to employers that they're at their locations and they're used to be back when i first got into the field but a lot of employers really investigate the institution through the web page and look at our academic profile and a lot of them contact us in today's world but every once in a while we do some site visits and we start to do a little bit more of that instead of the traditional site visits we're kind of lumping it in with  tour so we might bring a handful of students with us and it kind of make it more of a formal day so which exposing the students of the company it's also allowing us to make a contact with the company getting the company in the world a bit about stockton so now i was also told that the school is expanding and the atlantic city area what kind of services are you doing for that school that's i guess a branch of this school and then blanik city what what what kind of services are there well the vision is still being developed in terms of what it's going to be in atlantic city but our office actually we just submitted a plan last week in terms of how we would staff that so we would be providing ours down there few of our advisors would go over there a couple days a week just to make sure that the students who were over there have the same options of getting career counseling to students who are on the galloway campus so and so we kind of see what the demand is going to be we're going to start off slow with a couple advisors there part time during the week and then if we need to expand then you know we'll do so accordingly now that you see more and hospitality and things like that in that particular area being that the casinos and their hotels are there again i'm not sure what the larger macro level vision is  so now in the process of of the career services what else are you are you handling with this students themselves is there any extra activity that you're giving to those students in terms of creative development in your in the vellum and pretty well something unique that i think we have is we have a career community model and i know rutgers has a similar model where we're basically becoming more specialist in certain areas so the route my time in the field we've pretty much been generalist so if you're a business major biology major sociology major i could see you and i could provide services over time obviously some of us are going to become better with assisting search students and some majors vs other majors but what we've done to make sure the australians are getting the maximum level to service is we've divided our services up into career communities so each of our advisors is responsible for a cluster of occupations which means that they only focus on that so if you think back to the sample of a general is where i help the business student the sociology you know hala just i'm able to hone in on for example all of my business students which is very helpful when it comes to the employee development piece because now i can focus on just that cohort of students provide them with more opportunities while at the same time catering services to them so that's something that we've done that's kind of broad and i think what we're able to offer we've done a very good job of taking our services to our students as opposed to waiting for them to come into our office we get into the classroom a lot believe last year we did something like maybe around two hundred classroom presentations which i think when we if you go back maybe ten years ago i think we were at like thirty five forty classroom presentations so we made a concerted effort to connect with students in the classroom and all of that's only possible because of the exceptional relationships that we have with our faculty members here our faculty are incredible about inviting us into the classroom but i think that's kind of an expansion of the traditional services that you would typically see at a career center and you know i know rutgers has that motto i believe are the only two schools in the state in new jersey that operate for that particular model and those for open houses there's spread out throughout the whole year yes yes right so so is that where you're doing also classroom stuff or is that just for the parents to come that's really just more of an information fair if you want to think of it probably is the best way to characterize it we have our table set up and you see some literature and sometimes some giveaways depending on what's going on with the budget that you're just giving us some information about our office and what they should expect us to provide to their students when they come to stockton yeah so that's not really a formal presentation now we do have something called a day in the life that's run through the admissions office which give students a realistic view what it's like asked stockton i know there are some classrooms taught during that day just to give them a sense of what it's like to be in a classroom and we have been involved neka pass to be before in terms of a formal presentation but typically it's just more of an i would say first of all the education that we provide here it really creates these well rounded students our students have gone and done some tremendous things i think a lot of times parents get caught up in the name brand of a school  and our students compete with students from all institutions in you know that's something that i think we are really proud of but the biggest thing i think a parent so there is to it is to start early do not wait until senior year go to the career center come home so you can find a job i think usually if people start freshman year and they stick with our timeline their position where they want to be when they get ready to graduate well thank you very much thank you for having me yeah no problem so you've been watching the secrets of college planning on the whole stay open you about until next time