Archive for January, 2010

Like many institutions, my university participates in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) to measure programs and activities that enhance student learning and personal development. The purpose of NSSE is to help identify areas to improve the undergraduate experience in and out of the classroom.

The scholarship program that I coordinate hosts a first-year seminar course each fall for the 100 recipients of the award. The course is loosely based on the University 101 model framed by John Gardner when he was at the University of South Carolina. It follows an orientation and transition format and includes community-building activities for our program. We have a large group lecture for one hour each week and students meet in recitation groups of a dozen students for a second hour weekly.

In the NSSE spirit of enhancing the course experience and engaging our students, we try to integrate fun and a bit of technology for student projects. Our latest adventure was digital storytelling. Staff and peer mentors selected random movie genres, and a student from each recitation section drew from the genre options. We shared examples of digital storytelling and creating storyboards. We suggested task assignments such as videographer, actor, writer, and film editing to help the project go more smoothly. We made certain to review campus computer labs for the appropriate editing software in advance and provided this information to students. Finally, we stocked up on sale priced Flip Camcorders and gave this assignment to students:

• Create a media project that embodies the transition to college and your first semester experience.
• Final Project: No longer than 5 minutes and must include a flash mob.

The final productions were screened during our class “Film Festival” complete with popcorn and soda. Students were encouraged to vote for “Best Picture” and create award categories to fit the projects. Winning productions were featured on our student-run cable news channel.

There were a few bumpy roads throughout the ten-week project, but overall the response and student evaluations of the project assured us that students were engaged and most importantly, community was achieved. On an unexpected side note, our first semester grade point average rose to the highest level in five years, with no change in entering student academic profile. Of course we already look forward to repeating the project with our next student cohort.

Check out the final productions and let me know what you think.

Mystery/Thriller

Blair Witch

Western

Romantic Comedy

Action/Adventure

Musical

Crime/Gangster Part I and Part II

Zombie

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In my last post, I gave somewhat of an overview of major placement conferences for candidates in Student Affairs. In this post I hope to share a few tips for all you Higher Education/Student Affairs job searchers out there who are attending a placement conference this season.

During my 15-year career in Student Affairs, I was on both sides of the interview table at placement conferences, and can offer you some perspectives that will hopefully set you at ease and help you be more confident, and more prepared.

Save your money now. These things can get expensive!

• Ask your employer if professional development funds can be spent to attend a placement conference. For many institutions, the answer will be “no,” and you shouldn’t be surprised or offended by this. It’s just where many employers draw the line in the sand. Institutions give PD money to help their employees learn new skills and enhance their skills sets, but it’s not realistic to expect your current employer to help you find a new or better job.
• Find a roommate (or two or three) to share lodging expenses. The nightly rates at convention hotels are usually pretty moderate. (For example, nightly rates at preferred hotels for this year’s ACPA convention range from $199/night for a single room to $259 a night for a quad.) And don’t forget about parking, which will probably be in the $35/$40 per night range, or taxis and shuttle service to and from the airport if you are not driving in.
• If you have your own transportation, and can find a less expensive non-conference hotel near public transit, then drive in, or take the bus, and save some money.
• Take advantage of free in-room coffee and free continental breakfasts (if your hotel has them). It’s also easier than you might think to find yourself skipping breakfasts, or unwilling to fight the teeming throngs trying to get breakfast at the same time. It’s also a good idea to bring snacks to your room, in case you are pressed for time and need to eat and run.
• Bring a water bottle and refill it when you can rather than buying drinks at hotel/convention center prices.

Have all your ducks in a row before you get there.

• Make sure your resume is impeccably written, targeted toward the positions you hope to apply for, grammatically correct, well laid-out, and easy to read. Placement centers will give you a candidate number. Make sure it is on your resume and that all pages stay together. Staples are fine at a placement center. Take a stapler and use it. When an interviewer has a huge pile of resumes and interview forms and brochures and giveaways to deal with, the last thing they want to do is spend their time searching a pile of loose papers for one errant page of your resume that got separated from the rest, because your paper clip slipped off.
• Speaking of candidate numbers, many candidates these days make personalized message to employer forms that give a brief statement of interest, and leave room for the candidate to write in the employer number and the posting number on the form. If you do make your own, consider using colored paper. It stands out. As a conference interviewer, I always liked these, as long as messages were brief and concise. They also helped me find a candidate’s packet more easily.
• Make contact ahead of time with potential employers about listings posted before the conference. Ask to pre-arrange an interview for your position of interest. Many employers pre-arrange a significant number of their interviews when possible.
• Make sure all your references have been prepped about your goals for the placement exchange, any positions you are planning to apply for, and your reasons for applying for certain types of positions.

Be on Your Best Behavior. At All Times!

• It won’t matter how you are dressed or how you interview if you make an ass out of yourself in some other way. Some do’s and don’ts:

• Do:
  • Come prepared for each interview
  • Be friendly to the interviewers and to other candidates
  • Stay positive
  • Thank your interviewers for their time at the end of the interview
  • Network with other candidates and encourage them in their job search
  • Use the preparation table areas to organize your thoughts and your materials
  • Wait a few minutes if the interviewer is running late. Since most interviews run about 30 minutes, you should feel free to go after 10 minutes. But these are very busy days and people do get off-course. If you have back-to-back interviews, let the interviewer know.

  Don’t:

  • Schedule back-to-back interviews (if you can help it). You’ll need time to get from one place to another and you will periodically need a break.
  • Badmouth, make fun of, or make rude comments about an interviewer, a university, another candidate, your boss, your current employer, or basically, anyone. This means in the placement center, the hotel, the lobby bar, the McDonald’s across the street…wherever. If you need to vent or talk out frustrations, go to your hotel room and talk with your conference roommates or call a friend or family member on the phone. For everyone else, act like it’s raining daisies and nothing could be finer.
  • Stay in the placement center all day (especially if you are not especially busy at some given time with interviews.) This can lead you to think too much, stress out, and get down on yourself. You will need fresh air and walking-around time. Take it.
  • Flirt with your interviewer or other candidates, make inappropriate jokes or off-color comments, or go on and on and on about how many top scholars you know in the field. It’s boorish behavior and it will count against you in the eyes of many employers.
  • Expect to leave the placement center with a job in hand. Most universities just don’t work that way. There are human resource guidelines to follow, and many student-services positions really like to involve students, colleagues in related departments, and upper administrators in their selection processes, and it’s unlikely that all of these parties will be represented on the interview team.

Learn Something!

• If the placement center is part of a longer conference with professional development sessions, go to some! They are great places to network, you might learn something new that leads you to explore additional opportunities, and you will need a break from the placement center.
• If you have the option of talking about your career or some topic of interest with more experienced professionals, do it. Sometimes, these opportunities come up in sessions. Sometimes, they come up on the sidewalk, in a restaurant or at a volunteer post.

Volunteer!

• Volunteering is a great way to get informal opportunities for networking, to learn how the conference is organized, and to be of service to other candidates.
• It’s also fun. Did I mention that you are likely to need a break from interviewing? This is one way to take a break but depending on what you volunteer for, you may end up volunteering in the placement center. Just be sure that you are doing it during an actual opening in your interview schedule!

Best of luck to everyone interviewing this season!

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With both the DAYTIME #sachat and EVENING #sachat in full swing yesterday, it’s safe to declare Thursday as #sachat day! The topic yesterday was Connecting with Students on Facebook, and once again we set new records for conversing and learning. The conversation produced 581 comments from 87 student affairs professionals!

In case you missed it, below is a quick recap. If you haven’t yet participated in an #sachat, learn more here.

Full Transcripts
DAYTIME:
View as webpage
Download as PDF
EVENING:
*There was a tech error with the EVENING transcript. We’re working on getting the transcript.

Last Night’s Top Contributers
@edcabellon
@cindykane
@reyjunco
@debrasanborn
@pereirap80
@thestacyface
@brockter
@lvanlysal
@gballingerjr
@ediemccracken

Here’s to another successful #sachat. See you all next week! In the meantime, make sure to join our Facebook Page.

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After some degree of reflection on my career path these days, I’ve noticed that at every stop along my journey I have had some role or charge related to starting a new leadership program.  Whether you think of “program” as a leadership event or as a comprehensive four (or five!) year approach, I think a lot of campuses are reinventing their approach to leadership development.

At my campus right now, we are building some momentum around leadership because it’s made its way into the strategic plan. (insert dance of JOY from me!!)  This doesn’t mean that we don’t already have existing leadership programs that meet with good success in areas like residence life, athletics and in my office (Student Involvement and Leadership).  We’re honestly in pretty deep with these programs in these areas in addition to a couple of isolated academic courses.  Even though we’re in the middle of this already, I’m beyond excited for the potential that comes with institutional commitment and potential synergy in collaboration.

So, the light finally shines on an area I’ve been excited to get started for a number (not saying!) of years now on campus…what next?  Where do you start when there is finally “permission” to dream for your campus?  Join me in some planning and tell me what you think…

• Leading Change by John Kotter is an essential resource for anyone planning a change effort or who is overwhelmed by the change process.  Kotter’s fairly straightforward analysis of the change process reminds me to be patient and build momentum around this process.  I need to be intentional, build stakeholders, and not rush forward on what I believe needs to get done immediately.
• I don’t think we need to need to choose a leadership model.  I think our job is to offer a variety of models in a variety of settings for dialogue about what leadership actually means.  If students are able to grow in their personal definition of leadership, then they can pursue activities and opportunities that take their definition deeper.
• There is much to be gained from involvement of student leaders from the beginning of these conversations.  I’m hoping to include plans for student interns and directed study projects that let advanced students get the opportunity to influence knowledge about leadership for their peers.

• I believe our goal needs to be a “comprehensive” leadership program that includes…

1. Leadership training: Training for positional leaders (RA’s, club officers, etc.) on how to be more effective at managing their responsibilities.
2. Leadership development:  Campus-wide initiatives to cultivate broader understanding from students that they possess the potential to lead and increase their willingness to accept the challenges of leadership wherever they are presented.
3. Leadership education:  Educating more students about the art and science of leadership including exploration of leadership models, attributes, skills and case studies.

I am hoping to develop a series of posts about our journey toward connecting our many disparate parts of leadership education efforts on campus.  To start, what do YOU think needs to be considered when starting from the ground up… when you’ve already started the pieces a long time ago?

Next time…we’ll talk assessment.

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I got some great feedback on my last blog post on Teaching Twitter to Colleagues.  So I decided to do a quick video follow up!  Assuming that you’ve now got all your colleagues and friends on Twitter, now what?!?  How do you manage all the Tweets and filter out the noise?  Here is a quick five minute video that shows you how I use Twitter everyday to stay connected:

How do you use/manage Twitter to make it work for you?

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Springtime…the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and at colleges across the country, a young person’s fancy turns to thoughts of…unemployment?

In Student Affairs, this can only signal one thing…placement season is here. It’s time to brush up the resume, line up the references, check job postings, write cover letters, practice interview, really interview, and hope for the best. One part of this cycle in higher education is the placement conference, where candidates by the hundreds can answer the cattle calls of multiple employers, line up several interviews, and kick their search into a higher gear.

The three-hundred pound gorilla of placement centers these days is the Placement Exchange. A joint venture of ACUHO-I, ASCA, NACA, NASPA, NODA, AFA and HigherEdJobs.Com, this year’s exchange is being held in Chicago from March 3-7, just prior to the NASPA Annual Conference. According to the Placement Exchange’s website, 5070 interviews for 359 positions were held at last year’s conference in Seattle.

Two other larger conferences also offer placement centers: ACPA and the OshKosh Placement Exchange. ACPA hosts Career Central at their annual convention, held this year at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston from March 19-23. The OshKosh Placement Exchange is hosted by the University of Wisconsin-OshKosh and is in its 31st year.

For candidates that have a more regional focus, several regional organizations also hold placement conferences, including MACUHO’s Mid-Atlantic Placement Conference in Lancaster, PA from February 26 to 26 and the Southern Placement Exchange from March 11 to 14 in Memphis, TN. There are more, but these are the ones I could find while preparing for this article. If you know of another, please send it along, and I will make note of it in a future post.

For candidates that have never taken part in a large placement conference, the prospect of competing with several hundred people for positions can be pretty daunting. ACPA offers a great Guide to Demystifying Career Central at the Convention as a downloadable .pdf.

This guide offers steps for success before, during and after the interview, sample questions to help candidates prepare, resources and tips on handling illegal questions, negotiating an offer, planning your relocation, and more. These practical resources should be an asset to anyone in the Higher Ed/Student Affairs job market. I recommend reading it through well in advance of participation in any placement conference. It will give you a great feel for the placement experience.

Best of luck to you if you are a candidate this hiring season! In my next post, I will share some tips of my own. Though I probably can’t be as comprehensive as the ACPA Guide, I have been on both sides of the interview table at placement conferences, and can offer you some perspectives that will hopefully set you at ease and be more confident, and more prepared.

I’d also like to try a Twitter experiment to help keep the conversation going this placement season. If you are a candidate with a question about placement or an experienced professional (or employer) who has advice and perspectives to offer, please hashtag your placement questions and comments with #saplacement. Users can then follow these comments using their Twitter client and those of us with employment-related blogs and websites can post links to the trending topic or incorporate a feed to help others follow the conversations and add in their questions and advice. Let’s see if we can create a huge collaborative conversation that will help our colleagues and students succeed this placement season!

(This post is a cross-posting from my blog at  higheredcareercoach.com where you can find a Twitter feed tracking the #saplacement hashtag. Let’s get the conversations underway!)

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If you cannot view this poll click here.

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Thanks again to @tomkrieglstein and @DebraSanborn for allowing me to moderate this week’s #sachat!  I had a great time and gained a new appreciation for what goes into managing this fantastic weekly #studentaffairs conversation!

Tonight’s #sachat on “Making the Most of Conferences” was a fantastic discussion!  The one hour conversation produced 608 comments from 54 student affairs professionals! We are continuing our strong 2010 start to #sachat.  We hope those of you who participated, enjoyed it and will share the information you learned with others!

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If you cannot view this poll click here.

And here are the results from the last poll.

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