CELS is great and everything. Getting 3 grand of our parents’ money back from the college to fund internships, smart idea. Having a center that teaches you how to not be an asshole in an interview, certainly helpful if you have the potential of being an asshole in an interview. Having one that connects you up to the Alums that will help you into industries, genuinely valuable. But CELS is the only center that prepares us for life after college in any significant way, and it consists of seven women working in a gingerbread house. Conn has that prototypical Liberal Arts fear of pre-professional majors. I mostly agree with it. Majors like Journalism and Accounting and Mechanical Engineering do give you a narrow track that often throws theory and history and Big Picture Thinking by the wayside. (That said, we don’t have effective resources for things like Media Studies and Graphic Design, pre-professionalsounding subjects that are actually just too relevant for our traditional curriculum and mindset to know what to do with. Allison de Fren, our New Media scholar, just reached the end of her 2-year postdoc fellowship. We now have nobody who specializes in the history or cultural impact of media – let alone digital media! – on the Connecticut College faculty. But this is a subject for another day.)
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