Last Thursday night, I walked into the campus bar with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Peanut Butter Cup ice cream and threw four plastic spoons on a table. A few booths over, a group of fellow seniors applauded and raised their glasses. “We’re all in this together” seemed to be the mentality that filled the room along with some M.J. throwbacks and the misplaced scent of fried mac and cheese balls. Before I even had a chance to take my jacket off, a friend asked the forbidden question: “So, do you have plans yet?” Every senior knows by now that “plans” doesn’t refer to plans for tonight but rather implies plans for the Future — that cringe-worthy F word that most college seniors do not want to acknowledge until their tassels are turned.
I’ve been asked this question many times in the past few months, and while my answers have usually varied from “No, please stop talking,” to “Nah, but I’ll figure it out maybe,” I finally reached a place of calm when thinking about the vast, open space that is my Future After Conn. During the last week of winter break, I attended an intensive career preparation workshop designed by Conn’s Academic Resource Center (ARC) and sponsored by Diane Y. Williams ’59, retired executive of Merrill Lynch. Called “Now Hiring!” the pilot program was offered to 12 seniors, selected through an application process, and included focused workshops on communication, finance and technology skills.
Despite Conn’s rigorous academic schedule, the week of January 12, 2014 was the most intense of my time here. “Now Hiring!” beat out any senior seminar class I’ve taken in terms of workload. As I sit here, flipping through our 1” binder syllabus for the /week/, I am having flashbacks to how exhausted I felt by the last night of the program. As one of the seniors remarked mid-week: “It’s a good kind of exhausted.” It was well-earned. Every night when we went to bed around 1 a.m. (if we were lucky), we felt like we had accomplished something worthwhile and productive. It was comforting, in a way, to see our Liberal Arts skills being put to practical use.
I will admit that I was skeptical in the weeks leading up to the program. ARC Director Noel Garrett had been fairly quiet via email and only reached out to let us know the time of our opening dinner. By Day 3, we realized why he hadn’t given us an itinerary until we were moved in: none of us would have shown up.
The workshops went from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day with a roughly one-hour lunch break. But the fun continued well into the night with various homework assignments and group presentations to prepare for the following days. The 12 of us survived off unlimited coffee from Conn’s catering services and Garrett’s infectious enthusiasm for the program.
Each day, we would meet in Blaustein 203, usually with the CELS counselors or Shain Library staff. Day 1 was dedicated to personal branding and marketing, and the infamous “Elevator Speech” — a roughly 30-second spiel that lets your audience know who you are (a.k.a.: the time it takes to ride in an elevator with a stranger who could turn out to be your next boss). While many students would groan at the phrase “Elevator Speech” after not doing much with it in a CELS workshop, the 12 of us were required to stand up in front of a room of 20 or so people and pitch our speeches. Afterwards, we were given constructive feedback on how to improve in a real-life networking situation. I personally froze for a second realizing that 20 sets of eyes were on me as I rambled off a list of my accomplishments, but by Day 4, when we had to do this exercise again, the improvements that everyone made were astounding for only a few days’ time.
“Now Hiring!” was career prep boot camp. But with more Camel cookies and less physical activity.
The subsequent days saw intense resume workshops, presentations on Excel, PowerPoint and Prezi (which Garrett highly recommends if you’d like your presentation to be the equivalent of sending your audience on a rollercoaster ride) and strategies for using social media in a professional setting. On Day 4, Joyce P. Jacobsen, Andrews Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University, spoke to us about personal finances and walked us through how to make a budget. She first gave us a worksheet and let us blindly figure out costs. I’d say we did okay, but overall underestimated the cost of living on our own: who knew you should budget so much money for food? And who knew car insurance was so expensive? And who knows what our starting salaries are going to be?
The program wrapped up with a real-life case study project. We were divided into three groups of four, and given a set of questions to answer regarding a local business, Preston Ridge Vineyard from Preston, Conn, run by Andrew and Cara Sawyer. Working with our groups (until late late hours of the night), we all created 45-minute long presentations aimed to provide the Sawyers with suggestions for increasing their revenue and expanding their brand.
Pacing the floors of Cro at 2 a.m. and spouting out facts about grapes and wine that we just learned three hours before was unlike any other experience I’ve had at Conn so far. And pitching our ideas to the Sawyers themselves the next day was a valuable glimpse into the business world that I feel many Conn students don’t have experience with (unless they’re part of certain business-oriented majors).
“Now Hiring!” took 12 seniors from a diverse range of interests and backgrounds (economics, pre-med, English, philosophy, etc.) and put us through a demanding shared experience. I learned so much about these 11 peers in five days than I have with friends I’ve known for a few years. And in turn, we learned so much from each other and the staff who worked with us. It was information overload. But productive information overload.
The workshops wrapped up with a wine tasting sponsored by Preston Ridge, and closing remarks from Garrett, Williams, James S. Berrien ’74 and President Bergeron. All four remarked on the apparent successes of the pilot program and offered us advice as we move into the next stages of our lives. I believe it was Berrien, current partner of Bentley, Farrell, Ahl and Berrien executive search firm, who reassured us that we would all find fulfilling careers, sometimes in places where we would least expect it.
After completing the program and recognizing what skill sets I have to offer future employers, I believe him. A Liberal Arts degree affords us an opportunity to translate our skills into a wide variety of careers. Maybe I will become a journalist. Maybe I will fall into a different career path by accident and be equally as happy. Only time will tell.
The only challenge I foresee in the future for “Now Hiring!” is keeping the workshops small and personal while simultaneously reaching more Conn students. The lessons and tips that we learned that week were invaluable, and more students should be able to share in this experience. What “Now Hiring!” did that a bigger CELS workshop of 50 or so students cannot is offer us this individualized attention and critique. We delved into exercises and lessons that we merely glazed over in other workshops. We had meaningful discussions about SWOT charts and Myers Briggs personality tests. These are things that I never even considered as being important in the job search process. While some friends have still groaned at the idea of an intensive career boot camp, I think Conn should be focused just as much on career preparation as promoting the overall Liberal Arts experience. The skills we learn during our time here are valuable, but seeing how they can translate into practical situations might be even more so. •
