Junior Katie West is not the kind of person who passes up a good opportunity. So when Steve Malter, an associate director of undergraduate advising in the Olin School of Business, told her about a new class relating to academic and career development, West knew it was something she shouldn’t miss.
“It seemed like a great opportunity to learn as much as I could about what kinds of careers the different majors could lead to,” West said.
As it turns out, the course she enrolled in, “Managing Your Business Career Strategy,” is the first of its kind at the University and may very well be the first of its kind in the nation, according to Malter, who also is an undergraduate career adviser in the business school’s Weston Career Center.
The class helps students explore academic and career paths. Students learn how their classes could help with future career choices; they learn job-search skills; and they learn the particulars about the characteristics of various career options.
In designing the curriculum with Gary Hochberg, associate dean for undergraduate programs, Malter surveyed 50 to 75 syllabuses from other universities’ career programs in the hopes of finding some model to follow.
“I saw nothing like what we were trying to do,” Malter said. “We wanted to provide a blended approach, something that explored both academic and career options. Students get a realistic view of what kinds of course work they should take, depending on their major and what careers may come out of those majors.”
The for-credit class aimed at sophomores meets twice a week, once for a lecture and once divided into smaller discussion groups. For eight weeks, members of the Olin School’s faculty come and talk about the courses in their areas of expertise, and then there’s a career panel.
“We bring in actual practitioners — alumni mostly — who give advice on the practicalities of their careers and what the students need to take when they’re in school,” Malter said.
The practitioners also are open to questions from students — an opportunity that West took full advantage of.
“I talked to all the guest speakers; they were the most influential for me,” West said. “It was great to be able to ask anything about their careers, to get such a deep and broad perspective on what they did. Plus it was a great networking opportunity.”
The class made its debut a year ago and at the time, no one knew whether it would be a success. They needn’t have worried.
In the fall of 2004, the class had 71 students. This fall, the enrollment swelled to 126, and the class had to be divided in two sections for lecture; one is taught by Malter, the by Sally Pinckard, associate director of the Weston Career Center, who has been integral to the development of the course.
Although the course is meant for business school sophomores, about 30 percent of the students aren’t business students, Malter said.
Hochberg isn’t surprised by the course’s success. Hochberg and former business school Dean Stuart I. Greenbaum, Ph.D., came up with the idea during a meeting a few years ago. The topic of career education and job-search techniques came up, and that’s when Hochberg had his revelation.
“Something prompted me to say, ‘Isn’t it wrong-headed to treat academic advising and career counseling as two different things when they’re not?’ To the students, they’re all of one piece,” Hochberg recalled.
“It shouldn’t be that students are either knowledgeable about what classes to take or knowledgeable about how to prepare for a job search. Those two things should develop together.”
Malter was able to quantify the benefits the students derived from the class by looking at their certainty in choosing careers.
Kurt T. Dirks, Ph.D., associate professor of organizational behavior, and Chris P. Long, Ph.D., assistant professor of organizational behavior, got involved by helping Malter design an experiment to track students’ career certainty at the beginning and end of the semester with a career-decision scale. Malter used Long’s and Dirk’s classes to create a control group.
“By the end of the semester, students were 30 percent more certain of their academic and career choices than they were at the start,” Malter said. “We didn’t see that kind of jump in the control group. What’s more, the level of academic and career indecision decreased for class participants.
Even anecdotally, students reported getting a better sense of where they might be headed in life.
“I kind of knew I’d be interested in marketing, but I was surprised to learn about all the various ways of using a marketing degree,” West said. “I realized that investment banking sounded more interesting than I thought before.
“In the end, the class solidified my choice, so I wasn’t questioning if I was doing the right thing anymore.”
Senior Benjamin Schumacher, who is minoring in business, took the class last year. He said he regretted that the class wasn’t offered when he was a sophomore, because he missed out on the chance to plan his coursework better.
But he, too, walked away with a better sense of his options.
“By the end of class, I was certain that psychology and human resources really wasn’t my thing, even though I thought it might be when the class started,” Schumacher said. “But hearing people talk about their careers helped explain what all those different jobs were. Like when a consultant came to class I thought, ‘Oh, I get it,’ and for me that helped clarify what it means to be a consultant.”
In addition to the strong support Malter had from Greenbaum in creating and implementing the class, he also received plenty of encouragement from Glenn MacDonald, Ph.D., senior associate dean and the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Strategy, as well as the school’s current Dean, Mahendra Gupta, Ph.D.
Malter also met with professors from each of the eight disciplines in the business school to help formulate the curriculum. He also involved colleagues from the Weston Career Center and from undergraduate programs to teach some sessions.
What’s more, staff from the University-wide Career Center also teaches a few of the sessions.
“We’ve enjoyed the opportunity to continue to partner with the Weston Career Center at Olin by teaching several discussion sections of the ‘Managing Your Business Career Strategy’ course,” said Mark Smith, J.D., assistant vice chancellor and director of The Career Center. “The class is a tremendous opportunity for undergraduate students to build their career-planning skills.”
Malter and Hochberg will make a presentation at the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business’ November conference on undergraduate programs. Malter said he and Hochberg plan to present their model for the class and share the results of the ongoing experiment.