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Connecticut College’s Connections curriculum helps liberal arts students participate in interdisciplinary and experiential learning, and a new pilot intervention embeds focused storytelling around their college experiences and how it relates to careers.
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Creating clear pathways from higher education to careers is a focus for policymakers, university leaders and students themselves, but finding ways to deliver effective career preparation that connects to each student’s experiences can be difficult.
Some institutions have implemented career prep across the curriculum or in first-year seminar courses to ensure all learners take advantage of career development opportunities. At Connecticut College, a new pilot program provides students the opportunity to reflect on their learning and personal experiences to find connections between college and career.
Students Say
A May 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found 38 percent of respondents said colleges should prioritize or place greater focus on helping students prepare for internship and career success, the second most popular option of seven possible responses, after “helping students find internship and job possibilities.”
The background: All students at Connecticut College participate in an established, structured liberal arts curriculum that allows them to pursue independent research housed in two types of programs, an Integrative Pathway or a center for interdisciplinary scholarship.
The college has five centers for interdisciplinary scholarship and a certificate program or six pathways from which students can select. At that point, they identify an “animating question” to hone over three years. Each curricular offering has required courses that help set an overview of the student’s learning but then narrow into a specific discipline or field, such as community action, peace and conflict, public health, or arts and technology.
Completing an experiential learning component is required—typically an internship or a study away experience related to their animating question. As the culmination of their inquiry, all graduating seniors present or speak on a panel in a collegewide symposium, sharing their guiding question, research and experiences at the college.
Digging deeper: This year, the college piloted a senior seminar session for participants on the Creativity Pathway to connect their experiences to future careers.
“The missing piece of this Connections curriculum was closing the circle and teaching the students how to talk about their successes throughout their Center and Pathway experiences,” says Dot Wang, director of career development and curricular management in the Hale Center for Career Development.
Wang served as a practitioner in the Creativity Integrative Pathway and piloted a session specifically for these students to help them identify how their work in college can spur career and life choices beyond higher education.
“Through this reflection they see how they have shaped their liberal arts education, customizing it around what matters to them now and into the future,” Wang says.
The end goal is helping students build their career storytelling skills, or the ability to articulate their experience to a broad audience as well as connect and leverage skills and hands-on learning beyond their three-year pathway, Wang adds.
In the pilot, students within the Creativity Pathway belonged to a variety of majors, including English, art, biology and psychology. Wang brought in examples from alumni and how their pathway experiences led to their first placement out of college.
Seniors were also tasked with reflecting on how creativity is important in today’s context, amid the rise of generative artificial technology, and how their skills can be an asset to them.
The impact: One of the challenges in career development is helping students share their stories and how their career ambitions relate to their personal experiences and the broader community or world, Wang says.
Connecticut College students are more equipped to do this, compared to their peers at other institutions, through their presentation at the symposium and the reflection exercise.
“This career storytelling sets them apart from all the other liberal arts students and showcases their understanding of the interconnectedness of all things, and their role in shaping future initiatives and projects,” Wang says.
The college plans to track the first destination of Creativity Pathway students as one way to measure the effectiveness of this preparation and if students were able to leverage their education and experiences.
“I hope to ultimately create customized connecting career sessions to deliver to all our integrative pathways and our Centers for Interdisciplinary Scholarship/Certificate Programs,” Wang says.
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