Director, Career Success Center, Western Connecticut State University

My name is Kathleen Lindenmayer and I'm the Director of the Career Success Center. Our job is to get students ready to get out there into the world of work and we do that in many, many different ways. We try to work it through their academics, through their clubs, through just being in, I've got to get in front of the students' food and their phone. So my job is really a marketing person to try to get into where the students are whether they are, while they're eating or while they're looking at whatever they're in their phone to get them to know that once they get out of here, there's a world that they have to be prepared for. We offer a lot, both in person to person, face to face, as well as online. I think we've done quite a bit of work over the last year or so, trying to bring, not just the career fairs but one-on-one coaching. We had a lot of networking events. We do a lot of workshops designed to everything from Linkedin to of course everyone knows about the resumes and whatever, but branding yourself. I go into classrooms, so I'm hoping that students will ask us to their groups or classrooms. We do a lot of one-on-one time with them. Once they start with us, they continue. Once they get that little bit of, oh this is what it takes. Yeah I need to develop this piece more. I need to more about myself before I can really understand what is it out there that I really wanna do. Once we get them, they do come back several times. And what's really kind of cool is after they graduate, they know that they have a lifetime use of our services, so they frequently come back here after graduation as they continue in their career transitions.