Developing an Early Career Exploration Program for Sophomores

Meredith Metsker:

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker, and today I’m joined by Michele Doran and Melanie Murphy, both of Denison University. Michele is the Senior Associate Director of Career Exploration and Melanie is the Director of Career Communities and Coaching. Thank you both for being here.

Michele Doran:

Thanks for having us. We’re really excited to be here to talk about the Journey Program.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, yeah, likewise. I am so excited to talk to you both today about that Journey Program, and I know we’ll get into more of the details later, but just as a quick teaser for the viewers and listeners today, the Journey Program is a four workshop program designed to help sophomores with early career exploration. And it sounds like it’s been going over really well, so well in fact that you’re consistently filling all the spots in the program and now have a wait list even. So I’m excited to dig into those details here in just a little bit. But before I get into my questions, is there anything else either of you would like to add about yourselves, your backgrounds or your roles there at Denison?

Michele Doran:

Yeah, yeah, sure. So again, Meredith, thanks for having us. I guess what I would add is that Melanie and I are both non-traditionalist in this role, meaning that we didn’t get our master’s in higher ed. We’re both from the private sector. So I have had a very nonlinear career. It’s been a journey. This is certainly not what I set out to do when I was a sophomore in college. And so again, but at this point, I can’t imagine doing anything else. And I feel so privileged to be at Denison and working with such a great team in the Knowlton Center, but also the students that we get to work with on a daily basis. It really is just an amazing experience.

Melanie Murphy:

Yeah, and I’m in the same boat as Michele, which I think helped us, both of us having nonlinear paths really helped us create this program together that pushes students to explore and imagine possibilities, but also reminds them that you’re not always going to know where life’s going to take you, and that’s okay. And so I think Michele and I both having that experience has helped us in creating a program that students will resonate with.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. And it’s funny how often I hear that career services professionals have nonlinear paths, which I think makes them just perfectly suited to advise students because as we all know, it’s very, very rarely a linear path. Okay. Well, before I get into the more specific questions about our topic today, I do want to kick us off with a question that I ask all of our guests on the podcast, and that’s what does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Michele Doran:

Yeah, sure. I’ll kick off. So at Denison, we’re very fortunate, again, I think this has to do with Adam Weiberg our president, but at Denison Career Everywhere means integrating career development into every aspect of the student experience. So it’s not just confined to them coming into the career center, it’s embedded throughout the campus and their courses and their co-curriculars and beyond.

Melanie Murphy:

And I’d just add it’s not confined to a time or a place or anywhere specific. It’s an integral part of our daily lives. So everything we do, every experience, every interaction, every skill leads us on those chaotic pathways we didn’t know might exist. So Career Everywhere is living every day and then building these skills that you never know how they’re going to come in handy.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s great. It sounds like you all are walking the walk when it comes to Career Everywhere there at Denison with the Journey Program and all of your other initiatives. So I’m excited to learn more. So on the note of the Journey Program, I think to start us off, I think it would just be great to get some context. Can you just tell me what the Journey Program is, what it entails, and so on?

Melanie Murphy:

Yeah, I’ll jump in. So we developed the Journey Program to really provide a really immersive and intentional experience to engage students in the really important work of self-reflection and career planning. All career centers do this. We knew it was important, but we really were focused on that word intentional. How do they intentionally explore? So the program is geared towards students in their sophomore year, though we won’t ever turn anyone away. We have seniors who complete this program because they realize how valuable it is. And we hold the program over two days. So generally we run it prior to the start of the academic term. So students get to come back to campus early and they spend two days really immersed in this process. So we do it before they return early from summer break, they return early from winter break, and then we do a nice fall retreat as well in the woods in a beautiful setting over our fall break as well.

And for students to have that time to set aside, they’re not thinking about class, they’re not thinking about homework assignments. They really can spend two days fully immersed in this. It really is a game-changer. It really sets it apart from other programs that might be one or two hour workshops embedded into a really busy academic time. So throughout the program, our facilitators are guiding students in small group cohorts, helping them really gain clarity and confidence to embrace their future with excitement and possibility and promise and all those things we want them to feel. So specifically, we divide it into four 90 minute workshop sessions. So those are reflect, imagine, plan, and build.

So reflect is when we really have students looking back at all the things they’ve done in high school and in their early first year of college and really think about what motivates them, what fulfills them? In Imagine they start thinking about what are the ways they might want to live their life? And it’s beyond careers. We talk to them about where do you want to live? How important is money to you? What does wealth mean to you? Where are the places you might want to live? What kind of time do you want to have devoted to the things you care about personally?

And then we move on to plan. So in planning, they’re really thinking about intentionally building the ways that they’re going to use their time at Denison to build those skills and those values and their habits that are going to help them achieve their goals. And the last one is build. So then during build, they are thinking about really creating solid roadmaps for where’s this going to take them? They work on resumes and cover letters and all those essential building blocks of a strong career. Part of this too is that we provide them with a really interactive workbook that’s got a lot of information and really where they can work alongside the program so they’re really engaged and in the moment with it. And that can carry them through the rest of their time at Denison too. We hope that they bring that workbook back and sit with coaches and talk about it.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Yeah, that’s a great overview and I love… I don’t remember which phase it was in, but it struck me how you’re not only just helping them plan for maybe this career idea that they have right now, you’re giving them the tools to change their minds later on. And if they do change their minds, they know the steps they need to take to evaluate, is this the right path for me? Is it realistic? What do I need to do to get there?

Melanie Murphy:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s not so much about, maybe they plan three great careers out, that they absolutely end up doing one of those. But even if they don’t, having that framework, having the ability and the confidence in themselves to know, “Okay, I think I want to do this. I know how to determine if it’s right for me. I know how to do an audit and see if it fits with my values and my skills and my habits,” and then plan for it. Yeah, that’s something that they’ll have then in their toolkit that they can use over and over and over again because we know they won’t just have one career. They’re likely going to have many.

Meredith Metsker:

And they’ll probably change majors at some point. I know I did at least once. So I am curious with each of these four sections, how are they formatted? I know there’s the workbook that they can follow along, but is it a lecture format or are there activities? What are some of the things that you’re doing to facilitate each of these four workshops?

Michele Doran:

So each section, we have a learning activity. So part of it is we will, I hate to use the word lecture, but we’ll explain an outcome. So we talk about the chaos theory of careers, the continuum of focus, random exploration, focused exploration and commitment. And then we will have an activity, small group discussion. So most sessions have two activities. We always embed time for small group discussion because we think breaking it down and vocalizing what they’re thinking and having their peers weigh in is really important. There’s homework in each section. And then at the end on the last session, they’re also, the last page in their workbook is their commitment. In the next week, I commit to doing X. In the next month I commit to doing this. I’m going to join this career community. It’s very interactive. We’re not just standing there talking to them for two hours during the sessions. It’s broken down and they have homework after each session as well. So they’re using some of our resources or they’re working on their resumes or using LinkedIn and finding out who they could be networking with in their respective career communities.

Melanie Murphy:

My favorite element of it is that peer-to-peer piece. It’s really fun to watch them. And when we break down into these small group cohorts and they really get to know each other over these two days to start to help each other and see maybe make recommendations or, “Hey, did you know this club or organization exists on campus? And that might really help you with what you’re looking at.” Or, “Hey, my cousin does this and I’d love to get you in touch with them.” It really helps. It helps them see that Career Everywhere, that they’re not only here at Denison planning their own career, all their peers are doing that as well. And it really to see them helping each other with it is really cool so that those small cohorts and that peer to peer conversation time, it really becomes oftentimes us as facilitators get to step back and we just listen to them talk to each other about it and have those conversations, which is really powerful.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I bet. I imagine that helps cement what they just learned too, if they have a chance to discuss it immediately with their peers as opposed to just taking it in and then moving on to the next thing. So I am curious, could you share some examples of some of the activities that you do in each of the workshops?

Melanie Murphy:

Yeah.

Michele Doran:

Sure. Melanie, do you want to take this one?

Melanie Murphy:

Yeah, I’ll share one and then you can share one Michele if you want. One of my favorite activities that they do is their future self-introduction. That is always a highlight for me. So we have them think through, you’re coming back to Denison. It’s your, I forget if we say 10 or 20 year reunion and you’re here and you’re ready to talk to students about your career path, and they actually write out and introduce themselves as that future person. And you can always see how nervous they are to do that, to put those words to paper. But then hearing them say it is just so much fun. To hear them introduce themselves as that future research analyst or that future lawyer or that future person who’s really making an impact in medicine. And we encourage them when they do that, to not just focus on the career. They include the dogs they’re going to have and their pets and where they’re living and what life is like for them. What kind of habits and hobbies do they have? And so that’s a really impactful component of it that I appreciate.

Michele Doran:

And I’ll talk about on day one session one, we do an activity called Explore your Preferences. And this is where it’s really laying the groundwork and time for them to consider questions that they haven’t thought of. So asking them, where do you imagine yourself living after graduation? How far or how close do you want to be to family? What kind of salary or standard of living are you actually thinking about that you want to obtain? And for many of them, it’s the first time that they’re really thinking through this and putting thoughts on paper. Are you an outdoor person? If you love hiking, but you’re thinking you want to live in New York City, how does that align? And that’s an eye-opening experience for them session one, thinking about, “Oh gosh, maybe I need to think about these things.” And so that’s pretty powerful as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Thinking back to my own experience, I don’t think I really considered that aspect of it at all. I just thought, “What does work look like?” Didn’t think about the life part of that work-life balance, and that made a big difference for me because I transitioned. I started my career in journalism and moved to marketing because partly the work-life balance was really challenging, and it was like everything else outside of the newsroom was difficult, the pay, the hours, the stress, the balance. I’m like, “Maybe if I had thought more critically… I have no regrets, but maybe if I had thought more critically…”

Melanie Murphy:

Are the things they want to do congruent with the life they want to lead? So that’s what we really focus this on and what kind of life do you want to lead? Career is a part of that life, and it’s a big part of that life. One of my favorite stories and experiences as the student who really, really was pretty set on achieving a consulting gig with one of the big three consulting firms, but was also very, very adamant about the amount of time that they would spend traveling and doing personal fun projects early on in their career and spending a lot of time with family and friends. And when they realize that those two things might not line up really well, given the actual demands of that particular career field, especially early on in your career, they really had to make some decisions of, “Okay, which one of these things is more important to me?” And start to do that early on versus when you’re in it and then maybe regretting it.

Meredith Metsker:

At that point, it can sometimes feel like it’s a little too late, the stakes are higher. All of a sudden it’s your income that’s now on the line. Okay. So in our prep call, you mentioned that the program has been going really well. People are starting to hear more about it, students are telling each other about it, and now there’s a wait list, I believe. So how many students are accepted per workshop? What does that look like?

Michele Doran:

This workshop we made spots for 70. We actually are admitting 74. So this will be an interesting logistics problem because it’s going to be moving a small army, but we will persevere and we’re excited to… Again, we do have that small group element which allows that really personal interaction. So in all total, we have about 426 students now since we’ve been doing Journey who have completed the program, but we’ve had different iterations. Obviously that started during COVID, so we were virtual at that point.

Melanie Murphy:

And the growth has been slow. It takes time for something new to catch on campus. And so we have this balancing act of wanting to expand and scale and really get as many students through the program as possible while still keeping that intimate conversation with your peers and with your coach and that opportunity to feel vulnerable in a smaller group that you might not feel comfortable doing if you’re not in a smaller setting like that. And so we’re constantly balancing that and trying to find ways to keep that relational aspect of it really strong.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. So on that note, how many people on your team are involved in facilitating each program?

Michele Doran:

Typically, well, there are the behind the scenes people too who are doing all the reservations for food and buses and things like that, or arranging for alumni, so I would say anywhere from six, this one will be a little bit larger, so six to 10 staff members.

Meredith Metsker:

So six to 10 staff members, about 70 participants per program.

Michele Doran:

That’s correct. And we’ve done many iterations. We’ve done small groups over four weeks. We really felt that didn’t work because Denison is very much a campus of busyness, and so students sort of drifted off after weeks three or four. So we’ve tried different iterations, some groups smaller, but this by far will be our biggest group.

Melanie Murphy:

That’s okay. I was going to say we’ve been given permission from senior leadership to really be able to play with this and see what works. And so we’ve tried all these different iterations and we know what really works is that two day before. Because as soon as classes begin and athletic schedules and all of that, it is really hard to set the realities of day-to-day aside and just spend two days thinking about yourself and your future.

And so this is really where the sweet spot is. So we’re trying to lean into this model. Space is always a consideration for that then. In the ideal space, we would love to host it in our building, so we’re capped at that somewhere between 70 and 75, but I think that’s a unique thing for people to play with and see what works well on their campuses. It may work for some people, spreading it out over several weeks might work better. And I think that’s what’s really cool about the way we designed this is that it is a program that’s packaged into four smaller programs that really can be held in different ways, different shapes. We’ve done it virtually, we’ve done it half day, full day, one session a week throughout multiple weeks. And so giving yourself that flexibility to see what works and what doesn’t for your own campus, I think is really important.

Meredith Metsker:

And just to confirm, at least in the current iteration, there’s two programs that are offered on campus in your center, and then there’s one, the fall session that is off campus, correct?

Melanie Murphy:

Yeah, we take a group of students away. We’re lucky to have a state park lodge that’s about an hour away so that we take them to this beautiful setting. They’re in the woods and they’re in this old lodge, and they’re able to really, really step away. And I find, I don’t know about you, Michele, but I find that one even tends to be more impactful. You’re not near your dorm, you’re not near the typical. You’re really away. It really has that feel of a retreat, just like we go on professional retreats. It has that ability to say, “Okay, I’m stepping away from campus and I’m stepping away from all of this to really focus on myself for two days.” And that’s really impactful. I’d love to do more of that.

Michele Doran:

Yeah, I agree. Although that’s the most expensive iteration of the program. And I also think because it brought a state park, the numbers had to be a little bit lower. So I felt that it was a little more intimate, that we got to know the students we were working with a little bit more. But again, we assess each iteration of the program and that received very positive feedback.

Meredith Metsker:

I think I personally would love that retreat feel, especially if it was out in nature, out in the woods, there’s fewer distractions. It sounds like it’d be a really nice environment. Okay. Well, now I would love to dig into the why here. I think we’ve covered a lot of good context about what the program entails, what it is. So can you tell me why you decided to develop the Journey Program?

Michele Doran:

So pre-COVID coming together as a coaching staff, we realized we were having conversations with juniors and seniors who were really rather late in planning their post undergrad coming in saying, “Oh, I’ll do anything. I’ll go anywhere.” Well, that’s 60,000 job postings on LinkedIn. So that’s a hard conversation to have. Or on the flip side, we would have students coming in and say, “Well, I am going to be X.” But to Melanie’s point about consulting, they really had not investigated or really understood what it took to get to that type of career or what that career entailed. So we really knew that we wanted them to start thinking ahead, that we wanted students to be intentional about their college experience. So by completing the Journey Program in their sophomore year, which is the ideal time, it them provides them an opportunity to create a roadmap for their remaining time at Denison.

So thinking about what do they need to do academically? Do they need to consider changing their major? For a lot of students is just understanding what their major with the skills they’re building from their major so that they can talk about that appropriately in the interview situation or on those amazing cover letters. Thinking what can they do over their winter summer breaks? Do they need to do summer research? So again, we began with a 90-minute program before COVID. We realized that that wasn’t really enough time to dive in and do the deep work that this needed. And so during COVID, we were afforded the opportunity to develop virtual program. And so this was a grant opportunity for us to really dive in and create something a little bit more robust.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. And I think in our prep call too, you were both mentioning that this directive came from the top, right? It came from senior leadership?

Melanie Murphy:

During COVID, it was like, “Okay, we needed to build some programming, engage some students.” And we are really fortunate at Denison to have a president who has really planted a flag in the ground and said, “We’re going to really focus on students’ careers and their pathways to building those careers, and it’s going to be part of the culture and part of the experience at Denison and just something that you do.” And not only does he say that, but he backs it up with the resources and the tools and the financial resources needed to be able to do that. And so we were able to send Michele to the National Research Center’s Sophomore Success Planning Workshop where she got to do a lot of learning and research and understanding of that sophomore year experience. We were able to pull together resources from Dr. Katharine Brooks, author of You Majored in What?

And I had a chance along with some other colleagues to go to Stanford and participate in the Designing Your Life work done by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. And we were given the opportunity from senior leadership to take all of this and put it together into something that felt uniquely Denison and our own. And so yeah, having that support from the top makes all the difference. It’s not an inexpensive program. There’s not a ton of expenses to it, but in terms of physical expenses, other than food, it does cost to feed students when they’re back early two days. The other costs are minimal. It doesn’t cost that much to print a workbook and it doesn’t cost that much. Our staff is already here and planning to do that. But if you’re working on a small budget, it can quickly eat a budget. So having senior leadership that understands the importance and the payoff that it will have long-term, I think is a really, really key element of this. And we’re not naive to that, that this would not be as successful as it has been without that support.

Michele Doran:

And it was a perfect intersection. We really started thinking about this work critically, again, pre-COVID, when somebody from residential communities, two of the leaders over there approached us and said, “Would you develop some programming for the dorms for sophomores?” Very specific. And then that led to us doing more research. Again, I got to attend that conference and I could talk all day on the research. I find it fascinating about the change between the first year and sophomore year. Hence, why we do it sophomore year and not first year. Again, and then to Melanie’s when we had that opportunity with COVID to really dig down in and use all the work that was out there and the research. And again, there’s a lot of research that’s done in the book Helping Sophomore Students Succeed. And so just putting it all together in a way that we felt met the needs of our students. There’s a lot of great work out there. So we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just put it together in a way that made sense for what we were trying to accomplish.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s so cool. That buy-in from the top just absolutely makes such a huge difference, especially these days where there’s just constant discourse about the ROI of a college education and that return on investment. What career outcomes are there going to be? And it sounds like you all are really well positioned to showcase, “Hey, we really focus on this. Here’s one specific program that you can participate in.” I think in the article about this Journey Program, and I’ll make sure to share a link to that in the show notes for anyone who’s watching or listening, but in the article, I think it was the lacrosse coach, the men’s lacrosse coach that was saying that he directs his players and recruits to the career center because he sees the value in it. That’s huge.

Melanie Murphy:

Yeah. It’s become culturally part of what you do here. So students know, “If I come here, I’m going to participate actively in my career.”

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, absolutely. And on this note of getting that buy-in and making it part of the campus culture, how you go about developing this program. Again, how’d you get the buy-in to create it? How do you market it? How’s it paid for? All that good technical stuff.

Melanie Murphy:

I think we’ve tried lots of different things. We are certainly a team that will try everything and what works we’ll keep and what doesn’t, we’ll try again. One of the fun little things that we’ve done that has worked and we do again and again is we send a postcard home that strategically hits right around the time when students are home for Thanksgiving break, so that hopefully it’s written to the student, but mom and dad maybe check the mail and see the postcard about the program and are quite motivated to encourage their students to attend. One of the things we ask students to do in the beginning is, “What brought you here?” And we have no shame when they say, “Mom and dad made me. I don’t want to be here. Mom and dad made me.” We’re fine with that because by the end, they’re really glad that they did it.

I had a student once tell me that she came to it because her dad made her. And she said towards the end of the two days, she called her dad and said, “Thank you for making me go to this. It’s one of the best experiences I’ve had so far and I’m really excited.” And he said, “Great, sign up for the next one too.” And she said, “But I’ve already done it, Dad, I don’t need to do it again.” And he said, “You plan on a whole nother career path, it’ll be totally fine.” So we rely on good old marketing tactics. There’s nothing totally creative or out of the box, it’s marketing to parents, letting them know about it. Michele and other colleagues in our exploration community are continually emailing students and talking about the benefit. I think one of the biggest things for us though has been the word of mouth.

When one student does it and they feel like, “Oh, okay, this isn’t so scary. I have a sense of what I might want to do, and I know that I’m not locked in. I can change this at any point in time. I can go a different direction,” and that they feel relief. It helps other students want to participate. So I think that’s a big thing. Then I would say going back to the senior leadership, having a president who mentions it in faculty meetings to the faculty and says, “Hey, you should encourage your students to attend.” Who says it in Welcome back emails to students and says, “Hey, this is something you should look at.” Who sends notes to families and says, “We’ve developed this great program. I really encourage you to send your students to it.” People listen. And so that helps tremendously as well. And Michele just writes great emails, so they all want to come.

Michele Doran:

I have to say in the beginning we were sending out emails and I was always running to Melanie, “Oh, Melanie, I only have so many students signed up.” She would talk me down from the edge, “Well, they’ll come, they’ll come.” And they did. And it was really great this time, again, sending out the emails and the next day I came in and the registrations were just off the chart. So I feel like we have gotten to the place where we wanted to be.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, you were saying you have a wait list now. So I’d say that’s successful. Okay, that’s awesome. So in terms of the budget, is it coming out of the career center’s operating budget? Is that how you pay for it?

Melanie Murphy:

Yeah, we pay for it out of our operating budget. We also have worked with our major gifts team though to have them float it to potential donors. We had a really interesting, we had a donor who paid for a networking reception for all participants of the Journey Program. So we brought alumni to that, and then anyone who was an alum or who had participated in the Journey Program before got to come to that. And that was funded by a donor who’s interested in potential future funding of larger portions of the program. So I think it’s a really great thing if anybody does anything like this, to talk to your major gift officers about it. Especially for, we never fail to hear from folks, “Oh my gosh, I wish I would’ve had that. How different would things have been for me if I would’ve had that?”

And so when you can identify the donors and the folks who are interested and motivated because of that, it’s not a hard sell in that sense. So we definitely have lots of donors who are interested in it. But yeah, right now, at the moment, it is part of our operating budget every year. But again, it is so impactful in that if you look at how many one-off programs you might do where you’re buying a pizza every single time and the cost that adds up to, or you’re doing lots of individual one-on-one appointments or small group coaching appointments. The cost, like I said, there’s a cost, but it really is just around the food and the printing of materials. We love taking it off campus. That’s expensive, but it certainly doesn’t have to be taken off campus. There’s ways to do it to minimize that budget for sure.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I was really glad that you mentioned the potential for employer sponsorships because that’s what popped into my head is you have this great opportunity, you have a captive audience for two days. That’s a great opportunity to get a potential employer’s logo. It’s in front of those students, and I know you all have a landing page for the Journey Program on your virtual career center. You can plug in employer logos there. There’s lots of good opportunities there to integrate them and maybe get the thing paid for. So that’s really cool. I’m curious, you’ve been running this Journey Program for a few years now. What have been some of the results or the outcomes you’ve seen since you started it?

Michele Doran:

Sure. So we assess each individual session because we want to make sure that we’re delivering content that is useful to the students. So I can tell you each iteration is usually around 92% of students who felt that they got what they needed from the program, that they met their expectations, or they would strongly recommend it to a friend. We have an NPS score, and so those are all good things. But what I truly love is reading the comments after each session. And a story I’ll share that Melanie alluded to, we do have students do the future self-introduction. And so this was a couple of years ago, a junior student who was going through the program had come to Denison to be a journalist. You’ll resonate with this, Meredith, wanted to be a journalist. That was it. He hadn’t looked at anything else. And so when he stood up to give his future self-introduction, he told me the next day, he’s like, “As soon as I said it, I knew,” in his heart and in his gut that it was not right, that he was not going to be a journalist.

And so that was the beginning of his junior year. So he had time to rethink some things, and he has since graduated and he is not a journalist, but doing well. We have a multitude of quotes from the students and they all talk about this opportunity to have the time and space. So I’ll just share one. It was a quote from a student. So it says, “This program can completely change someone’s thinking about their career and major. It gave me a lot more confidence and can give someone else a lot more. It can really make someone think about what they’ve done in the past. This helped me because I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I got to college.”

So we have hundreds of quotes that speak to that, but also there have been recommendations that we’ve taken. It’s like, “Oh yeah, that’s a good recommendation. We’re going to make that change.” We’ve had 426 students go through the program now. So we’re just now getting to our alumni cohort, so we’ll be working a lot with running some data to look at their outcomes compared to students who didn’t participate in the program.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s great. I’m so happy to hear that the feedback has been positive. Again, not only are they getting all this great information on helping to plan their career, but it gives them the information they need early in college if they need to change their major and help them really think about the why of it all. I’m sure they are probably like me when I was in college and everyone is asking, “What are you majoring in? What are you going to do when you graduate? What job do you want?” And it’s like, “I don’t know.” And now with this workshop, they have answers to those important questions.

Michele Doran:

And it’s really unfair we’re asking 19 to 20-year-old pick a job title and there’s like 20,000 job titles out there. How are they supposed to know? So it’s a daunting task for sure.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, and you just don’t know what you don’t know. Like you said, there’s so many different job titles and job directions you could go and you just don’t know about them sometimes. So yeah, that’s really cool. I’m glad to hear that it’s going over well. Again, in that same thread, I’m curious, what are your future goals for the Journey Program?

Melanie Murphy:

Yeah, so now that we’ve gotten… I would say so much of this beginning part of it has been really making it part of the culture here, getting it ingrained and just something which I think takes anything new, a good cycle of two to three, maybe even four years to really make something a part of the experience and part of something that is expected. We feel like we’re making really good progress there, and so now we’re really looking to extend training across our team so that more individuals can run this program, so that we can start to deliver it in more specialized ways. So we are a school that runs career communities. So we have seven career communities. Six of those are industry-based career communities. So we’re working with staff in those communities to think about how might they create Journey 2.0 where it is maybe more specialized to, okay, you’ve done all this exploratory work, you’ve gone through it now, how do you keep it going as you prepare for a career in consulting?

And so really looking at what those next layers are. I think the other thing, and we talked about this, about getting to scale, getting as many students as possible through the program. We have constraints like any other school would have with space and time and staffing. And so we’re looking at ways to make sure it’s accessible to all students. We have enough staff who can deliver the content, but then also thinking about students whose time might be really limited. So we’re running these in the early ,come back to campus early, but that might be really tough for athletes, for example, student athletes who maybe are in training and cannot get back to those earlier times. So we’re playing around with lots of different models and thoughts about how we can potentially reconfigure this to still get the experience and the content and the really great peer-to-peer connection and the relationship building with a coach, but do it in a way that supports various student needs.

So that could potentially take the form of an online program. It could take the form of working with athletics to do a specific program for an athletic team. I think possibilities there are large, and we just want to keep playing with that and seeing what works. So we’re really in growth phase. We will always revisit our content. We have not built this in a way where we run it the same every single time. Before every single iteration of this, the core team that designed it gets back together and we ask ourselves, we review the data from the students who participated previously, and then we ask ourselves, what’s working, what’s not? Where do students, when they’re participating seem bored? Where do they seem really engaged?

Just today, Michele and I had a conversation about changing the order of two different activities in one of the sessions because we think it might work better. We’re not sure, but we’re going to try it. We’re going to see and we’ll get feedback and then constantly iterate and change from there. So I think future goals is just to keep making it more accessible to all students, to as many as possible, and to keep integrating the changes. We’ve added elements of artificial intelligence and new tools as we’ve developed and brought new tools on board to our team and to our organization. So yeah, constantly refreshing it.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I feel like we’re going to have to check in another couple of years say, “What’s going on with Journey Program? What’s new?” Okay. Well, I’m curious, what advice do you have for other career leaders who may want to build something similar to the Journey Program, maybe especially if they don’t have that top-down support that you all have?

Michele Doran:

I think my advice would be start small. Don’t start with 70 students. Start with 10 or 15. Figure out what works. Take the student input. What did they enjoy? What did they need? What was missing? Start there. Build from there. Then when you have some data and maybe some outcomes like higher student appointments or higher engagement with a career office, whatever, then you have some things to take to leadership, maybe to request funding or to build and expand the program. But I always think it’s best to start small, tweak and adjust where needed before trying to blow it up and take it on more than you can handle.

Melanie Murphy:

Yeah, totally agree with everything Michele said. I think also showing and really making a case to senior leadership to say, “Here’s why this is important.” You’re not always going to be in a position where it’s something they’re thinking about. We recognize we’re very fortunate in that. But share examples of other schools where senior leadership is pushing that and the outcomes that they receive because of it. And if you start small, if it’s 10 students, that’s a small cost. So try early, get those early wins and move from there.

Meredith Metsker:

And for anyone who’s watching or listening, maybe direct your senior leader to listen to this podcast episode, be like, “This is an example of how it has done and how it has worked very effectively.”

Melanie Murphy:

Yeah, and Michele mentioned earlier that we’re now starting to have alumni who participated in the program. So I think as we get farther along in this and we’re able to really show positive long-term outcomes because of participation in this program, and hopefully affinity back too and appreciation to Denison for providing them with these resources. We always hear that when you say to somebody, an alum hears it and they say, “Gosh, I wish I would’ve had that.” We’re eventually going to get to the point where we have alums who say, “I had that and this is because I had that, this is what has happened.” But you have to have faith that it’ll get there and you have to trust the process. And as much of our work in higher ed is, it’s not immediate results. You have to wait a few years to see the benefit and the outcome of that. So yeah, we’re excited for that and truly believe that that impact will be there and are excited to do more with those alums who have gone through the program.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, yeah. I imagine it won’t just be the impact around career, but it’s going to be increase in enrollment and increase in alumni affinity and maybe giving back in terms of financial contributions. So it’s a win-win all around. All right, well, I want to be mindful of our time here, so I’ll probably start wrapping us up, but is there anything else either of you would like to add about the Journey Program or anything we’ve talked about today?

Michele Doran:

I think for both of us, honestly, again, it’s a labor of love. When I got to go to that first software workshop and coming home with all of this data and research, I was just so excited to share it with people. This was never in my career plan, but I feel privileged and excited to do it every day. So happy to talk to anybody who wants to talk about it.

Melanie Murphy:

Yeah, the only other thing I’d add to that is I’m also happy to talk to anybody about it. You’ve got to make it uniquely your own. So we made this. We didn’t reinvent the wheel. There’s a lot of great work and a lot of great research and a lot of great tools out there already. What we did do was we took what existed and we made it fit our campus culture and our students, what we knew they were looking for and wanting. And that makes it a little bit easier. And it feels like your own. It doesn’t feel like someone else’s program that we’re putting on. It feels like other really smart people have done the research and created these really amazing activities and tools and resources, and then we just packaged them in a way that speaks to our students uniquely. So think about what works for you, what works for your campus, and build from there.

Michele Doran:

And I do think students appreciate the fact that when we stand up there and we talk about what we’re going to be doing. These are not activities that we have made up for busy work. These are all things that have research behind them, and I think they appreciate that.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. On that note, maybe Michele, if you have any links to that research that you would want to share, let me know and I can include that in the show notes.

Michele Doran:

One of the things that I use the most is probably the book Helping Sophomore Students Succeed. It’s used a lot in graduate school for people in higher ed. That’s been really helpful. Again, Melanie already mentioned the Katharine Brooks’ book, You Majored in What? And the Evans and Burnett book Designing Your Life. But again, if you’re really looking for the research that’s in the Helping Sophomore Students Succeed.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, perfect. I will be sure to include links to all of those books in the show notes. So anyone watching your listening can go check that out. And on that note, Melanie and Michele, if people listening would like to connect with you, where’s a good place for them to do that?

Michele Doran:

For me? Happy to connect on LinkedIn or email Doran D-O-R-A-N-M at Denison.edu.

Melanie Murphy:

And same LinkedIn is a great place to find me. And also via email. My email is Murphy MA, so M-U-R-P-H-Y-M-A at Denison.edu.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, great. And again, I’ll be sure to include those emails and links in the show notes so people can reach out. All right, so to close this out, I like to do this thing at the end of every interview where we do an answer a question, leave a question thing. So I’ll ask you a question that our last guest left for you, and then you will leave a question for the next guest. So our last guest was Cheryl Rotliano from the Wake Forest University School of Business. And she left the following rather unusual question for you, which she often asks in interviews, and that’s what would you do if you found an elephant in your backyard?

Michele Doran:

So we chuckled over this because we knew we would have very different responses. So my response was I would call the local police department, find out who from animal control or whatever, could come out, tranquilize the elephant before it hurt somebody or got hurt and get it back to its rightful safe place.

Melanie Murphy:

Yes, and Michele and I had a good laugh when we shared our answer since we saw this question before and we were in her office laughing about it a little bit. I had a very different answer, which was I would first try to come up with a great name for the elephant. Trunks, is what came to mind first. And then I’d just want to see what the elephant wanted to do. Have a snack, play a game. I don’t know, jump on my trampoline maybe, something fun. So we’re having very different responses to the elephant, but I think it’s an example though of how working with some colleagues that would approach things very differently when you’re creating programs makes for an even better program because we can bounce those different unique ideas off of each other and land with something pretty great.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, absolutely. I know she’s going to love those answers because you’re right on that. She uses it as a way to just get a feel for people’s personalities, see how they would respond to something like that. So that’s great. What question would you like to leave for the next guest?

Michele Doran:

So this refers back to the Journey Program. So if you knew that education wasn’t a factor or salary, if no one would judge you, what would you do with your life?

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. I love that question. That’s a good one. I feel like that’s going to take some thought there.

Melanie Murphy:

Yeah, the big thing in there is no judgment. We ask students that they’re often, they’re judging their own answer. Before anyone else can even judge it. They’re judging their own. So yeah, no judgment. What would you do?

Meredith Metsker:

I’m curious. What have some of the students said? Has anything stood out?

Michele Doran:

That’s one of those questions that they don’t have to share because we really want them to think deeply about that and unpack the burden that they may be carrying as far as parental expectations or family expectations or their own expectations. So it’s like just sit with that a little bit. But it also ties into another activity called 10 Possible Lives, which we didn’t talk about. So sometimes it’s revealed in that activity.

Melanie Murphy:

Yeah, it’s all the things you would imagine, movie star, blogger, TikToker-

Michele Doran:

Singer, entertainer, the more creative things, I think.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I think the first one that came to mind for me was a travel writer of some kind.

Melanie Murphy:

And then what we asked them to do is think about ways you could integrate that into the life you have now. Maybe you’re not going to be a travel writer, but man, could you write after each of any travels you do take and incorporate it into your life in some way, shape, or form now? We often think we have to wait for the right moment to do one of those big things when we can incorporate a small slice of it for our lives now. So that’s what’s really fun about it, is when we do hear about it and they do share them, we say, “Okay, what part of it could you do now? There’s got to be some element in it that you can incorporate.”

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. I love that. That’s a great question. So I’ll be sure to pose that to the next guest. Well, just both of you, thank you so much for taking the time to join me on the podcast today. This was a great conversation, tons of tactical advice. I think anyone watching or listening will have a good foundation if they want to try and build something similar. So just thank you both again for sharing your time and your wisdom today.

Michele Doran:

Thank you for the opportunity. Appreciate it and the work that you do.

Melanie Murphy:

Yes, thank you, Meredith. Really appreciate it and appreciate this podcast.