Engaging Indigenous Students with Career Services

Meredith Metsker:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere Podcast. I’m your host Meredith Metsker, and today, I am joined by Beverly Johnson. She’s the associate director of Career Readiness at Arizona State University. Thank you for being here, Beverly.

Beverly Johnson:

Thanks so much for having me, Meredith. I’m grateful for the opportunity.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I’m really excited to have you and I’m really excited to talk to you today about how to support and engage Indigenous students with career services. I know this is a really big focus for you personally, for your team and for many of your colleagues across campus there at Arizona State. But before I get into my questions, Beverly, is there anything else you’d like to add about yourself, your background or your role at ASU?

Beverly Johnson:

Sure. I’ll just let everybody know that I got my start in this work during my undergraduate degree. I have a degree in social work from Northern Michigan University and it was there that I decided to get a minor in American Indian Studies. I had to do a service learning project in addition to my social work internship, so that was an exciting year of my life, but I did that work doing after graduation planning with K-12 students with a focus on American Indian students. And so from that, I took a really long road. I did child welfare for a very short time and then I spent actually most of my professional career before coming here in human resources recruitment.

And so I have been with career services at ASU for four years now. I’m newer in the career services space, but I have a lot of different professional experiences that brought me here. And then before we dive into the questions too, I just wanted to make sure to let everybody know that while I’m here talking about this work by myself today, I’m actually part of a work group who is committed to doing this work. None of them were able to join today, but I just want to make sure that I am sharing that right up front that I’m just a very small part of a larger group who’s doing this work here at ASU.

Meredith Metsker:

Great. And I know we’ll dig more into who is part of that group, what that committee is doing to support Indigenous students, so we’ll dig more into that here in a little bit. But before I get into my specific questions, Beverly, I want to kick us off with a question I ask all of our guests and that’s, what does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Beverly Johnson:

Yeah, Career Everywhere is really actually an important concept to me. When I first started with career services, I was a specialist and part of my job was building relationships with academic units and other student support groups to really increase the equitable engagement with career services. We can’t be everywhere and our small teams can’t service everyone and so really being able to partner, especially with faculty and academic advisors and places where students are already going to make sure that those people feel really comfortable, either having conversations about career or referring students to our department, it really means that students like myself, when I was an undergrad, I was working, I was raising a son by myself, I didn’t really have time on campus to wander into a career services office or seek out that extra support.

So if I would’ve been able to have those conversations in my classroom where I already was, then I would’ve gotten the same service that everybody else has access to, right? But some people aren’t in the position to take that extra step. And then obviously, there’s always the awareness piece as well that we, as career services professionals, battle with. And so Career Everywhere means I think putting the career education and career resources in places that are easily accessible to all students and not just the ones that hear about us, happen to catch a social media post or wander into our offices.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. It’s a great answer. True to the name, it’s about making it everywhere accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Beverly Johnson:

Absolutely, yup.

Meredith Metsker:

All right, well, I think let’s go ahead and dig into our topic today. And to get us started, I think it’s important that we start with some history and context. I know you and I talked about this in your prep call a little bit, and like you mentioned in that call, it’s really heavy, but I think we need to start there. Can you just walk us through some of that history and context when it comes to Indigenous peoples and institutions of education?

Beverly Johnson:

Yeah, and thank you for making space during this conversation for it. To start with the history, whenever myself or anyone on the committee presents on this topic, we start with just a little bit of background. I’ll do my best to summarize it. It’s a long complicated story, but it boils down to our government. It historically had used education systems specifically to try to eradicate Indigenous cultures. And so in the very early days, children were forcibly removed from their families and put into schools where they were punished if they spoke their language or sang traditional songs or tried to practice their own religions. And those were referred to as Indian boarding schools.

And so they actually got brought forward in the media within the last few years because of the discovery of mass grave sites at Indian boarding schools and that’s their terminology, not mine. I wouldn’t use that. So a lot of children never did make it home and it wasn’t communicated to their families, whatever happened to them. Those who did make it home had experienced great trauma and unfortunately, the efforts were successful. A lot of native languages became extinct because generations of people were not taught their native languages and songs and very important parts of their culture. Not to mention how a lot of history was lost in that way because Indigenous people in North America were storytellers. They didn’t really keep written history. A lot of the languages didn’t even have a written form to record that history. And so a lot of that has been lost.

And so I think the really important thing to remember when you’re taking all of that into account, if you were to google Indian boarding schools right now, you would probably be inundated with black and white photos from the early days of Indian boarding schools like the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s. But in reality, the boarding schools were not abolished until 1978. And so while they may not have been driving around and rounding up children forcibly, it was still the same concept to try to, as they put it, kill the Indian and save the man by eradicating their culture and making them polished individuals.

And so that wasn’t very long ago, that that stopped. A lot of families today still were directly impacted. A lot of our students have aunts and uncles and grandparents who are part of that experience. And so the education system, there may be a little bit of mistrust of education in general when you’re talking about Indigenous families.

Meredith Metsker:

Got you. Thank you very much for sharing that. I think it’s like we mentioned, it’s difficult and it’s heavy, but it’s such important context for this conversation. And with that history in mind, what advice or cultural considerations should career services professionals take into account when they’re working with Indigenous students?

Beverly Johnson:

Yeah, thank you. And that is a big reason why I want to make sure to share about history, so that people can understand that frame. And I want to start this portion of the conversation too with a disclaimer that there are hundreds of American Indian tribes, there are sovereign nations and they each have their own unique cultures. And so while I’m going to give some advice here to take into consideration someone’s culture and background and how they might be impacted by that, they’re all very unique. And so it’s important not to generalize. Also, here at ASU and I think probably pretty commonly in the US, we have about half of the Indigenous population in their tribal communities, in those sovereign nations and half living in urban settings.

And so there’s a lot of things to take into consideration when you’re working with Indigenous students and it’s very hard to generalize, but given that, I would say that that mistrust, don’t take it personally if you encounter that. It can take a lot of times of showing up. It can take a lot of conversations to really build trust with our students and with our Indigenous professionals that we’re working with as well. So I would say it’s worth it when you do take the time, but it takes several times of showing up, of making a commitment and following through with that commitment to build that trust.

And I think that a lot of that comes from their tendency to rely on the people that they already trust, their family members and their friends. That’s where they would be getting most of their advice, but as we know here in the career world that that can limit people’s worldviews and that self-efficacy of thinking of all the different types of careers that you might be able to achieve if you keep your circle very small when it comes to who you talk to about career. Indigenous people still today face higher rates of unemployment and underemployment and that is regardless of where they are in the US. It is pretty stark, the discrimination that they’re still facing.

And then I would say another thing too, I think we talked about this in our prep call as well, you’re not going to make a huge impact on your data by engaging with Indigenous students and that is one thing I’m so grateful for the support of the leadership here in my department and ASU as a whole. We have made … Our president, President Crow, has made a special commitment to the Indigenous communities here in Arizona and so I think a lot of that empowers me to be able to do this work, even though I know if I get 100% percent of our students who identify as Indigenous who participate with us, I’m barely going to push that needle. They’re always going to be the smallest population of students that you work with, unless you are, of course, at a tribal college or university.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s some really good things to keep in mind. Yeah, so thank you for sharing that. So now I’m curious, can you walk me through what all you are doing there at Arizona State to support Indigenous students?

Beverly Johnson:

Yeah. So as I mentioned earlier, it’s part of a working group. Well, Arizona State, first of all, I couldn’t even begin to probably measure all of the things that Arizona State as a university is doing to support Indigenous students. But the group that I’m working with, we are focusing on the career readiness aspects and also the networking opportunities for our students. And so when we first got started, we had noticed that they had the lowest engagement of any group by ethnicity when we pull our engagement data. And so I wanted to start with learning as much as possible, and so to do that, I started talking to our student groups.

We have several Indigenous student groups here at ASU and then also did an informational interview with one of our Indigenous faculty members, which is ultimately how I ended up being on the committee. And so we started by asking them, “Why did they think that was?” the students, “Why do you think it is that we have such low engagement?” And they were very straightforward in their responses that they really didn’t feel like it was for them. They didn’t see a lot of representation at our events, on our website or anything like that. And when we asked them what they wanted most, it was the connections and opportunities to network, and of course, they wanted their own dedicated career fair. I feel like that comes up when we talk to affinity-based groups all the time.

And so that was really important to start with asking them what they wanted and then I got involved with the subcommittee who originally had … They had started because of concerns about required internships. The faculty member I mentioned earlier was part of the social work program and he had a pool of Indigenous students who needed internships. But when the shutdowns happened and people weren’t taking interns, then they couldn’t graduate because they couldn’t meet that requirement. And so it was a larger work group or a larger committee that had formed around that problem. And then our little subgroup, we grew our goals, we expanded on them and we were like, “Hey, we should be increasing engagement overall and trying to help positively impact students’ career readiness overall,” and so it grew from there.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah. So to confirm, the subcommittee focuses on career readiness for Indigenous students, is that correct?

Beverly Johnson:

Yeah, we’re called Indigenous Career Futures. That’s what we unofficially named ourselves.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. And then what’s the larger committee or the larger work group called?

Beverly Johnson:

Oh, that’s American Indians Needs Assessment and Engagement. So that’s led by our Office of American Indian Initiatives and it includes all sorts of people at ASU who are committed to Indigenous student success. So it includes people from the dean’s office, our financial aid offices, who are letting us know … This year, I think we’ve changed our dropout deadline for classes and the students getting scholarships from their tribes are probably going to end up in a bad because of the dates changed and now the scholarship money won’t be there and that can cause all these complications. And so it’s bringing an awareness overall to specific challenges and needs Indigenous students face and trying to address those before they become a problem with the deadline example. So that group is larger, and then our subgroup is focused on the career piece of it.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. That’s really cool that it involves so many people across campus. This is very much a campuswide initiative. That’s really, really neat.

Beverly Johnson:

Yeah, I love it.

Meredith Metsker:

So I’m curious, in addition to some of the things you just mentioned, has there been any new programming that you’ve added? Anything else that you’ve done to increase engagement among Indigenous students in terms of career readiness?

Beverly Johnson:

Yeah, so I will say, career services here at ASU, we had a partnership with American Indian Student Support Services prior where every semester they would request some workshops from us or some presentations from us and we would come in and we would do our resume presentations and things like that. And of course, all of our events are open to all students, but based on the feedback that we got from the student group about representation specifically, how we’ve changed that is partnership with AISSS still to create a programming schedule for each semester and so they tell us what are the topics that are coming up.

So for example, we have about a hundred students that get a specific scholarship at ASU and they have resumes due at the end of September. So they bring that forward and they’re like, “Okay, cool. Let’s do a resume working session,” and it’s actually going to be a workshop where the students will work on their resumes or start to build one if they don’t have one yet, so that they can be prepared for that scholarship deadline. Also, instead of me coming in and giving the presentation, I’ve invited Indigenous professional from one of the agencies who has engaged with us in the past to come, and actually, well, we’re meeting in two weeks to talk about how do we want to facilitate this like, “Do you want to give some tips and advice to the students? Do you want to run the whole workshop? What is it?”

But I’m always reaching out to Indigenous professionals and Indigenous alumni and asking them, will they co-present with me. So we have been running three or four programs a semester in collaboration with American Indian Student Support Services. And then one of the things, because I mentioned earlier the students wanted their own career fair, that’s a lot. So we didn’t organize a regular career fair, but we did put on what we called Employer Expo. And so we invited … We had a checklist of criteria that employers had to meet, either located in a tribal community, serving Indigenous populations owned by an Indigenous person. There’s a couple other things. And as long as they meet those criteria, they could participate with us.

And it’s more of they come on virtually, talk for … They give a three-minute pitch basically about, “Why do you want to work here?” and then they talk about their opportunities and give some tips for applying. So we’ve done that virtually three years in a row now and it’s grown every year. Employers love it. The students love it. We’ve gotten really good feedback on both sides and we had our first in-person event last spring and it went amazingly well. And I had students coming up to me and thanking me and they’ve seen me now at several workshops the last couple of years, and they’ve seen me at the events. And that’s where I mentioned that relationship and that patience, that relationship building and that patients really does pay off because now they are coming to know career services as a place that really does care about them and they want to engage with us.

So I would say that, those programs, while we were doing some presentations in the past, we’ve changed our approach to how we offer them to make them more helpful and also they wanted those connections. And so now the individual coming to present the resume workshop, they will know her and know her name and her agency.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, I love that. Those are some great new initiatives. And this reminded me of something else that you mentioned in our prep call or one of the other things to keep in mind when working with Indigenous students is their set of values that maybe their values around life after college might be a little bit different and how to keep those in mind as you work with them with programming. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Beverly Johnson:

Yeah. Oh, and I’m glad you brought that back up because I missed it. I would say, and again, important not to generalize, we have plenty of Indigenous students in our business school who want to go into commercial banking or whatever it is, but there is a common set of values among all of those tribes. I can’t say among all of the tribes, but I would say a core set of values and family is very important to Indigenous people as well as responsible, being responsible towards the Earth and the environment and things like that. So I’d say those are two core values across tribes.

And I actually learned the hard way that sometimes the word success can be triggering because Indigenous students, if we say, “What do you need to achieve success?” they may feel like we are measuring success on our US values of making a lot of money or having an important position or title. And a lot of times, the values that drive them are being able to make a positive impact in their home communities or to be the first one in their family to achieve higher education. And that could be because they want to make money to support their family or that could be because they want to go back. I spoke with a student last semester whose full hope was to go back to her home community and combine sustainability with agriculture and she was talking about solar panels that are providing shade for the plants to grow, for the sheep to eat and just brilliant ideas.

And so she wasn’t even concerned about the money. She didn’t even care where that was going to come from. She was just like, “I want to get this degree, so I can understand how we can have more sustainable food practices in my home communities that will lead ultimately to food sovereignty, so less reliance on outside sources.” And the topic of what a title would look like or how much money she would make doing that never even came up, that she really just wanted to use her education to make her home community better and so that’s important to recognize.

I had actually asked a faculty member about what Indigenous students needed to be successful and he was like, “Well, what is your definition of success?” And so I would just say, “Well, be careful how you frame that conversation and to just understand that the values may be different than what we might be used to looking for.”

Meredith Metsker:

Right. Yeah, there’s never any one definition of success.

Beverly Johnson:

Right.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s really important to keep in mind. I noticed too that going back to some of the different tactics and strategies you have used to engage Indigenous students, I noticed that you all have a Indigenous people’s community on your website. Can you tell me a little bit about-

Beverly Johnson:

Yeah, I’m really excited about that, and actually, there are big improvements underway. I have some videos from some events that we’re doing and I also am going to be taking some of our past programs and writing them into blogposts and things like that. And so improvements are coming, but right now, it’s really helpful that we have a feed pulling our events out of Handshake onto that page. And we also have created a label for American Indian-friendly hiring organization. And so the employers I mentioned earlier that meet those criteria that we’ve partnered with in the past, their job opportunities will pull through into a feed on the page as well.

We have some specific internship information that are for internships for Indigenous students like Udall and some others that are very specific to our students. And so I’m excited to have another opportunity to show that representation. I love that we have control over what goes on the page and how’s formatted. We have photo from one of our actual events as the banner and so students truly can see themselves represented on the page. And also the improvements I just talked about, that came out of a conversation with our American Indian Student Support Service and the Indigenous Career Futures work group like, “What do you all want to use this space for?” So it’s really, really cool that we can add and change and improve it on our own.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, and for everyone watching or listening, I’ll be sure to include a link to that page, so you can go and check it out and see some of these resources that Beverly just mentioned.

Beverly Johnson:

Thanks.

Meredith Metsker:

So I’m curious, what results have you seen since instituting some of these changes and some of these new programs?

Beverly Johnson:

Yeah, thank you. So I mentioned earlier that a lot of times the impact, the numbers aren’t going to change that drastically, right? We’re still talking about a very small percentage of our overall population, especially at a university of size that I’m working at. But we do take into consideration how students self-identify and I would say the most measurable impact when we first started pulling data specific to this population, when I first started doing this research three years ago, it was the year before’s data, but we had 0% participation in career events. That was heartbreaking to me. I couldn’t understand how somehow an entire population of students hadn’t participated in any career event and that’s our bigger fairs, expos, employer-type events.

This last year, we were able to hit 3.7% engaging in our career events and so that was exciting. And then another exciting one was the advising appointments. Somehow we ended up with less than 1% of our students coming to see us for advising appointments and we were able to raise that up to about 3%. So like I said, very small, but also, just by being present in the spaces, taking that Career Everywhere approach to things, I went to a research symposium. It’s an American Indians studies course, that at the end of the course, they present the research that they had done over the period of the course.

That was one of my favorite events. I wasn’t there to tote career services, but I ended up having probably four or five really good conversations with students about taking their research further, how they could add it to their resume, how they could talk about it and then also was able to make some connections for students, saw that their research project was on the lack of appropriate media in the Navajo Nation, which is one of the largest, actually, it might be the largest by area, I believe, tribal sovereign nation in the US. And I have Indigenous contacts in the media in Northern Michigan and so I was able to make some connections with students, some suggestions anyway on connections.

I don’t know if they followed up on them, but that isn’t measured, but those conversations were some of the best I had all year, but I wasn’t there unfortunately. I wasn’t there counting them as advising appointments or anything like that for them to end up on the dashboard. So I think those conversations are really priceless. And like I said, when I am out at their events volunteering, at their convocations or showing up at their research symposiums, they know that I’m with career services and it’s helping to build that brand and build that trust by being there.

And so while I can’t measure that, I could see the impact especially this year as now I’ve been doing it for three years. And I actually had students reaching out to me asking, “Hey, could you come and talk to my student group about resumes,” even though it wasn’t Indigenous related, but he had seen me at another workshop. And so the recognition and the trust is starting to build and I think we won’t see on a dashboard that measurement for a while, but right now, you can feel it building.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s really exciting. I love that you shared not only the data-driven evidence of these results, but also these anecdotes. Sometimes I think that’s what keeps us going, even more than the numbers. It’s those stories.

Beverly Johnson:

And I think, well, that’s just so important. And the example I gave earlier about the student I was talking to about her ideas for sustainable farming, that wasn’t even part of an appointment either. That was a conversation, now I’m thinking about it, that I had at the library because I ran into her. So yeah, the stories are very important. And what’s also important to remember is that context that I talked about, the highest levels of unemployment and underemployment of any ethnicity in our country. So anything that we can do to help one student, even if it’s just one and they go tell other students or they take it home to their families, that social impact, we can’t really measure it, but I believe it’s there.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, clearly, you’re seeing the signs of momentum and trust and that’s critical. Okay, so you’ve mentioned a lot of really great ideas already, but what are some other ways that career services professionals can be good allies to Indigenous students?

Beverly Johnson:

Yeah, that’s a great question. I jumped the gun and shared a little bit of that already, but I think the biggest thing that I’ve done was just be present. And it’s easy for me because I genuinely care. I really do. I have Indigenous nieces and nephews and I want the best for them. And so I’m intrinsically motivated in that way to keep showing up. I wanted to go to that research symposium. I was at 7:00 at night after a crazy week of other events, but I wanted to go. I was curious about it. So I genuinely care and I think that’s evident and I think that will be evident if you are doing it to check a box. It’s evident.

I have the same conversations with employers who reach out to me and they want, “Oh, we really need to increase our number of Indigenous students that we’re recruiting.” “Okay. That’s going to be evident if you are approaching these students and saying, ‘Oh, we need to increase our number.’ That’s not what it’s about for me and I think it’s important to be genuine, to be sincere in your care for a population.” I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again, my team here at ASU, I could not be more grateful for them. We have several partnerships similar to this. We have someone who the veteran population is near and dear to their heart. So that’s the person who is collaborating with our veteran center because she genuinely cares about it and I think that’s important.

It helps us in our own professional development to be able to work in a space that we feel passionate and excited about, but it also helps to build the trust with that population and to really be able to make strides and make progress with them.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. I’m curious, maybe for career services professionals who are just trying to think of a good first step to reaching out to Indigenous students at their institutions, what would be your advice for them? What is a good solid first step, first thing for them to do?

Beverly Johnson:

Yeah, I think our career services nerds are going to love this advice, but informational interviews. If you approach the conversation as wanting to learn more and wanting to understand and then be intentional to design your resources or your programming or whatever it is towards the feedback that you’re getting and talk to as many folks as possible, figure out who your allies are in this space. The Indigenous Career Futures work group, an incredible group of individuals. It’s not part of any of our job descriptions. It was not written anywhere for any of us that we would be doing this specific career-centered work, but we care about it. And so I think that’s really exciting and it’s good networking for me as well.

Meredith Metsker:

You mentioned just now finding your allies across campus in this initiative. What advice do you have for career services professionals as they try to find those allies? Are there places they should look first, people they should look to first?

Beverly Johnson:

I did it the most old-fashioned possible way. ASU has a directory, and as part of that directory, everybody can add a bio about themselves in there. And so I literally searched for Indigenous, American Indian, Native American, just searched for those terms to see who would come up and that’s who I reached out to. And it snowballs, right? So I spoke with a faculty member who was part of this committee and I told him why, “Why I’m reaching out to you, I want to begin work with this population of students. I noticed they’re not very engaged with us. Would you be open to a 15 or 20-minute conversation? I see that you have American Indian workforce development in your bio.”

And then when I was closing that conversation, I asked him, “Is there anybody else I should be talking to at the university about doing this work?” And he’s like, “Well, actually, I have this whole committee of people.” And so that’s one technique, is ask. Once you find a good contact, asking who else. And then also, you can definitely use LinkedIn, their alumni tab on LinkedIn to find other professionals who are doing the same work. Also, I am following the Arizona American Indian Chamber of Commerce, all different types of organizations and hashtags on my LinkedIn as well, so I’m inundated with information and potential contacts when I’m scrolling.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, that’s some really smart advice there. On a similar note, you mentioned that you have been trying to reach out to more Indigenous-facing or Indigenous-owned companies. How do you go about finding those folks?

Beverly Johnson:

So that is where the power of the committee comes really to the table. I have Indigenous contacts in Northern Michigan, which doesn’t do my student body here in Arizona that much good, so it really is their networks. I could have on my own said, “I’m going to have an Indigenous employer expo,” and done cold calls to organizations. I’ve tried doing cold calls to organizations because we’re trying to diversify our industries, making sure that we have the industries our students are interested in at the table. I rarely get responses, but this committee of people, many who are Indigenous themselves, have their own networks.

And it’s hilarious because one of the cold calls I did was to a specific tribe where I noticed that we had a little concentration of students from that area. And when I put it on the list, we all are working collaboratively off of a Google document. One of the committee members was like, “That’s my cousin,” and I’m like, “You’re kidding.” Wasn’t even in Arizona, it was a tribe in California and so their networks really do make it happen. They get our professionals to show up, and then once they’ve been involved a few times, they keep coming back. I was able to reach out to plan my workshops this semester just on people that I’ve worked with now for the last three years, but I met them through the committee. It’s all about networking.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Right, yeah. Isn’t that how it goes for a lot of things? It’s all about who you know.

Beverly Johnson:

Right.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Well, is there any other advice that you would like to share with our audience?

Beverly Johnson:

I would just say don’t give up. If there is a specific population of students that you notice are not engaging that you think could really benefit, which I think everybody can benefit from more career readiness education, don’t give up and just keep trying. If anybody wants to talk to me about ideas, I welcome that. But yeah, I think I’ve shared all my secrets so far, but just don’t give up. You’ve got to persevere and relationships take time. That’s what we struggle with when we see a lot of turnover in our positions and things like that. So having some kind of plan also for, “Who will pick up this work if I have to drop it?”

I’m bringing other people from our team into meetings and having them present at events and getting them out there, so that it’s not only me who’s able to show up for things. And luckily, we have an assistant director on our team who is incredible. He works a lot with first gen and he just does amazing work. And so I’ve been pulling him in and we have someone on our team also who worked in a tribal community, in a K-12 school who’s really familiar with the values and those cultural considerations. So I always have a backup plan, so that if I win the lottery tomorrow, I would probably actually still come to work, but if for some reason I don’t come to work tomorrow, it won’t be forgotten about, it won’t be dropped.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s really smart to think about that long-term sustainability of these relationships, especially considering, like you said, how long it takes to build that trust, build that rapport. Yeah, that’s really smart. I think we’ve covered a lot here, Beverly, but is there anything else you’d like to add before you start wrapping up?

Beverly Johnson:

No, I think that’s good. Like I said, I welcome anybody. You’re welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn or whichever way. I’d be happy to chat further about the way that we’re doing this work. I think it’s a model that would work for any population of students. It’s very similar to a wraparound model that I saw when I mentioned I did that very brief stint in social work. It’s finding out who in your community caress about this and rallying the troops to get them to move forward on an initiative.

Meredith Metsker:

Right, yup, that’s really smart. And for the folks who are watching or listening, I’ll be sure to include a link to Beverly’s LinkedIn page, so you can reach out to her there if you would like to learn more. So, Beverly, I want to move into something I do at the end of every interview, which is this, answer a question, leave a question thing. So I’ll ask you a question that our last guest left for you and then you’ll leave a question for the next guest. So our last guest was Carissa Liverpool of Rutgers University and she left the following question for you. “How did you align your passion with your purpose and how did you define your why in your career journey?”

Beverly Johnson:

Oh, wow. That is a loaded question. I’ve had a really long and winding career journey, honestly, but I did find that in any position I held, I really am intrinsically motivated by impact, by making a positive impact. So when I was very young, actually, I worked at Honeywell in manufacturing and I made really good money and I did really cool work in the aerospace industry, but at the end of the day, it was interesting, but I didn’t feel like I was reaching my potential and I feel like I was put here to be a positive support for other people. And so my work really has to be doing that.

And I mentioned also education in social work and American Indian studies, but a background in human resources. I spent eight years recruiting and now I get to use my secrets as a recruiter to help our students prepare for going through that process. So I remember reading the job description for the career and industry specialist, which is where I started in this department and getting goosebumps and being like, “This is so weird.” It’s my social work education plus my recruiting background, plus that work that I randomly did for a service learning project with the K-12 students, with American Indian students and field placement at an alternative high school doing career planning. And I was like, “All of these, strange things.”

And as I was reading the job description in my brain, I was like, “I did that here. I did that there. I did that as part of school.” I was wondering all along like, “What the heck am I doing with all of this random experience?” So I moved across the country a couple of times, and then when you get goosebumps on a job description, by the way, that’s when I tell students, you really have to personalize those application materials because that’s the one. It’s like buying a house. I love this job. I tell people that all the time. When I said, “Even if I won the lottery, I’d probably still come to work,” I do. I feel like career is the space where I can take that social work heart of mine and put it to practice, but do it in something I feel really competent in, which I did not have that experience when I was working in child welfare. Positive impact, sure, but felt way out of my league.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s an amazing career journey. It’s like it’s just the perfect fit for you.

Beverly Johnson:

It is. I love it.

Meredith Metsker:

And I can relate to that goosebumps feeling too. I am thinking specifically to when I changed my major in college to journalism. I had been an English major. It wasn’t the right fit. I didn’t really enjoy my classes. So there was just one day, one of my classes ended, I left, I skipped my next English class, I went right to the registrar’s office. I changed my major that day to journalism and it was early enough in the semester that I was able sign up for some journalism classes. And I remember sitting in my first one and the teacher’s just talking about the syllabus. It’s like the most boring day of class, but I’m sitting there getting goosebumps. I’m like, “Oh, yes, this is my place. I am in the right spot,” so I can relate to that.

Beverly Johnson:

Yeah, it’s the same with buying a house, adopting a pet. You just feel it when it’s the one.

Meredith Metsker:

Yup. When you know, you know, right?

Beverly Johnson:

Yes.

Meredith Metsker:

So what question would you like to leave for the next guest?

Beverly Johnson:

Oh, I love it. I’m a fan of the podcast. I listen to it all the time. So I would love for your next guest to tell us what’s the most creative career resource or program your department has implemented in the last year.

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, I love that. I’m going to steal it. Yeah, we’ll ask the question, so everyone who listens can steal it. It’s a good idea. All right, well, I will be sure to ask that of the next guest. And, Beverly, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. This was a really great conversation and I hope it will be helpful and enlightening for the folks who listen to the podcast. So just thank you very much again for sharing your time and your knowledge.

Beverly Johnson:

Thanks. I really appreciate the opportunity. It was fun.