Give CCE due credit

February is already here, and as students become more stressed about increasingly large piles of unfinished homework, the threat of a summer without a decent job also looms ever-nearer. Columbia offers a number of resources for job-searching students through the Center for Career Education. But just how useful are these resources?

CCE serves a number of schools within Columbia and has made several impressive improvements in expanding its internship programs over the past few years. The center has moved from running just two such programs in 2007 to 13 in 2011, which include STEP for students interested in engineering, Columbia Communities in Action Internship Program for nonprofit work, and Columbia Arts Experience for students in the arts. And these programs have a number of high-profile employers—the Arts Experience, for one, offers opportunities to work with Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center.
In terms of opportunities specifically for engineering students at Columbia, Dean Peña-Mora has taken matters into his own hands. Though CCE itself does offer a few key internship opportunities, such as the Columbia Experience Overseas program, and will likely offer more in the coming semesters, the Dean has worked outside the center to bring Google, Boeing, and IBM to Columbia for campus recruitment.
Some students are overly critical of CCE, claiming that the center offers only jobs in finance and consulting, and thus fails to provide opportunities in areas like the humanities and media. The majority of students also seem to automatically delete the weekly CCE emails that list the newest events and job opportunities, assuming that the entries are irrelevant to their particular interests. But this is exactly the kind of viewpoint that CCE is trying to combat. Though in the past the featured employers were disproportionately oriented toward finance, the Center’s new programs provide a much wider range of opportunities.

It’s also important for students to remember that without a career center, the response rate to job applications from employers is quite low. By simply applying to an organization through a college career office, a student’s chances of hearing back from an interested employer increase enormously, an experience that many Columbia students can attest to. Though it may be easy to complain about CCE’s ignorance of one’s particular needs and interests, without a career center it becomes very difficult to survive in the increasingly competitive workforce.

This is not to say that Columbia’s career advising resources are fine as they are. Many nonprofit organizations can’t afford to do on-campus recruiting at Columbia, and so naturally the larger, wealthier corporations are the ones best represented on campus. CCE has already been working to change this, but it is an area that requires even more attention. There is also a disconnect between Columbia’s pre-professional programs and CCE, leaving meetings with pre-professional advisors unhelpful for the job search. CCE and the pre-professional advising offices are working on an event, “College to Career,” that should allow students to network with alumni of a range of majors and careers, but we hope that this is just a beginning and that there will be more collaboration between CCE and the pre-professional programs in the future.

One of the other significant problems that prevents students from fully using the resources at CCE is that some students simply aren’t comfortable with going to the center. What if CCE had an event during NSOP week that enabled students to visit the center? Additionally, students could be assigned to one advisor at CCE in the same way that they have an academic advisor, one who would work with them throughout their college career. These changes might encourage first-years and other more timid students to take full advantage of the resources at hand. And if the 10-minute slots to speak with advisors were lengthened, CCE employees could better get to know individual students’ needs and interests.

For the students who have become accustomed to deleting CCE emails as soon as they appear in the inbox, it would be helpful for the center to tailor the emails to general groups of students. Currently on LionSHARE, Columbia’s job search database, students can set up a “job search agent” to send them updates about particular fields or opportunities. Why not streamline the email process by including relevant events with the job search agent that already exists? This way students would only receive emails appropriate for their interests.
Ultimately, it’s our job as students to take the initiative when searching for jobs, and so in many ways CCE is already doing its part. But CCE has many areas where it can continue improving to make the transition from college to career easier for Columbians.