Program Share: Short Workshop on Knowing Yourself and Knowing Your Options
This June, Saint Francis University (SFU) Career Services will be conducting a 30 minute session multiple times on Zoom with groups of up to 10 incoming first year students participating in the summer bridge program, which allows new SFU students to complete a few classes early and get acclimated to the institution. Each week during the first summer session, the students attend a different department-hosted seminar to do an activity pertaining to that department’s services.
Beth McGregor, Director of Career Services and Lauren Watson, Assistant Director of Career Services will be hosting a short program for summer bridge students that would translate well as a workshop that could be part of regular semester offerings, a session to target exploratory students, a session for first years, an offering for a group of prospective students, a guest visit to a class that is operating online or that has computer access, and more. This session could be conducted virtually or in-person and with various group sizes. The tools highlighted are Candid Career and 16personalities.com. If your institution does not have a paid version of Candid Career, the activity could be completed with the free version.
Career Services staff will begin by introducing themselves and will allow students to do the same if the group is small enough, with the ice-breaker question, ‘When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?” As part of a short introduction to what Career Services offers and highlighted resources, the main message for the session is that students have to know themselves well in addition to knowing their options well in order to make meaningful decisions about their academic programs and professional endeavors, thus the session title, “Understanding Yourself and Your Major/Career Options: The Perfect Match”. The component on 16personalities.com will emphasize the need to have self-awareness and the Candid Career piece will address the importance of learning about options, and from multiple perspectives.
16personalities.com and the nature of the Myers Briggs Type Inventory will be shared with the prompt to complete the free 12 minute tool outside of the session and submit results via an online form so as to get an idea of the summer cohort’s patterns. If doing this session with more than half an hour, there would likely be time for students to complete the assessment during the session and discuss their reaction to their results as a group.
Candid Career will be the focus of the interactive portion of the session, as students will be instructed to access the paid version via the SFU Career Services website and identify a video interview to watch. Students will be encouraged to choose however they’d like: perhaps they have already decided what major they want, therefore they could watch a video of someone in that line of work, or they might choose something that they have heard of and have a mild interest in but do not know much about, or perhaps just a video of a job that sounds intriguing.
If conducting the session in person, the Candid Career video activity worksheet would work nicely to guide students through note-taking, especially if it is a session longer than 30 minutes. After giving students time to watch a video and jot down a few notes, they will be asked to share which position they watched, why they chose that video, and something they learned from the interviewee. It is okay if students do not have time to watch a full interview, as it is more important that they interact the resource, become familiar with how it can help them with their next steps, and see the value in getting first-hand perspective.
Click here for full session details as well as the slide deck. Feel free to follow up at careerservices@francis.edu if you have any questions or would like to hear how it went in practice!