At the beginning of last school year, Andrew Beverly met a new student in the Renick University Center who seemed, like many new students, somewhat lost. What classes should she be taking? Where would those lead her? She was clearly feeling overwhelmed.
So Beverly, who directs the START academic advising office, invited her to walk across the building to the office his team shares with Career Services. “She met with our advising peers, she met with career peers, she met with a career advisor, all in the same afternoon, because it was all together,” Beverly recalls. “That was a new thing that never would have happened before and it helped that student get acclimated to campus.”
Not that the staff members in START and Career Services wouldn’t have been happy to talk to this student in the past. But until last year, their offices were located on two separate campuses. With the recent renovation of the RUC, Career Services moved from the Fairlane Center into room 1183 on the RUC’s first floor. Centralizing student support programs was a major objective of the RUC renovation. For START and Career Services, the co-location has spurred new — sometimes unexpected — opportunities for collaboration.
START offers advising for new students, and also runs Health Professions Advising and Peer Advising and Learning Success programs. Career Services has a team of coaches who work with students and recent graduates on job search strategy. And while students come most frequently for help with resumes and cover letters, director Laurel Draudt says her team offers far more.
“I often say that if we work with students earlier, we have a runway with them to talk about things that they can be doing, like undergraduate research and internships, and are they working with their academic advisor and finding that they're in the right major or not, and then how can we help them if they want to explore other options?” Draudt says. “We want to be working with students from day one, if not even before day one, and work with them through two years after graduation. The more time we can have with them, the better to help them know how they can be stronger candidates.”
Now, START is providing a pipeline of those very students. Senior Pedro Callado de Paiva was a student employee in START for more than two years, until he secured an internship this summer. He says that co-locating helped him understand the breadth of support Career Services offers. He began referring to his peers there frequently. “Because I got to learn about Career Services, what they do, how they operate, I knew how good they were. So, it made it much easier to tell my friends that if they need it, they could just reach out,” he says.
START and Career Services are also taking advantage of new amenities in the RUC. While the offices have long collaborated on preparing students for medical school interviews — a partnership that has deepened since the co-location Beverly and Draudt say — they are now also able to make the RUC’s new conference rooms available to students for their interviews. “I think for students, especially a large commuter population, they need to get things done when they're here. And we can do that much more easily now,” Draudt says.
Draudt, who started at UM-Dearborn in 2022, calls her office’s move from Fairlane to the RUC a “game changer.” “We are so much more accessible to students,” she says. “We've had more walk-ins this last year than we certainly did the whole time I was over in the Fairlane Center.” More faculty are taking her up on her offer to stop by, she adds, and she’s running into colleagues out and about in the RUC. This has helped her forge stronger relationships. “When you do those things, more opportunities arise,” she observes.
The overarching result of these efforts and experiences, Beverly and Draudt hope, is that students see their academic and career paths as a continuum. “I think the benefit to students of our offices being co-located is that we're helping introduce the fact that your major and your advising and your career and your career advising are connected,” Beverly says. “We’re helping build that connection for students.”
Story by Kristin Palm
