It’s summer and the Duke Career Center is quiet.
At first, Leigh Ann Waring is focused. As assistant director of employer relations, she knows summer break is a good time for establishing, maintaining and even elevating external relationships. Yet soon she misses the bustle. The Career Center is nestled in the Bryan Center, one of Main Campus’s social hubs. Its door is always open to students. They study at Career Center tables or hang out on its couches. They use its soundproof pods for virtual interviews with prospective employers. There are regulars. There are students who bring friends. When students aren’t around, the Career Center is not the same.
“I kind of miss the energy,” Waring says. “It's contagious.”
By opening its doors to students, whether they need a summer internship or just a quieter place than the dorms to study, the Career Center aims to make their job hunts a little less stressful. If students are comfortable hanging out, then they’ll be more at ease when they talk to Waring and her colleagues about the higher-stakes world of internships and careers. Student support – through career advising, through tutoring, through building community in unlikely places – can make tomorrow’s Duke graduates comfortable enough to take a beat, look around, and see that academic or career success is possible.
“We’re definitely a group of helpers,” says Waring. “We really try to level the playing field for students when they are looking at their careers.”
She serves a diverse student body at Duke. Students come from all over the country and globe, sure, but she’s seen that they also show up with different social capital and economic backgrounds. Even the most desirable internship in New York City is unrealistic for some students if it’s unpaid. As someone whose younger self was a lower income college student, Waring gets it. This is where the Career Center steps in.
“We have an endowment that allows us to give students $5,000 [living expense] stipends for the summer,” she says. “We also have a professional development fund for interview attire.”
Students receiving either form of funding receive continued support from the Career Center. Undergraduates who get the stipend, for instance, are required to develop learning objectives related to their internship – with Career Center guidance as they need it – and check in regularly through the summer. As for the professional development fund, Waring’s colleagues make themselves available to help students choose interview attire appropriate to their respective fields. Aside from that, staff try to demystify the process.
“There is a lot of anxiety,” Waring says. “We see students that come in and feel like they’re behind, when in reality they’re not.”
Students see that their peers have job offers, for instance, and stress out. Different industries hire on different timelines, Waring notes, and in different seasons. A down economy, too, can be a source of stress for job-hunting students. Again, the Career Center counters fear with information.
“A lot of it is educating the student about what is happening in the economy,” Waring says. “It ebbs and flows.”
Waring and her colleagues are generalists enough to talk with any student who comes in the door, but each has a specialty as well. Waring, for example, builds relationships with employers, representing the needs of Duke students and making sure recruiters’ trips to campus are worthwhile.
“Don’t plan an event for a Friday afternoon, because chances are you’re not going to get the same amount of attendance,” she tells employers. “A big one is don’t plan to come to campus on a home basketball game day.”
Comfort and community are key to tutoring, too. A larger class section can seat hundreds. Peer tutors like senior Katherine Hinton, a biology major with med school in her future, connect students to the lessons, yes, but also to each other.
“Students really get to know each other throughout the semester,” she says. “I’ll see them walking around campus together.”
Hinton is lead peer educator for lower-level math classes and some economics courses through Duke’s Academic Resource Center. The ARC’s offerings go beyond tutoring, with some building students’ public speaking skills. Hinton learns best in groups, so she started as a member of another peer educator’s study group.
“It was helpful to really see where I was at,” she recalls. “Even if I understood a problem really well, being able to do it with someone else made sure I really understood everything.”
That facilitator thought Hinton would do well as a peer tutor. Now, during each semester Hinton runs one peer tutoring group of between two and four students and one slightly larger SAGE Learning Community (SAGE stands for STEM Advancement through Group Engagement), which is a formalized study group no larger than a dozen students. As the weeks pass, she gets to know the students, but she also sees them get to know each other.
Every session, the members of the group are more talkative with each other than the last. They’re engaging with the material, sure, but studying together leads to sitting together. And sitting together leads to friendship and trust.
“The ARC really focuses on building community in the class,” Hinton says.