The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), a professional association for college career services staff, recently highlighted Muhlenberg’s new Sophomore Career Accelerator program.
In a recent article on the NACE website, the Career Center’s Director of Career Coaching and Education Caitlin Bach shares the story of how she came up with the two-day immersive career development experience and why she thought it was important. Per the article:
[Bach] explains that, while first-year students benefit from structured onboarding, juniors engage in important internship searching and recruiting, and seniors receive intensive job search support, second-year students often exist in a developmental gray space: no longer new but not yet recruiting.
“I saw an opportunity gap. Sophomores are navigating identity formation, academic commitment, and emerging professional aspirations, yet many lack clarity, confidence, labor market fluency, and networking capital,” Bach points out.
The first Sophomore Career Accelerator took place over two days in January and featured interactive discussions with alumni and site visits to local employers B. Braun and United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley. The experience was fully funded by the Benjamin Katz ’21 Fund in Support of the Career Center.
In a post-event assessment, all of the students who responded said that they had left the program with specific, actionable next steps for the upcoming semester to advance their career development.
Read the article on the NACE website here.
Learn more about Muhlenberg’s Career Center here.
Photos by Joe Romano ’23