Editorial: Changing Career Center

The arrival of Sheila Curran as the latest director of the Career Center has brought alongside it several ideas for improving career-finding and job-placement services for undergraduates.

With her arrival, the center's improvement should be one of the Division of Student Affairs' top priorities. Leadership has long been too inconsistent at the center to develop ties to employers, online databases are embarrassingly outdated, services are disorganized, and, too often, "counseling" is reduced to spending time looking up resources yourself. One very successful model the center should keep in mind is the pre-law office at Duke, through which consistency, knowledge and experience allow students the very best opportunities to find the best law school. Career services should be no less smooth and organized.

Plans to enhance links with Alumni Affairs is a welcome move. Duke has produced many leaders in various fields and the Career Center should take advantage of that for recent graduates trying to get their foot in the door within those same fields. Likewise, the endeavor to renovate the career center is long overdue. A first-rate facility in which interviewers and students can meet should be a requirement for a top-10 school.

Curran also notes that the center should offer students more choices than just pre-law, pre-medicine, consulting and investment banking. While that's true, the reason Duke students lean toward careers in law, business and medicine is because those career paths can naturally appeal to bright and talented people, not necessarily because the Career Center hasn't offered enough options. While the center should provide as much information as possible to students about as many career choices as possible, it should not forget about the demand those career fields have to students and should work to maximize opportunities in law, medicine and business, including more ties to pre-professional advisers.

Plans to start career advising for students earlier in their undergraduate career are also very welcome. Too often, students wait until their senior years to think about their future, scurrying about trying to land a job. Guidance during the sophomore or junior year would allow students more time to plan their career options, all the while providing them with information as they set about planning their courses and planning for summer opportunities. At the same time, linking career guidance to academic advising should raise caution. Career paths, at a liberal arts institution, should not determine majors. An engineering major can apply to law school, a physics major can apply to medical school and with a few courses in math, economics and finance, a classical studies major can get a job in banking. Students should choose majors based on their interests, not their resumes.

Curran's ambitious agenda for the Career Center may prove to be a highly successful one. Although renovations will take time, many of the changes can and should begin immediately.