Debra is the Associate Director of the Career Success Center at Western Connecticut State University. After spending a decade with on-air broadcast journalism, Debra changed gears to focus on her true calling: career preparation and counseling for college students. She and her team work with students every day on all types of job preparation, from resume writing and interview prep to networking practice and career exploration.
Transcript
I am Debra Manente, the Associate Director here at WestConn, for the Career Success Center. A Career Success Center on any college campus helps the students prepare for their career after college. We can help them during college, to search for jobs, prepare for internships, learn how to write their resumes and their cover letters, how to interview, build a powerful elevator pitch, and anything related to their career development. We work on various projects throughout the year, and we also work with the students and all the alumni. I tell the alumni, even though you've graduated, you're always welcome to come to our office and work with us. The major workshops that we do throughout the year are the interview workshops, the resume workshops. We also put on several career fairs, a finance and accounting career fair in the beginning of the year, our major career fair in March, and then other various networking events throughout the year. Each student is different. It depends on what their goals are. If I'm meeting with a student who is a senior, and this is their first time coming into our office, I'll counsel them on the first steps that they need to take to prepare before graduation. I'll help them with their resumes. We'll talk about some personality interest, personality assessment tests. We have several personality assessments that a student can do to find out what they're passionate about. One of our assessments is measured, it measures the personality four different ways, based on their leisure activities, what they like to do in their leisure, based on their work interests, their school interests, and just their overall personality. That'll give them a starting point and a list of careers that are best suited for their personality. I talk about my stories, because they can relate to it. I'm a product of the Connecticut State University System. So each student is different, but that's the first place that I turn them to. This week we have a career week. We've been preparing for several months to have alumni come on campus and record videos, such as this one. And tonight, we have a networking event, where many of the alumni are gonna be participating in a mock-tail event, to meet the students, so the students can get a first-hand experience, networking, and talking with alumni, and seeing what it's like to start building those personal relationships.
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