Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Each month, Texas State University President Dr. Kelly Damphousse sits down with faculty members, staff, students, alumni, and community members for a conversation about all things TXST — the past, the present, and the bright future of the university.
Part of the TXST Podcast Network: https://www.txst.edu/podcast-network.html
- What differentiates candidates from those who get a job offer and those who don't, is did they have an internship?
- Wow.
- And then second, was the internship relevant to the job that they're applying for here? But just getting an internship increases the chances of getting a job offer by five times.
- Wow, that's really interesting data. I know that 77% of our students work at least 10 hours a week. Some of them work a lot more than that because they have to financially support themselves.
- That's right.
- But if they can somehow find a job that's related to what they're doing or get an internship, those are remarkable data about the impact that has on your chances of getting a job and perhaps getting the job that you want. One of the things I wanna talk about today is about something that happens at Texas State that I think is pretty special, and that's our Career Services program where we help students learn about what it takes to get a job while they're a student, maybe get an internship while they're a student, but also be successful when they leave here as well. And the assistance we help for alumni as well, that we're continually investing in our alumni even after they leave here at Texas State. And to help me do that, I've got the Director of Career Services, Ray Rogers. Thank you for joining us today.
- Glad to be here.
- Yeah, so let's talk about how you got to Texas State. What's your Texas State story?
- Yeah, good question. So, native Texan, but I was in Florida for about 20 years and I was working in higher education, career center there at a small liberal arts. It came time to come back home to Texas though.
- Yeah, where'd you go to undergrad?
- My undergrad was actually in North Texas, Midwestern State University.
- Okay.
- Yeah, not too far.
- So where'd you grow up?
- And I grew up there too.
- Oh, okay.
- I grew up in Wichita Falls. Dad has a ranch up there. Lived in Houston for a little while, graduated high school there, and then went to college up in North Texas, and then left the state, went to Missouri to grad school, and then lived in Florida for 20 years, so it was time to come back.
- Where in Missouri?
- Yeah. I was in Warrensburg, Missouri, University of Central Missouri is the name now, yeah.
- Oh, okay, that's awesome. So did your parents go to college?
- My mom did, but later in life.
- Okay.
- We were already born when mom decided to go to school.
- So in many ways you're a first-generation college student.
- In some ways, yeah.
- Yeah. That's good. So how did you end up at Texas State?
- Yeah, so I decided to come back home to Texas. I thought Austin was one of the best places to live and got a job at.
- It turns out it's the second best place to live.
- Yeah, yeah, after San Marcos, I'm gonna guess.
- [Kelly] Yeah, that's it, yeah.
- And got a job at St. Edward's University.
- [Kelly] Oh yeah.
- Running the career center there and knew of Texas State, but hadn't paid a whole lot of attention to it until I met some of the career center staff here. Opening became available. And the more I learned about it, the more I loved Texas State. I had always wanted to go to a large public institution.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- I'd been at a private liberal arts before and this just fit the bill perfectly. And I realized the drive from Austin to San Marcos is not what I thought it was. It's a pretty easy drive, actually.
- It's easy if you live in Austin and drive.
- I'm going against traffic.
- You're going against traffic all the time.
- Yeah, I'm going against traffic.
- Yeah, we have a lot of, a lot of our employees will live in San Antonio or Austin, more in the Austin area, and make that that against traffic drive and it's actually not as bad, so.
- [Ray] Yeah.
- Yeah. Well, good for you. How long have you been here?
- So I've just celebrated my five year anniversary at Texas State.
- Five years, all right. I got the pin and everything.
- Yep, real proud of it.
- That's great. Well, I'm glad you're here and I think that, well, let's talk about Career Services in general. I think that people, if they are aware of Career Services, think about career fairs probably first. So maybe talk about what Career Services does here. 'Cause it's more than just career fairs.
- Sure, and career fairs is a big part of what we do.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- It's a signature service and it's what people see. I think the real thing that we do though is we help create systems. We integrate what we do throughout campus in a lot of different ways to help prepare students for whatever it is they wanna do after they leave Texas State.
- And that includes, for example, help just with simple things like writing a resume. And I remember when I was younger, writing a resume, like it's gotta be one page only. And then sometimes there's different rules about what's on a resume and having like career aspirations and so on on there. But there's a bit of an art to it, to doing that. And you provide students with assistance in writing a resume and interviewing skills and things like that too.
- Yeah, it's real basic. We do some basic things as well, such as helping students prepare a resume. And as you indicated, you need to be strategic.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- About how you put that resume together depending on what you're doing. That's one thing, we do one-on-one all the time. We see thousands and thousands of resumes a year. And and it's one of the main reasons a student will start to come to Career Services, but once they're there, they'll realize there's a whole lot more that we can do. Help them figure out what they wanna do after they graduate.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- How does my major apply to what it is I think I wanna do? What kind of experience do I need? And then internships is the big thing. And that is my big push and the thing I'm most passionate about is my jobs, encouraging our students to go out and get internships.
- You know, one of the things I think that is discipline specific, many students come here and major in education, 'cause they wanna be a teacher, and they major in engineering, 'cause they wanna be an engineer, or in business, 'cause they wanna work in business. But there's so many majors we have that aren't really named after a career and students major in them because they've always liked the subject or they took a class as a freshman, they said, "Oh, I really like that. I hadn't even heard of that before." And then at the end they go, well what do I do with X degree, because it's not named after a job. And you all help with that, major exploration, probably helping people pick majors, but also what do I do with this degree?
- Yeah, that's right. And I think that's probably one of the main questions we get is.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Either what do I do with this degree or here's a career I want to go into. But we don't have a major.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Named after it as you implied. So how do I get there? And as you know, I mean there's circuitous paths we take.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- To our careers.
- At 18, probably what you thought you wanted to do, I'm gonna guess somewhere in the criminal justice world.
- Yeah, I wanted to be a police officer.
- Little different, right?
- Yeah.
- That's not the path to becoming a university president for most folks, but it certainly was for you.
- Yeah.
- And so one of the things that we help folks do is just sort of plan incrementally and look at that next step and be open to opportunity as it comes your way.
- What was your major?
- My undergraduate was business administration.
- Yeah, I tell students this all the time. Almost no one's doing the job they thought they were gonna do. And many people are doing jobs they didn't even know existed. Like, I don't think I knew there was a job in, I don't think I even knew there was a college president until graduation happened. Like I just wasn't right aware.
- [Ray] Right
- I was just like the world was happening around me. I didn't, I was so unaware, but I'm certain I didn't know about Career Services. Like I just wasn't paying attention to that. I don't think I ever went to a career fair at my university. I'm sure they had 'em, I just didn't know about 'em.
- Right, and I'm hoping fewer and fewer students will say that here.
- Yeah, exactly, yeah. Because it, I think more and more students now are thinking about like, even as freshmen, like what am I gonna, what's the return on this investment? Like what job will I get at the end?
- And it is the number one question they get when they get excited. They got accepted to Texas State. You know, aunt or uncle, friends will ask, what are you gonna major in and what are you gonna do with that?
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- And they have a hard time with that, but they will discover that as they get here if they don't have a plan. Oftentimes it changes. And that's one of the exciting things about working in Career Services, is getting to sort of watch that unfold for our students at a real exciting time in their life.
- I don't know the exact percentage, but I think there was something like, we have 8,500 freshmen last year and something like 2,000 of them were undecided on their majors. And that's actually okay for people to kind of like try to discover what their majors should be. We don't want people to drift for too long, but sometimes I think students get kinda get locked on too early and then they're in a degree they don't really like, and then they find out too late that they have to change and that can add to the length of time to graduation. Or they end up having a degree that they wish they hadn't had.
- Yeah, and I wanna give students permission to say when someone asks, "What's your major gonna be?" "I'm not sure yet."
- And I think that's a fine answer because many of our students also come in and they'll change their mind.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Sometimes they change their mind between New Student Orientation and the first day of class when they get here, because they're thinking about different career opportunities.
- I think that happens. People are sitting in New Student Orientation, they're sitting beside someone else and they say, "Oh, I'm a film major." I didn't know we had film. And so, and then next thing you know, they're a film major too or whatever that degree is. And so there's a, I think there's a discovery process that's really unique by person and by experience that we should have some flexibility in there because people are unique individuals, right?
- Absolutely.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- And as they sort of discover what they wanna do or discover what they're good at, or oftentimes, and as I mentioned with internships, they sometimes what they don't wanna do.
- Yeah, yeah.
- They think they wanna do that, but they're, they go and get a, what a I'd call a realistic job preview with this internship and decide, yeah. That's not really what I wanna do. So now I wanna pivot and do something different.
- You know, when I was an undergraduate, I was, so I went to community college and I worked in prison for three years, went back to four year school. And when I went back I just wanted to get out. Like I was trying to graduate as quickly as possible so I could become the police officer I wanted to become. Well, I met this girl and she was a year behind me in school because she was an education major and music education was like a five year program. And so I was gonna graduate and go back to Canada, and I didn't wanna do that. So I talked to my advisor and she said, "Well, you know, you can delay graduation for a semester and do an internship in the spring." And I thought, I literally said, "Like, what's an internship?" I had no idea about it. And she said, "Well, it's an opportunity for you go, you know, practice the job, go work somewhere at a place you might wanna work at, and you learn about the position." So I kind of backed into my own internship and I talk about that experience and remember more about that experience than anything I did in the classroom. I mean, still remember professors and some of the lessons I learned there, but that internship was in many ways kind of eyeopening in a way that I didn't expect. Because as you said, I discovered, like I was, I worked at the Special Prison Prosecution Unit in Huntsville, Texas, and I was working with the DAs and the investigators who were investigating crimes that took place in the Texas prison system. And I discovered about halfway through the process, I didn't wanna be a lawyer. If I couldn't be a police officer, which my wife had already kaboshed. I thought, well maybe I'll go to law school. And then I said, oh, I did not wanna go to law school because I had an experience I wouldn't have had otherwise. And so, so tell me, tell us about the internship experience from your perspective.
- I'll relate a little bit to my own story.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Where I often would say in Career Services, it's sometimes these small things that happen, like I call the ripple effect that sort of affects where you're gonna be.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- And just getting back to major for a second, students get real concerned about that choice of major. And while it's important, it is often not the determining factor in what you're gonna do. As both you and I are in different fields than in our undergrad major. For me, it was my work study job in the Dean of Students office.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Got so excited about higher education and what I could do and there's a whole career and then went to grad school for it and it worked out great. With internships, when we send students to go do these internships, it is real important that they're reflective about what they're learning while they're there and being real observant, not just doing tasks that's given to them, but who's working there. What is the real business?
- [Kelly] Yeah. What are some of the ethical decisions that folks might make in that kind of a field? And is this a thing that I want to do? Is this gonna be an easy job to get? Is it competitive? There's so many things that come up in an internship that I love, but mainly it's because it teaches these students what we call foundational skills.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- And this is what employers are asking for, such as teamwork and communication and critical thinking. Professionalism is a big one that we keep hearing about now too because they've worked somewhere before and all the better if it's somewhere relevant to the kind of job they're gonna apply for after they graduate.
- I was a mock interviewer once for for several years at a previous institution for students going to medical school. And so we would do interviews with them as if we were the medical school, to give them practice answering the questions. And one of the questions that we always asked about is, have you shadowed a doctor to know what it's like? And the advice we were giving them like, don't even apply to medical school if you're not shadowed someone or dental school or whatever. Spend some time just shadowing someone.
- [Ray] Yeah.
- And I learned a lot about how medical schools, like that's really important to take people who really understand what the job is, not what they saw on TV, but to understand more intimately and correctly what the job really entails.
- That is such an important point because it is not just for the intern to figure out, is this what I want to do? But it also will help an employer see that if, if you've done work like this before, you already know this is what you wanna do. They've probably been a few rounds where folks think they wanna do X, Y, or Z position and then they realize once they get there that the new employee doesn't. If you've done an internship in that field, you already know enough about it to know if that's the direction for you.
- So student teaching is a type of internship.
- [Ray] Yeah. That's been pretty common. Like you can't become a teacher if you didn't do a student teacher position. But it seems like more and more disciplines are requiring internships where it was kind of an optional thing. Like it was for me, criminal justice didn't require an internship, but there are more and more disciplines that are requiring it. So are what majors do we have on campus where it's almost expected that you have an internship?
- Yeah, and you're right there, there are a lot of majors that require internships. You know, student teaching is a real good example of that.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Where a lot of our students will go do that and discover that opportunity and what they do and don't like about teaching from that perspective.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- But many of our other majors will require it too. And those that don't require it are building a pathway for students to do internships. Liberal arts is one of my, my favorite colleges to talk about here. I was in liberal arts career centers for 25 years before I came here and often people will look at liberal arts majors and say, yeah, but what are you gonna, what are you gonna do with that major?
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Right? And the answer is really anything they wanna do.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- And, what our college here has done is they've built this really great opportunity where every major in that college has a pathway to do an internship.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Those students are the ones that are probably gonna learn the most from that internship experience. They may be English major or a history major, but decide I wanna do social media marketing, for example.
- Yeah.
- Go do an internship in social media marketing and discover that that's a career for you and learn all those transferable skills that are gonna come from that liberal arts degree.
- Or that it's not a career for you. Like, oh, I did not realize how much work this was. I thought it was just tweeting. But there's a lot of work to this. And so that's actually one of the beauties of the internship is, there's several beauties. One is finding out what you're good at, or what you like, but also finding out what you might not like to find the reality of it. The other benefit though is in some ways, it's like a semester long interview for you with the perhaps future employer.
- Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. One of the things I would say is back when internships were beginning, they weren't as popular. And I'll I'll say when I was in college, I didn't do an internship.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- It wasn't an option similar to what you said, but when employers started offering internships at first, it was a way to get work done, low cost.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Bring someone in, whether it's paid or unpaid, or paid less, to get work done. That is not the case now. Almost all of our employers have internship programs as a way to bring candidates in, get their name out there as an employer of choice, but also to screen candidates.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- To figure out, this is our hiring pipeline is our internship program. So they've gotten very strategic about when they offer those and what they bring a student through to give them a realistic job preview. So more and more that internship is a test for both a potential applicant in the future, but also a potential employer.
- You know, when internships started, I think there was, there was so little oversight on the placement sites by the university, that I think some people took advantage of that and had basically getting free employees and so on, or the students were going there, and part of their internship was like mopping the floor or doing, or making runs to Sonic for happy hour or whatever. And they weren't getting real world experience. But you probably do a lot more vetting of the internship sites that happened early on in the history of internships.
- We do. And you're exactly right. I think there was very little oversight of what an internship should be before, but the career center as well as our internship coordinators in the academic colleges across campus do a really good job screening those now, helping an employer understand what an internship is. We will get calls often from maybe a startup company or a smaller business wanting to offer an internship and we have to talk them through the process.
- Yeah.
- This is what it needs to contain. There needs to be some real learning outcomes involved.
- Yeah.
- The student needs to see some kind of a meaningful exposure to this career field and shadow a professional in the field to understand what it might be like to have that job in the future.
- Because a student's paying tuition through an internship, right?
- Tuition and time and time.
- [Kelly] And time.
- More and more, you know, their time that they're gonna be giving up. That's something they could be doing something else, working at a part-time job, for example, or whatever the case may be.
- So one of the things we try to tell our students when they're building their resume is to have a differentiator on their resume. Something that makes them stand out. And if all you have on there is your major and your GPA and what high school you graduated from, there's not much for future employer to kind of dig through. And so we think about, you know, being involved in clubs or having a part-time job somewhere, doing a study abroad, having an internship. These things all have different weights that people look at. And I think when employers are looking through hundreds of resumes, when they see someone had a internship, that's a differentiator that really makes a difference. Or study abroad's kind of the same way, but in a different perspective. But an internship just sets people apart in a way that did, that is super valuable to the student.
- Kind of think you're reading the journals I read.
- [Kelly] Oh really?
- Because that is exactly the case. There is one survey out there through NACE, which is our professional association, five years running, that is the number one answer. What differentiates candidates from those who get a job offer and those who don't is did they have an internship?
- Wow.
- And then second, was the internship relevant to the job that they're applying for here? But just getting an internship increases the chances of getting a job offer by five times.
- Wow, that's really interesting data. I know that 77% of our students work at least 10 hours a week. Some of them work a lot more than that because they have to financially support themselves.
- That's right.
- But if they can somehow find a job that's related to what they're doing or get an internship that's, that those are remarkable data about the impact that has on your chances of getting a job and perhaps getting the job that you want.
- It's one of the things we work on. There are certain hurdles for students to do internships and one of them.
- It's hard, right?
- Is, I've got this part-time job. I'm going to school at the same time taking classes. I don't have time. So if we can help identify paid internships.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Where they're going to be able to replace that income through that internship income, so that that semester they're not doing that part-time job, all the better. And we're finding more and more internships are paid too. That did not used to be the case back when I started out in this field.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- But little over 60% of our internships are paid now.
- My internship did not pay and I had to pay I think nine hours of tuition and all I did was the internship, but I had a part-time job. I was an RA at the same time. But that was 60 hours a week, because I had 20 hours a week as an RA and 40 hours a week as an intern. I remember thinking at the time, what if I was taking classes at the same time or had like, an RA is not a real tough job, but what if I was doing something that was pretty tough in addition to that? The chances are, back then, that the people who did internships and study abroad, where the people who could afford to do it, or people who did an internship in Washington DC or New York. And what we're trying to do is level the playing field a little bit to make things like internships, these value added experiences, available and accessible to everybody that comes here.
- It's, right, 'cause if we look at internships as being the key to getting a job offer, especially in some of these more competitive fields, and you have to get that internship to do it, that can be sort of the access gap.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- That many students wouldn't be able to have access to. So it's why I like paid internships so much more. And I'm so excited that so many more of our employers are paying. 'Cause it does level the playing field, so that everyone has access to an internship and then those folks are the ones who are gonna have access to those more competitive jobs.
- You know, we have 230,000 alumni, Texas State University and they often ask me, how can I help you? And I say there's time, talent, and treasure, right? But one of the things that they can do, is to think about, could I use an intern here? Not just can I use one, but can I make an opportunity for a student to engage in the world that I live in so I can help them figure out a way to become part of that world? What would someone do if they want to offer an internship?
- So, and they don't even have to offer a whole internship yet.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Although if they do, all they have to do is reach out to the career center, either give us a call or send us an email. We get right back with them, talk them through the process. More times than not, their companies have an internship.
- Yeah.
- Program. And what our students need is maybe someone to talk to first before they apply, to understand the company, how to be more competitive. But one of the things that I'm more excited about now is our job shadow program. And we've got a lot of alumni who are now able to do that. Maybe they can't offer a full internship, but I can bring a Bobcat to work for a day.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Show them what I do. And that is what has been turning a lot of students interested into certain different kind of career fields by going and shadowing and learning about things that they wouldn't have done before. It's a day commitment, not a semester.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- So why not go out there and learn about it?
- You know, we have alumni living in Chicago and New York and LA. And some of our students can't imagine like, how do I go to New York City and they've never been to New York City, how do I live there? And I often tell them, you know, if you could just host a student or a student group, help them kind of get the lay of the land, help them learn how LA works and how New York works, and so on, that could be a real door opener for our students as well. You figured it out somehow, but they might not even try without a little bit of help. And so I'd love to be a, you know, bring a Bobcat to Work Day or something like that. That's a great idea.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Well, thanks so much for sharing about what's going on at Career Services. Thank you for serving our students like this. And also just a reminder for our alumni, they actually have Career Services for life, right?
- Absolutely, yeah. One of the great things about Career Services, once a Bobcat,
- [Kelly and Ray] Always a Bobcat.
- So all of our services are open for free to all of our alumni for the rest of their life.
- Well, Ray, one of the things we love to do is have our listeners engage in the podcast as well. So we ask them to submit questions and we actually ask our guests to ask the questions. So you get to play podcast host here for a moment and ask me, I don't even know what the question is. And so surprise me and let me know. Hopefully it's a good question.
- If you could go back and attend to any historical event, which event would that be?
- Oh, you know, I think that, you know, being an immigrant to the United States has made me really interested in the process of a country becoming a country. And I guess I'd love to be a fly on the wall at the constitutional, the Congress, when they're writing the Constitution and be part of that conversation, or before that, while they're declaring independence where these people sign their name to this Declaration of Independence and how courageous it must have been for them to do that. Creating something out of scratch, something that's never been done before, but then to create something as great as this country we live in. I think being part of that would be really interesting to see. I hope I'd have the courage to sign along them. I think I might've got swept up in it and done it anyways, but these people were super courageous and almost all of them ended their lives having lost everything. Like they sacrificed everything to make this possible. So that's probably it. Probably the the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
- Yeah, that's gonna be a tough one to beat, I agree.
- Pretty much any scene from "Hamilton".
- Yeah.
- The real version of that.
- Yeah, that's great. Ray, thanks so much for sharing what was going on at Career Services. It's inspiring to see how much work our faculty and staff put into our students to help them rise above whatever challenges they're facing. And the biggest challenge is to get a job when they graduate. And we want them all to be employed when they leave here. I know their parents do as well. So thank you for helping us do that.