Get to Know CDO Peer Advisor, Haley Witschey '20

By Matt Mandel '19

This past summer, the Career Development Office (CDO) trained three Career Services Associates (CSAs) to make career counseling more accessible for Kenyon students. CSAs are available to meet with anyone who wants their résumé or cover letter reviewed, or who needs to start from scratch.

Haley Witschey ’20 is one of this year’s CSAs. Witschey, who had her first appointment as a peer advisor with a fellow student in mid-September after starting her training in late August said that she feels comfortable offering advice to students. “It just kind of flowed out of me. It was easy to talk about tips to the [first] girl I was meeting with,” she said. “I’m learning how to edit, use tab stops, and borders, and cool formatting stuff.”

Witschey is from Wadsworth, Ohio, and is a junior psychology major with a minor in anthropology. She is a right-side hitter for Kenyon’s volleyball team and the sisterhood chair for the Theta Delta Phi sorority. Just from her on-campus experiences, it is clear that Witschey likes helping and engaging with people around her.

She plans to take a semester abroad to Kenya in the spring. Through a program with the University of Minnesota, she will take classes in Nairobi for seven weeks followed by a six-week service internship. “I’m thinking about the social services or education track working with women or children either teaching kids or working in a clinic.”

Yet before she moves halfway across the world, Witschey is looking forward to helping her fellow Kenyon students to follow their own dreams. She encourages everyone to seek career counseling, no matter what stage in the process you might find yourself.

“We’re the first round. You can come to us initially if you have a basic resume, if you have a resume from high school, or if you don’t have one started we can give you prompts on how to start each section ... You should go to the CDO in general because they can be super helpful … There are a lot of ways to present yourself really well; but there are other ways to do it not so well, so we can help you see the better ways.”

The CSAs are available to students to offer peer guidance in an environment that might make getting your application materials reviewed by a staff member a little less daunting, as well as to help meet student demand for resume and cover letter support. 

Working on a résumé or cover letter is a process, and one student could seek advice on multiple times along the way. “You can keep coming back to us.” Witschey explains. CSAs often send resumes and cover letters back and forth with students they counsel.

Witschey hopes that more students will take advantage of the CSAs as an on-campus resource. “I like being a CSA because it gives me an opportunity to help other students,” she said. “It’s a chance for me to help people and also learn a lot in the Career Development Office. I really enjoy editing résumés. It’s become a game, or a puzzle to find things that can be improved upon.”

CSAs are now available for evening appointments in the Bookstore. Their evening hours are Mondays from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m, and Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.  They are also available during the day at the CDO in lower Gund Commons. Students can schedule appointments with CSAs on Symplicity.