A new way for students and alumni to get connected is now as simple as, well, simplicity itself.
The Career Development Office recently migrated the Kenyon Career Network, a database of 5,700 alumni who offer to mentor students, onto Wisr, the one-stop site for internships, job shadows and on- and off-campus jobs.
The change, which cuts costs and improves functionality, is also indicative of a larger push by the CDO to engage alumni with students and other graduates.
“That’s really one of our goals: to turn this into a Kenyon mafia that all the other schools are in tears [over] because they can’t get their people employed and we’re the only people who can,” Scott Layson, director of the CDO, said about how alumni will now be able to post jobs for fellow Kenyon grads.
“Something that’s not widely known is we, as the Career Development Office, don’t stop working with our graduates just because they graduate,” Layson said. “We work with our alumni just like we work with our student body.”
With the new KCN, students and alumni will now be able to search a wide array of career fields — 101 industries in all, according to Associate Director Leslie Harding —in a more streamlined process, which includes a better search function.
In addition to the system update, the increasingly popular externship program, in which students spend a few days or weeks following a graduate at work, is undergoing a rebranding.
With the new system in place, Layson and Harding said they are excited to continue expanding opportunities for students to network, including bringing alumni back to campus for events such as the alumni panel on finance careers last month.
“It really motivates our students to act,” Layson said. “If I can get our students connected to a couple of alums, those alums really love to help mentor those students, and the active students are the ones that are really successful.”
By Henri Gendreau ’16