Career Development Educator, Borough of Manhattan Community College

My name is Ladana Jenkins. I am currently Academic Internship Faculty here at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. I've been here since 2010 where I teach career planning but I also work with our academic internship students preparing them for their internships and working them throughout the course of the semester for their internships. So I work specifically in the accounting department is my assigned department. But I also work with liberal arts majors, computer information system majors, communication studies majors as well. So pretty much the life cycle here working with the students we get them and what we call CED201 which is our career planning class. And in that class is where I work specifically more so with accounting but we also have other majors cause it's an open course. So any major, any student can take the class. And we work with them with the entire career development cycle. So helping them figure out they want to do with their career figure out what path they want to take. Particular with accounting students they'll say I wanna work in accounting. And I'll tell them that's very broad. So what exactly do you wanna do in accounting? Auditing, tax, government, you know, what area so you wanna focus? So we helped them with that entire cycle. Looking at their skill sets, what they need to develop more, what they need to work on more, and then preparing them with the resume, the cover letter, the interviewing skills, doing all those pieces as well, attire, and then also salary negotiations. So really take them through the entire career development cycle. Once they finish that course they can move onto take our internship courses. We have a few majors here that require the students to do an internship and accounting is one of them. A lot of it is really exploration. I really like to have that conversation with them. Really why do you want to do this? Why didn't you choose this particular field? Let's explore that because you have to be clear about that. So when you're talking about in an interview or when you're trying to get a job or an internship you need to be able to communicate why you chose this field, why you chose this particular organization, why did you choose this school to come to. So all this pieces play out in that. And so really getting the students to move away from the one word responses or because I like it or I love it. But really getting beyond that to say you know, this is why I'm interested in this field. This is what appeal to me, this is why I like your company. So helping them to learn how to communicate themselves more and add a little bit more meat to it. But so busy days is getting all the students sending out their resumes helping them set up their interviews for their internships. We come back a little bit later then most schools. The CUNY System. So for example we came back later in August. Most schools come back mid August so that gets us a little bit behind in the scale with that so we just want to get all the resumes out to the employers so the students can start interviewing. So it was getting all that managed. When your working with 40 or so students you know, you're managing a lot there with them to help to get situated with that.