Transcription
Hey Carson Cougs, this is Michelle, and if you're listening to this video, you're here to learn about the Crimson Pathway of the Amplifier Program. The Fire Program was developed by industry professionals, our National Board of Advisors, and our faculty to ensure that we have everything set up for you so that when you graduate as a Carson professional, you have everything you need to be career-ready.
So, let me tell you a little bit about our program. Our program is set up so that you will have all the career competencies and technical skills that you need, and employers are actually searching for. So, let's go ahead and go into our webpage. When I share the webpage, you would go, obviously, first to business.wsu.edu, and then in the drop-down from the Carson Center for Student Success, go to the Amplifier, which is where we are here for the Carson Career Amplifier Program. We have an Amplifier overview and then a video, and it's a very helpful video.
After looking through everything that we have on the webpage and looking at Suitable, then what you can do is, if you still have questions, you can click this button, and you can email us, or you can just remember that it's ccb.amplifier@wsu.edu.
So, what are we doing here in the Amplifier Program? Well, we've taken the NACE career competencies and we've put some of them in the classroom and some of them in our Amplifier Program. The ones that we are covering in the Amplifier Program are career and self-development, communication, leadership, professionalism, and also within professionalism, equity and inclusion. Now, we can't forget that you are students, and so we also have the student success.
Now, let's take a look at Crimson Pathway. Here, you can see that if you had more than 30 credits when you're coming into the college, you're going to be a Crimson Pathway student. So, we will click right here, and it's going to take you directly to the Crimson Pathway for transfer students.
In Crimson Pathway 1, you are going to complete two business-focused 100-level trainings. This is going to be things that will just help—actually, it's 200-level; this will be corrected here shortly—and that's going to help you with business specifics. So, maybe learning how to write for business as opposed to for composition or for stories or for other things academically. We wanted to teach you the seven C's of professional communication; that's just one example of many that we'll have available for you.
Then, you're going to complete one orientation, which is going to happen here in September, so mark your calendars. It's going to be September 10th, and be looking in Suitable and then the signage that we have throughout Todd and all of that. Attend at least one professionalism event. This is basically saying, "Hey, you're interested in business; let's learn more about it." So, it could be an info session. There are a lot of things that might work for this, but an example would be Boeing coming in and talking to you about what it's like to be in the aerospace industry. That would be a business-focused or professionalism event.
Complete one career networking event. We want you to really start getting into that networking, and networking takes practice, just like anything. It's kind of weird and funky at the very beginning sometimes, but with practice, you're going to settle into it, and you'll be able to really communicate what you have to offer the companies that you're talking to.
Since you are already with 30 credits, you should probably be getting engaged with our faculty. So, let's say that you're really interested in accounting. How great would it be if you could talk to those accounting faculty to say, "You know what? I'm really interested in accounting; I want to become a CFO. What kinds of classes do you think would really give me the best opportunity to become a CFO?" They might say, "Well, in smaller companies, a lot of CFOs will oversee the IT department, and they also oversee the HR department." So, it might behoove you to consider MIS or MIS classes or even a double degree and perhaps either an HR minor or just some classes in HR and people management. They're there to help you; they love to talk to you. Even though it seems daunting to go talk to a faculty member, they're here to teach students, and they want to talk about their expertise. They've been spending their entire lives working on it.
Now, if you are a transfer student but you haven't been admitted to the college quite yet, that means that you need to complete Crimson Pathway before you can be admitted to the college, and I'll talk about those deadlines here in just a moment.
Crimson Pathway 2 is going to be after your first year, so you have until you graduate to complete Crimson Pathway 2. You're going to do two "Building Your Market Value" activities. These are really understanding what the market is looking for. The example I gave you before for a CFO: they probably want to have a little bit of knowledge about IT, and they want a little bit of knowledge about HR. So, you can really start to hone your skills towards your end-game goals, and that makes you marketable and valuable to the employer. That's why we call it "Building Your Market Value."
Complete two "Creating Your Brand" activities. Once you know what you need to do to create your market value, you're going to want to really figure out, "What is my personal brand? What do I stand for, and what do I have that's unique to offer to the company?" We're going to help you walk through that process.
Now, in college, it's pretty easy to kind of follow a learning plan, right? Your academic plan—that's normal; that's expected. But when you leave here, you don't want the learning to stop, and neither does your employer. That's how you get raises, and that's how you get promotions, and that's how you kind of move up the ladder. So, we're going to help you learn how to make a really intentional professional development plan to meet your long-term goals.
You're going to complete one equity and inclusion event, attend at least two career networking events, and complete one leadership development activity. This could be becoming the leader of a club; it could be that you are a manager in your full-time job; it could be that you are in leadership in your fraternity or your sorority. There are a lot of different ways that you can do this, or you could also take that time to learn about leadership, and we have a couple of opportunities that are really solid for you to learn about that.
The next one is about career essentials. Career essentials is really all about how we help you just kind of live your life so that when you're at work, your time, mental capacity, and energy are being put towards that instead of, "Oh my gosh, I don't know what to do for insurance, and I don't know how to do my budget, and I don't know how to pay back my student loans." We want to help you with all those so that you're armed for living your life, so that when you're at work, you can focus on work.
Then, you're going to complete the post-grad survey plan. This is basically just telling us, "Hey, where are you headed after college? Did you get a job? Are you still looking for a job? Do you want some help from our career consultants to help you get a job?" We're here to help you even beyond the time that you graduate. We have a team of seven full-time career professionals that are here to help you. Our employer relations team is here to bring in employers and opportunities for you and get them in front of you. Then, we have four full-time career consultants that are also here to help you get jobs, do program development for your ultimate goal. They can help you with interview skills, help you look for internships, and help you do research on companies—all of these different kinds of things. You can see them as many times as you want or as they're available.
Completing that is really important to help you along in your process, so take advantage of everything that you have here. It's free while you're in college, and then even for a little bit after college. We have two exit surveys that you will do. One of them is really focused on your technical skills that you've acquired over the four years that you've been here. It's a really great opportunity to review some of the things that you've learned. The other one is really all about your transferable skills or your career competencies, or those soft skills that we're working on through the Amplifier Program and some of your VA courses. It's a really great thing to review as you're walking out the door.
We're going to have you complete one "Pay It Forward" activity, which is really giving back to the community. It could be your personal community, but it could also be, you know, being a mentor or an ambassador, or maybe you are working with your church. The main thing is we just want you to give back because that really is the Coug spirit—that's Coug's helping Cougs. That's what we're all about.
Last but certainly not least, we have the high-impact learning experience. The high-impact learning experience is really a great opportunity to take those technical skills and those career competencies or transferable skills and put them together in application. An internship, a competition like the business plan competition, or even a special project if you're working as an accounting assistant and you want to get your accounting degree so that you can move up into higher roles or become, you know, eventually that CFO. The high-impact learning experience has an opportunity for you as well. You can actually create your own workplace project and get it approved, and then you get to go through. Just know that if you choose one of those, you're going to have it approved ahead of time.
So, how do we keep track of all of these things? Well, we use the Suitable app. When you log into Suitable, there is an app on your phone and one on the computer, and you would use different ones for different purposes. When you come in, you're on your dashboard. For you, because you're in Crimson Pathway, you would only see Crimson Pathway 1 and Crimson Pathway 2. On this view, I can see all of them just because it's a test account.
So, let's click into Crimson Pathway 1, and it will show you what we're going to do to get you career-ready. You can click into this; you're going to attend that orientation we talked to you about. There's the professionalism, and you can see that there are multiple options that you can do. When you complete this, it just disappears, so really you're only looking at what you still have left to do. That's really helpful. Make sure that when you click into these, you look at the directions.
You can see here to review the faculty engagement form, which we're actually also updating right now, so it'll be new and improved. It tells you exactly what you need to do. At the very end of everything, it will say, "To receive credit, this is what you need to do." This is the faculty engagement form, and we have it linked, but you can also find it back on our webpage at the very beginning.
At the top of this webpage, you have these forms right here. Let me tell you a trick: let's say that you're filling out Form A, and you fill out all of this information, and then you go to download it over here. You don't want to download it because downloading it is only the form. You want to actually print it, so you're going to print, and then you're going to print as a PDF because that will save the contents that you put in there. That is really helpful, and then you would come back to Suitable, and you would just choose the file, and so you would upload the file from wherever it is on your computer, and that's it. Very easy to navigate.
If you have questions, down here under resources, you can go into the students, and then you can have your help question answered right there. If we look at the activities, let's say that you heard about an activity and you wanted to go to it. Here, you can see general upload, and then you could find it here. Another thing that you can do is the achievements tab will take you right to here, and you can go all the way through just like we showed you that you can do it on the dashboard. The portfolio is where things that you have done and submitted will go.
Let's say that you want to really focus on showing an employer that, "Yeah, I really am engaged. I'm not just talking here; I actually did it." You can give them a link to this page or put it on your LinkedIn, and then they can see exactly the kind of engaged student that you are, and that is extremely enticing to an employer.
All right, so last but certainly not least, we have the admission deadline. If you have not been admitted to the college and you're taking a BA 102, that's going to tell you when things are due. If you're in spring BA 102, it's due May 1st, and so on. You also, when you go to take your capstone close to graduation, have to have completed at least Crimson Pathway 1. I would say probably Crimson Pathway 1 and then at least half of Crimson Pathway 2, but as a bare minimum, you have to have Crimson Pathway 1 complete before you can even get into your capstone.
Graduation deadlines: you have to have everything finished by the final last day of finals week at midnight. This gives you that opportunity to really make sure that you've done those experiences, that you've thought about them, that you've reflected on them, and that you have something to talk about in your interviews, which will then get you that job that you want.
Now, I wish you all the luck. This is a really well-thought-out program, and the opportunities are endless if you take advantage of them. Let us know how we can help you here in the Carson Center for Student Success. We have so much to offer you, and we are here to serve you. So, good luck, get engaged, and go Cougs!