Photo by: Sherlyn Ong

By: Nick Hurter
For the 2015-2016 year, our Career Services at Southwestern was ranked 12th in the nation by Princeton Review. Some of the key people behind this success are Director Daniel Orozco, Associate Director Alex Anderson, Internship Coordinator Maria Kruger, and Administrative Assistant Dana Luna. I spoke with them briefly in the Career Services Office about their opinions on their success.
Hurter: What is the importance of career services?

Orozco: I have always thought, in all three of the schools that I have been at, that studen are going to go through something when they leave here; they are not going to stay forever. And what we do is what they are typically going to do when they leave here. Either more school, or they are going to go work and they are going to have to adapt.

Kruger: We can impact in a positive way in helping [students] navigate that process. It can be a complex process for a lot of people to figure it all out. We provide so much individualised attention for students and that is extremely good. You can’t get that at a lot of other universities.

Hurter: How do you feel that this fantastic review by Princeton review will encourage not only current students, but future and prospective students to feel confident about getting a job/internship after college?

Anderson: It gives us confidence that we are on the right track. Part of it is murky; they don’t publish exactly how they collect that information. What we know is that is that they do tap hundreds of thousands of students that remain in contact with Princeton in some way.
Orozco: I very rarely quote the number. It is kind of awkward to toot your own horn like that. But when  it is brought up often with families that are visiting here, President Burger is the one who brought it up. It does raise us on a pedestal a little bit, and people will say ‘Wow, there’s some value in there.’

Kruger:  I will echo what [Daniel and Alex] said, but from a parent’s perspective, because my daughter is in the graduating senior pool, it matters. We are looking at things like this at other schools. When you are picking a major it is important to know how much the school will help,  so it’s been interesting to ask those kind of questions at other schools and seeing how little they do in comparison to what we do for our students.

Hurter: What is the plan for the future? What are some ideas of which to broaden the reach of Career Services at Southwestern?

Kruger: Another thing is trying to figure out how to grow the variety of internships that are out there. So for instance, We just finished a program called Surf Programs. It’s basically internships in the hard sciences, and trying figure out how to grow those.

Anderson:  I think things that we would like to see, I mean we’ve got our pie in the sky dreams, but coming down the pike is […] the new alumni networking system which we are very much a part of. We talk frequently about wanting to grow our involvement with SU in regards to Alumni, Parents, etc. That is something that we are good at and want to continue cultivating.

The full interview can be read on The Megaphone website.