Friday, December 13, 2013
Monday, December 9, 2013
Friday, November 22, 2013
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Thursday, November 7, 2013
![12 College Experiences Your Resume Needs [Infographic]](http://blog.boundless.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Boundless-12-college-experiences-your-resume-needs.png "12 College Experiences Your Resume Needs [Infographic]")
Monday, November 4, 2013
Need an Override for Spring 2014? Fill in the form on the ASC website from 11/7 - 11/14/13
Students seeking an override into a business course for the Spring 2014 semester must formally request an override via an electronic form located on the ASC website at www.jmu.edu/cob/asc beginning Thursday, November 7th. The override request form will be available until midnight, Thursday, November 14th. Students will be notified by Friday, December 6th regarding the status of their request(s). Requests from current students will not be accepted after November 14th! Students will be referred to MyMadison to watch for openings.
Monday, October 28, 2013
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Friday, October 18, 2013
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Monday, October 14, 2013
Friday, October 11, 2013
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
The Academic Services Center (ASC) Welcomes a New Madison Advising Peer in Zane Showker, Room 205!
Would you like to discuss some academic and advising issues with a peer? Lauren Crain will be advising within the Academic Services Center on Tuesdays from 2-5 and Fridays from 1:30-3:30.
- Which General Education check sheet do I follow?
- What are the cluster requirements in General Education?
- How do I know if I've met all of my General Education requirements?
- How do I find out who my advisor is and when should I meet with him or her?
- How do I remove a hold from my record?
- When can I register for classes?
- Is there a list of courses offered in the summer at JMU?
- How do I read my degree progress report?
- How do I map out an academic plan?
- Can I take a course at home in the summer and transfer the credit to JMU?
- How do I request a course override?
- What is the difference between repeat forgive and repeat credit?
- How do I declare a minor or pre-professional program?
- What questions should I ask my faculty advisor when I meet with him or her?
- Where can I find information about progression standards for my major?
- Where do I go to get information about studying abroad?
- How do I change my major?
- What minors are offered at JMU?
- What is the difference between the BA and BS degree?
- When do I apply for graduation?
Advising Topics Madison Advising Peer's Can Assist You With:
- What are the cluster requirements in General Education?
- How do I know if I've met all of my General Education requirements?
- How do I find out who my advisor is and when should I meet with him or her?
- How do I remove a hold from my record?
- When can I register for classes?
- Is there a list of courses offered in the summer at JMU?
- How do I read my degree progress report?
- How do I map out an academic plan?
- Can I take a course at home in the summer and transfer the credit to JMU?
- How do I request a course override?
- What is the difference between repeat forgive and repeat credit?
- How do I declare a minor or pre-professional program?
- What questions should I ask my faculty advisor when I meet with him or her?
- Where can I find information about progression standards for my major?
- Where do I go to get information about studying abroad?
- How do I change my major?
- What minors are offered at JMU?
- What is the difference between the BA and BS degree?
- When do I apply for graduation?
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Major Help or Major Harm?
As more and more students concentrate on multiple fields in college, advisers and career experts debate the benefits of a narrow focus...
Read more of the article here:
/http://chronicle.com/article/Major-Help-or-Major-Harm-/16685/
Read more of the article here:
/http://chronicle.com/article/Major-Help-or-Major-Harm-/16685/
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Friday, August 30, 2013
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
The Journey is the Goal!
Start with making a commitment to yourself to give yourself the time and luxury to think about your career path. Now that you are a college student it’s the perfect time to reflect further and explore the road you are on. You do not need to have all the answers figured out yet. Don’t let the pressure of other people’s expectations affect your journey. Career development is a lifelong journey with many twists and turns along the way!
Explore and research the world of work. Conduct informational interviews with adults that work in the field you are considering and ask them the hard questions. People that work within the occupation are the ones who really know the nature of the job the best! To guide you with questions you could ask, find out “what they wish they would have known about the field of XYZ that they now know”. Examine and discuss the pros and cons of the occupation. Learn to explore the culture of various organizations. Most of us are happiest when the culture of the workplace is congruent with who we are and the skills that we want to use on an everyday basis.
Use some popular exploration tools such as the Occupational Outlook Handbook from the Bureau of Labor Statistics available at http://www.bls.gov/ooh. Examine how the world of work is clustered so you are not overwhelmed by your exploration. Can you see the relationship between the similar occupations? Great, then you’re on the right track!
Another great tool and one of my favorites is the O*Net Online. Click the link to check it out at: http://www.onetonline.org/. The O*Net takes it one step further and helps you see the types of knowledge and skills that one needs for various occupations. Use this tool and compare it with your campus “Guide to Majors” that many career centers offer to help categorize and explain the majors and their requirements. This will give you a starting point for what types of majors you may want to consider.
Use your campus professionals and visit counselors and advisors to guide you through the process. They are eager to help you do some self-assessment to reveal your personality, interests, abilities, skills and values so you can select the best major to help you fulfill your goals and dreams! Most importantly, remember that the “journey is the goal”…Good luck and enjoy your journey!
Christine Harriger, M.Ed., M.C.D.P.
Monday, August 12, 2013
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Cute Infographic depicting the differences between college & real world
Adpated from my VT colleague's professional blog entitled Young, Polished & Professional.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Friday, May 3, 2013
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Thoughts on how to find your vocation
How to Find Your Vocation in College
From the time you were five years old, someone was always asking you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Maybe you answered “a cowboy” or “a princess,” but you really didn’t know. As you get older, the pressure intensifies. “A professional baseball player.” “A veterinarian.” Now you are in college, but you still don’t know. You have to pick a major, but how do you know (1) whether you will get a job, and (2) whether you will be satisfied with that job should you even get one.
Vocational Training
These are all struggles about your vocation. That word has become a synonym for “job,” so that colleges debate the extent to which higher education should be primarily vocational training or whether it should have higher goals, such as cultivating the intellect. But vocation is simply the Latinate word for “calling.” It is one of those theological words—like inspiration, revelation, mission, and vision—that has been taken over by the corporate world and drained of its meaning. The idea is that what you do for a living can be a calling. From God. That He has made you in a certain way and given you certain talents, opportunities, and inclinations. He then calls you to certain tasks, relationships, and experiences.
Your job is only a part of that, and sometimes not the most important part. We have vocations in the family (being a child, getting married, becoming a parent) and in the society (being a citizen, being a friend). There are also vocations in the church (pastor, layperson), but even if you don’t believe in religion, the vocations are operative. Not only that, according to Martin Luther, the great theologian of vocation, God works through vocation, including the work of people who do not believe in Him. God gives us our daily bread by means of farmers, millers, bakers, and the person who served you your last meal. God creates new life by means of mothers and fathers. He heals by means of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists. He protects us by means of police officers, judges, and the military callings. He creates works of beauty and meaning by the talents He has given to artists.
The purpose of every vocation—in the workplace, the family, the church, the society—is to love and serve our neighbors. These are the “good works” that we are given to do. That may sound idealistic. Surely in our participation in the economy we are motivated by our enlightened self-interest. And yet it is surely true that if we are not helping someone by the goods or services we provide, we will not stay in business very long. Even our self-interests are taken up into God’s providential workings.
In serving ourselves we also find ourselves serving others, whether or not that is our intention. Thus our work, our families, and our citizenship can be charged with moral and even spiritual significance.
It makes a difference if we think of our work as a “job” (meaning a task we perform), an “occupation” (how we spend our time), a “career” (meaning running at great speed on a preset course), a “profession” meaning taking a vow of commitment, or a “vocation” (meaning a calling). Strictly speaking, we do not choose our vocations. Our vocations choose us.
Certain Republican governors, Fox News pundits, libertarian think tankers, and others worried about skyrocketing taxpayer-funded student loans that are often impossible to pay back are arguing that students should stop majoring in liberal arts subjects like philosophy and history. Instead, they should major in something practical like business or “STEM subjects” (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). That way our nation’s young people would get good jobs that would enable them to pay back their student loans and contribute to society.
The assumption is that if students would just choose a profession, any profession, that would make them lots of money, all would be well. Now you would think that Republican governors, Fox News pundits, and libertarian think tankers would realize that free market economics, with its laws of supply and demand, applies in the job market. The reason certain jobs command big salaries is that not many people can do them. Conversely, if all college students were to go into the STEM line, both the salaries and the employment rate in these fields would plummet, since the supply would overwhelm the demand. As it is, business majors, scientists, techies, engineers, and math majors are already complaining that they can’t get jobs either.
Finding a career is not as simple as identifying fields with good employment prospects that pay a lot of money. There may be a growing need for accountants in the year you expect to graduate. But if you are no good in math, hate working at a desk, and fail your accounting classes, that field is not for you. Or, rather, you are not for that field. By the same token, if you are no good at science, technology, engineering, or math, you are not cut out for the STEM professions. If, however, what you do best is philosophize, you may be doomed to be a philosopher.
What you do is related to who you are. That is, to your personality, talents, aptitudes, and interests. Also, to your background, experiences, and opportunities. The factors about you that are “given,” that might be shaped by your choices but not easily changed, are the raw materials for your callings.
Higher Education
College is both a place where you learn things and a phase of your life. For many of those with the opportunity to go to college—and never despise those who don’t—it is a transition between childhood, living with your parents, and independent adulthood. So it is a time for seeking, preparing for, and finding vocations. (Not just in the sense of jobs. College can also lead to other vocations, such as marriage or a heightened awareness of your citizenship.) Part of the genius of higher education is that its structure usually allows you to try things. Most people come to college with little sense of what fields even exist and have only a slim idea what they are good at. Here the much-maligned liberal arts requirements can be enormously helpful.
I think that part of the recently displayed hostility to the liberal arts on the part of the Republican governors, Fox pundits, and libertarian think tankers might be that these conservatives think the liberal in liberal arts means “liberal,” as in their political nemesis. It actually comes from the Latin word for “freedom,” as in the education needed for a free citizen, as opposed to “servile” education reserved for slaves, who handled most of the tech needs of ancient Greeks and Romans. The liberal arts, properly speaking, are an education for freedom, something conservatives should support.
It is true that most universities have also forgotten what “liberal arts” means. (Four of the seven liberal arts involve mathematics, indeed, STEM-related skills. The other three involve mastery of language and logic.) But the liberal arts requirements, or what is left of them, are designed to cultivate your intellectual powers. Studying history and your cultural heritage can help you in your vocation of citizenship. Learning to read, write, and think deeply can make you better at whatever profession you are eventually called to. And taking courses with so many different methodologies—hard science and social science, literary analysis and quantitative research—can give you a sense of what intellectual activities you find most rewarding, which can help direct you toward a major, perhaps one you never even knew existed.
The liberal arts are often played against “vocational education,” in the sense of job training. It’s true that the liberal arts are concerned with bigger issues than your own personal job prospects—that is, with transmitting our heritage and our civilization, with transcendent values such as truth, goodness, and beauty. But because the liberal arts are, above all, concerned with cultivating all your human powers and helping you to become a free human being, they are vocational education in the theological sense.
Your vocation now
Thinking about your future vocationally should take some of the pressure off. It isn’t that you have to make a career choice that will determine your entire life and ruin it if you get it wrong. Since a calling comes from the outside, vocation lets things happen. Finding one’s vocation takes seriously doors that open and doors that slam in your face.
Also, vocation is in the here and now. College students are often so fixated on what their future vocations may be that they forget that they have vocations right now. Slinging burgers may be a dull and boring occupation with the sole purpose of earning tuition money. While it won’t be your vocation forever, it is still a calling, a sphere of service to one’s neighbors–customers, the boss, fellow workers—and a meaningful human enterprise.
College students also have a vocation as members of their family, with obligations to their parents, brothers, and sisters. They also have a vocation as citizens of the various communities they inhabit (their hometown, their college community, their state, their country). They also have vocations in their religious communities, if they have one. Most notably, they have the vocation of being college students. This calling, like all the others, has its proper work—namely, to study, read, go to class, discuss ideas, and write papers.
Who are the neighbors a college student is to love and serve? Professors. Fellow students. Roommates. Also the people, living and dead, whom you are studying. As a student of literature (now a professor), I like to think that I am loving and serving William Shakespeare by appreciating his art and exploring its meaning. Thus the vocations involved with being at college can themselves prepare you for the vocations that await you after college. This is a matter not only of what you are learning, but also of the kind of person you are becoming. The various and ever-changing vocations that you will experience throughout your life will blossom out of that.
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Friday, April 19, 2013
Monday, April 15, 2013
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Meet Dr. Mary Gowan, the new Dean of the College of Business. Dr. Gowan will officially begin her appointment as of July 1, 2013!
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| The College of Business Academic Services Center is delighted to welcome Dr. Mary Gowan as the new Dean of the College of Business! |
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Friday, March 22, 2013
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Friday, March 15, 2013
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
How to Keep Momentum on Your Career Goals
One big problem we all have when it comes to pursuing our goals is losing focus or momentum. You see it the most for people trying to lose weight. They get all excited in a flurry of planning and preparation only to poop out a month later. The same thing happens to us for almost all of our undertakings unless the amount of time between launch and finish is seriously short, like a month or two. Very few career goals can be achieved on such a short time frame; so how can you avoid this familiar trap?The primary mechanism you must establish is accountability. Accountability is one of those things that come built-in at work. You get an assignment and a list of people, like your boss and peers, who expect you to get it done. BAM! Accountability. Sure, you’d like to think you are mature and professional enough that you don’t need someone lurking over your shoulder to make you do things. That is only partially true. You don’t need someone to over-manage you, but like most of us, you do need to know that someone will be expecting you to produce something.
That’s why it’s tough to do things on your own. You have only yourself to be accountable to and quite frankly, we’re all kind of pushovers. We can rationalize why doing something else right now is fine to do rather than work on something that will support our career goal. Next thing you know, you have done that enough times that you don’t even think about your action plan until it is too late or past due.
How to build the right kind of accountability:
Identify your support structure. It may be enough to have simply one person in your corner to help you, but more than likely it will be a team each with different roles. Your boss is the first and most likely person to engage in your career plan and to help keep you accountable. In addition to your boss, consider securing a mentor in your work place. You may also want to have a career coach who will not only follow up with you but tap into your deepest vision of what you want for yourself.
Identify regular follow up. Schedule in advance the specific day and time you will follow up with each person on your accountability team. It doesn’t have to be all in the same week. You can stagger your follow-up time. The key to this step is that it is on both your schedule and the other person’s. You both know what the time is to be used for and it will make it tougher to push out or reschedule. As well, with busy schedules the way they are, if you wait until the last minute to get time with another person, you may still be waiting.
Establish accountability “rules.” When you identify your team, you need to lay out the kind of behavior you want from them. You need to discuss such things as missing your deadlines or failing to work on something you had committed to do. Obviously, nothing critical will happen as a result of you missing something, but you don’t want the situation so loose that it’s meaningless. As a coach when I see someone miss something a time or two, I then ask them tough questions like: “What are you avoiding?” or “How can you make this as important as these other things you have done?” You don’t want your team to take you out in the parking lot and beat you up, but you also want them to be appropriately tough if they have to keep you going. Talk about all of this up front.
Celebrate your milestones. We tend to do significant things and then just blow them off with very little attention. Use your accountability team to take a few minutes to bask in the glow of a well-deserved accomplishment. You can master your career success by developing your goals and setting up the right structures to help you achieve them. You don’t and shouldn’t try to “white knuckle” your way to the finish line. In your career, just like in sports, you can have a team to help you win.
Dorothy Tannahill-Moran – Your Career Change Agent from ww.nextchapternewlife.com
Monday, March 11, 2013
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Monday, February 11, 2013
JMU cited as a best value college
JMU is one of 150 institutions – 75 public and 75 private undergraduate institutions – included in the book, which was published Feb. 5. Schools were selected from 650 colleges at which the Princeton Review conducted institutional and student surveys for the project in 2011-12. The annual guide features profiles of the schools with detailed information about their academics, cost and financial aid. Of the 75 schools in each group, the top 10 colleges are ranked 1 to 10, and the remaining 65 are listed in alphabetical order and unranked. JMU was listed in the Princeton Review's "Best Value Colleges" guides in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.
The public- and private-schools lists can be viewed at http://www.princetonreview.com/best-value-colleges.aspx and http://bestvaluecolleges.usatoday.com.
Monday, February 4, 2013
Congratulations to JMU Alumni, DJ Bryant, who played in the Superbowl last night!
CONGRATS to @JMUAlumni DJ Bryant! RT @djbryant13: Wow that's all I can say #blessed #ravensnation http://instagr.am/p/VS6wseRmd4/
Monday, January 28, 2013
President Alger's Listening Tour Visits COB, "Why Madison?" College of Business Leadership Council
Student teamwork obvious in Showker Lobby
Walking through the lobby today on my way to the "Why Madison?" Listening Tour meeting with the leadership council of the College of Business, I was met with a burst of energy --students raising money for causes, socializing with friends and working on group projects. Through the glass I could see a professor leading a class in the Gaglioti Capital Markets Lab, where students are able to analyze the impact of financial events and decisions by plugging into the same data that Wall Street traders use. I have heard so much from employers and alumni on the "Why Madison?" Listening Tour about how our graduates have the ability to work well in teams. I saw firsthand today how our students acquire and practice these skills.
CoB300 is the result of a College of Business that dreams big
This student energy is indicative of a college that is nationally recognized—in the top 5 percent of undergraduate business schools in the nation. As one participant mentioned, this college is not afraid to dream big—which is a theme I have been emphasizing on the listening tour. The faculty got behind the concept of a hands-on, team-taught course requiring students to work in groups to create business plans that could compete in the business world. The course has become the famously successful CoB300. Students say that the course is grueling to experience, but is also the best preparation for the business world of their academic life. Other business schools have tried and dropped the JMU model because they couldn't make it work, which takes extra time and commitment from the faculty to plan and work together for the benefit of the students. The business alumni with whom I have spoken on the tour identify faculty-student relationships as the key to the college's ranking and to their own personal success. We can further strengthen and distinguish JMU's business education offerings with additional focus on ethics and civic engagement (in keeping with the Quality Enhancement Plan and the university's mission).
The faculty is critical to university decision-making
There were strong opinions on increasing the role of the faculty in university decision-making, with one suggestion that instructional faculty should form the majority on all university committees. I agree that the efforts and reputation of our faculty will help lead JMU to the next stage of JMU's development, which is one of the reasons I have embarked on this "Why Madison?" Listening Tour. We have arrived at a key moment in the history of JMU, and we must take the time to review together where we have been and what makes us special—and then to chart where we want to go together in the future through the strategic planning process. Faculty are a critical part of these discussions.
I have asked the Compensation Task Force to think creatively
One of the consistent challenges I am hearing about on the listening tour is acquiring the funding to retain our world-class faculty members and recruit new ones. As I have explained in almost all of my meetings with the faculty, last spring, even before I became president, I identified the need for a task force to focus on compensation issues. I asked Jerry Benson and Charlie King to form the Compensation Task Force, which is looking at the compensation issue now. I have asked that group to think creatively and broadly and to collaborate on developing a range of ideas to address these challenges. I've asked the task force to come up with short-term, medium-term and long-term proposals.
Faculty suggests differential tuition and revisiting tuition/fee priorities
While the university is not a business per se, I am looking forward to some innovative ideas for developing university funding models from the College of Business faculty, because they especially know the value of sound planning, innovating, financing, budgeting and managing. One suggestion was that JMU revisit the concept of differential tuition, which has had broad support in the past, and would allow for JMU to charge tuition on a program-by-program basis, based on the cost of the program and the earning potential of its graduates. Another suggestion was to revisit the balance between tuition and fees. I would like us to get as many constructive ideas as possible on the table as we begin the next phase of our strategic planning process.
Nov. 8 presentation will offer transparency in the budget process
This CoB leadership council would like to see transparency in the university budgeting process, and we are already making strides on that front. Jerry Benson and J.W. Myers will be making a presentation Nov. 8 on the university budget to faculty, sponsored by the Faculty Senate.
Comprehensive campaign will be high on JMU's list
High on JMU's list in the near future will be a comprehensive campaign to augment tuition and state support with substantial private support. The College of Business has enjoyed a strong start in fundraising, not least of all because our business alumni understand better than most the necessity of investing back in the enterprise—so to speak. The CoB can help teach the rest of the university as we focus on dramatically increasing our endowment and, specifically, ways to increase private giving that can offer the faculty and curriculum support we need at JMU. One business faculty member specifically requested the resources to hire an experienced fundraiser as the college's next dean.
Space is at premium for the College of Business
Also on the resource front, I could tell from my walk through Showker Hall lobby that space is at a premium for this college. Purposeful student activity took up every square inch. Showker remains a fine facility today, but it was built 20 years ago, before the college's core emphasis on collaboration and group projects took hold. Today, not only has the CoB outgrown Showker, but it is in special need of spaces that allow for the group projects that are the centerpiece of courses like CoB300—which students and employers say is one of the prime reasons for the success of JMU alums. Today professors say they witness a literal stampede of students to claim a room where they can work together. This is something that we must and will address. We can't have multiple students squeezing together into a faculty member's office to participate in JMU's hallmark mentoring relationships with professors. The space crunch, along with a good hard look at student-faculty relationships and resources, are examples of how we must take this collective moment in our history to see where we stand as an institution in delivering on our core values and describing our brand.
It will take a large, diverse and inclusive family to help create economic opportunity
On the "Why Madison?" Listening Tour, I have been consistently hearing JMU described by alumni, faculty, students and parents as a university with a warm family feel. I have been underscoring the need for us to make that family diverse and inclusive. We will have to work intentionally to find ways to identify and develop underrepresented students with academic potential to access the College of Business—e.g., perhaps by building on the CyberCity program and looking into our own very diverse public school system (among other strategies). It is key that we educate future business leaders who can in turn create economic opportunity for a broader population.
JMU made the list! Check out this link for the Top 100 Social Media MBA Schools!
How do prospective students find more information about the colleges they are considering? Increasingly, they are turning to social media. From watching videos on YouTube to asking quick questions on Twitter, students expect to be able to interact with schools online to get more information about the programs they are considering.
To determine the most social media friendly MBA schools, the staff at Online MBA Page.com, spent weeks gathering and compiling data from the social media accounts of more than 400 business Campus-based schools and ranked them based on their presence and activity levels on various social media platforms. The data was put into our own formula and voila, the rankings emerged. The highest possible score was 100, with a maximum of 25 points for Facebook, 25 for Twitter, 25 for YouTube, 10 for LinkedIn, 5 for Google Plus, 5 for Pinterest, and 5 for Flickr. If you made this list then congratulations, you’re executing on your social media plan. This list is valid for all of 2013 and will be updated again next year. Feel free to use our Top 100 badge on your website or blog so other students can know of this very unique distinction.
http://onlinembapage.com/top-100-most-social-media-friendly-mba-schools/#87
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
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