Maximizing Student Outcomes Through Meaningful Engagement and Experiential Education

Good afternoon, everyone, and a belated happy New Year. We're so excited to be with you for one of Peoplegrove's first webinars of the year. I am pleased to co present maximizing student outcomes through meaningful engagement and experiential education with Fordham University. Today's webinar is also sponsored by the Society for Experiential Education. We're grateful for their support. A couple of housekeeping questions before we get started. First, we will address questions at the end of the webinar to ensure that we can make sure that we're getting through all of the content that we're going to cover today. We do have a handy q and a box in the bottom section of, your your view on screen. Please feel free to use that to drop in questions as they come up, and, again, we will get to them at the end. If we don't get into any of your questions, we will make sure to follow-up as we go through. We will also follow-up with a recording of this webinar for access going forward. So, no need to kind of feel that you've got to jot everything down that you see on screen. We'll make sure that you get a copy. So I'm so pleased to be here today with my colleague, Annette McLaughlin from Fordham University. Excuse me. I've got a little bit of a frog in my throat. Forgive me for I got a little bit of a cold this season. Annette is the director of Fordham's Career Center. I've had the pleasure of working with Annette for the last several months, and she and I have also presented on this topic previously. Annette is a true expert in our field and is a real innovator when it comes to incorporating experiential education into the day to day lives for students. Annette, thanks for joining us. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. And for those of you who don't know, new Fordham University is located in New York City. We have about seventeen thousand students overall. I'm responsible for the Career Center which supports four undergraduate schools, which are about ten thousand students, as well as two graduate schools, our Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Graduate School of Education. So the Career Center for Cura Personalis serves thirteen thousand students, across five campuses as well. So just to put it into context, and I'm thrilled to be here co presenting with Sarah and the Peoplegrove team. It's been a great partnership, and we're really excited to share what we've learned so far. Thanks for sharing that context about Fordham University. I know sometimes when, you know, folks are attending webinars, they often try and see their institution and what we're talking about. So, like, where does their size or scope fit in? One of the reasons that I've been so excited to work with Fordham is that, I think smaller institutions and larger institutions, mature institutions, and those that are still growing can all kind of see themselves and how Fordham serves and and enables students. So I'm excited for folks to listen in and and hear how they fit in. I'm gonna cover our agenda very quickly today. We're gonna talk a little bit about current landscape opportunities and challenges. I always think it makes sense for us to all be starting from the same point, when it talks about when we're talking about any specific topics. We're gonna talk a little bit about the road to the internship promise at Fordham University. So this is really where Annette is going to tell the story of how, they progressed into experiential education at Fordham. We're gonna talk a little bit about the infrastructure and the PeopleBrove partnership that's supporting it. So a little bit about the technology behind the scenes helping to make the internship promise a reality. And then a little bit about your own institution's experiential learning process. We're trying to figure out the start of the year, where to get started as where we'll kind of tackle that, and then some key takeaways and questions and answers. Okay. Let's start with a little bit of landscaping. Again, I I like to make sure that we're setting the stage. I started off this presentation with some institutional research from Titan Partners. They are a higher education firm who specifically supports work happening in the intersection of education, higher education, workforce development. And this is from research that was published in September about meaningful practices for student employment, like what is best enabling student employment after graduation, and what are practices that are enabling that success? I wanna call out what I thought was fairly notable, and it's a little hard to see at the bottom, but the takeaway here is that that embedded career exploration within the curriculum is a high value for four year institutions. We can go to the next slide. And I think the call out here, again, previous slide was that that was research published in fall of twenty twenty five. I think the highlights here are just that, we find within the marketplace that experiential education is becoming more and more important. If you signed up for this webinar, you're probably also experiencing the same in in your areas of practice or, you know, maybe reading inside higher ed, or the chronicle of education, seeing more and more conversations about impact of experiential education. Couple of highlights from our standpoint is, you know, we see participation is climbing. More than two thirds of graduating seniors reported completing at least one internship in twenty twenty four. And right now, we're working on the we're all supporting the graduating class of twenty twenty six, so we expect to see the stats go up even more. The kind of maybe complementary, maybe not as exciting point of this one that I'd like to highlight is that there's still access and equity gaps on this. Women, first gen students of color are less likely to land those paid internships, those kind of key experiential learning opportunities, offering that ability to to have access to experiential learning, but also still continuing making rent, paying tuition, those kind of components, those inequities still persist. So I just kind of highlight those as as kind of two two points of awareness as as we move forward. Part of what Fordham is trying to solve for is, you know, how do I enable that while enabling it through that equity lens, which I think is an important call out. As we move forward, I think it's important for Annette and I to kind of understand. We've got a quick poll question that'll land on your screen quickly. Tell us a little bit about how much of a strategic priority is experiential learning at your own institution? You'll see a couple of the, the options there from at least top priority, strategic plan, president's plan to not currently a focus. Maybe you're here because you're anticipating it'll be coming in the current year. And I'll give just a minute for folks to answer that question. K. Sarah, I'll add in just Sure. We move forward. This is Fordham University, we would do the top institution priority from the top down and the bottom up. So I'll I'll explain more about that, but that I love that. We are at the top in answering that poll question. For answering that live, Annette. I think it's really helpful to for context for others answering. So I'd just like to quickly say, again, kind of quick summary is is where we see the landscape. And, again, this is through conversations with Annette. This is through research. This is some proprietary research that People Group has done. We see our challenges today when it comes to experiential learning. There's access gaps. So campuses are large. They're complex. Even at a small institution, there are different departments who are touching this. There are different offices. So, like, there is just, it it is tough to navigate this at scale, ensuring everybody has same access. There's also assessment challenges. Like, how are we tracking that students are actually completing experiential opportunities? What's the quality of that work? How does it tie to the curriculum? And then we're missing opportunities. So how are we going back to that previous slide? How are we ensuring that everyone has access to experiential opportunity? How are we making sure that when faculty or staff hear from alumni or friends that they've got this opportunity, that it's funneling back to the right spot? So those are some of the challenges we see. On the flip side, I always think a challenge opens the upper door for an opportunity. We go to the next slide. I think we have opportunities here. And, again, you'll see this is a kind of a quick balance. Like, when we think about gaps, we can promote more access. When we think about assessment challenges, we can tackle those through scaled technology. And when we think about missing opportunities, what we can actually do with some technology pieces and strong partnerships across cap campus is shift from that missing opportunities to really seizing those opportunities to better support our students. So that's the lens that I think we're approaching our conversation and the lens that Fordham has really tackled with their road to the internship promise. So with that, now that we've set the stage a little bit, I'm going to turn it over to Annette for some conversation to kind of explore what the internship promise is, how they're approaching it on campus, and what are some of the the outcomes that are coming that Fordham is excited about. Annette, I'm turning it over to you. Thank you. Welcome. I will start by saying the poll said fifty two percent of you that answered the poll, it is a high priority. And we are seeing that every day and things that we're seeing coming out from admissions, from offices, etcetera. So first, to back up a little bit and answer the question, what is the Fordham internship promise? So over a year and a half ago, eighteen months, it was actually August September or August of twenty twenty four, the university, Fordham University, from the top level, went to market with what they call the internship promise. That is every student that enters every undergrad student that joined that comes to Fordham, that's admitted to Fordham, beginning the fall of twenty twenty five, so this last six months ago, that will graduate in twenty twenty nine will have the opportunity for at least one internship research prompt research opportunity and or experiential learning within their four years. So we went out with a bold statement over eighteen months ago to the incoming class that every student would have this opportunity. That's that equal access that Sarah was talking about. We care about all students, it's really important to that. It the the university's job is to create these opportunities and integrate it and have our students understand and articulate, what are the skill sets that employers are looking for. So that is what the Fordham internship promise is, and you're happy to look at it on the website. As the director of the Career Center, I was asked to deliver on that promise and to this is a university wide initiative, but it and it involves everybody across the campus. So the first thing I did was create a fourteen person interdepartmental across all the entire departments within campus to create an internship promise working group so that we could start to tackle those opportunities that Sarah mentioned, which how do we enhance access, how do we scale. And we they weren't talking about technology. I was just told how are we gonna scale this for everybody and what are the opportunities. So we did start with that access, you know, an assessment of what are the challenges and what are we missing. So we can move to the next slide. So I'll go to Fordham also recently, as of the fall of twenty twenty five, went to market with a new brand. We are a private four year institution with that also has a grad school of business and a law school, just so you know. Those have their own career centers that we do not support, And we also have a school of social services as well. We do support the alumni in career development. A little bit more context. So for what matters. What matters and our strategic goals were to, number one, streamline our experiential learning and discover go through discovery and tracking across the campus kind of audit to identify what are the current gaps. What we recognized was we have really strong outcomes, which we'll talk about at the end of our presentation already. We had that foundation, but we realized we weren't tracking all of the opportunities. Secondly, we're looking to create, and we're currently doing this, a culture campus that helps to bridge between academics, experiential learning, and our co curricular experiences. We call the Career Center the Career Center for Cura Personalis, which is the whole person, mind, body, and spirit. And so we we know that our students and the leaders of tomorrow are coming showing up to work as a full person, and we need to be able to to develop all of that. And so they need to understand everything that they're doing in the classroom, outside of the classroom, volunteering, service, does matter. And we developed a holistic cross campus experience that is focused on student success. The career center reporting structure was moved from student affairs as of September of twenty twenty five into student success division that reports into the provost. Once again, just where where do you fall within your institution because that does impact some of the things you can do or some of the challenges you may have. And then we started to benchmark high impact practices and are evaluating what are those high impact practices and how do you evaluate them. So then we'll move ready for the next slide. So we started the question with, if we don't know where we're going, you'll end up someplace else. And that's a famous quote from Yogi Berra. What that means here at Fordham and how we use that is our end goal are maximizing outcomes, making sure that we're delivering on the internship promise, that every student has the opportunity within their four years to do some type of internship, experiential learning, and or research. Backing up, because we had to define what are is Fordham University going to count as experiential learning that would meet the internship promise. That was part of the fourteen person working group. We have institutional research is part of that. The framework that we chose to use, and each of you can choose your own framework, is that we took the NACE eight core competencies and said that in order to meet the internship promise, it must, whatever this experience is, it must meet a minimum of one, if not more. Secondly, they must be supervised. And thirdly, the student must have some type of reflection so that we can show some real learning and outcomes. That it's not just doing something for doing something. They're able to articulate what they've done. They're able to understand the value in the marketplace, and they're able to connect that to a potential employer or grad school, whichever route they choose to take. And, Annette, if I could just jump in on that, because I think that's an important component. One of the things we've learned in in conversations with you and I kind of connecting on this and and across with other colleagues is that definition is so important. And so I think that's something to highlight when we think about, for those who are are saying this is top priority. Many of you, I'm sure, have already made those definitions and have already have campus buy in on on what those experiences are and what might count. If not, that is an incredibly important starting place to make sure there's collective agreement and buy in, not only from different departments or academic census, from the institution as a whole. One thing to call out, you know, some of people group's other work is really tied very closely to clinical education. And so making sure, like, when you're defining what experiential education is, how are those different pockets of different areas as on campus kind of included in that? So thanks for letting me jump in on that. Yes. Definitely. And, at Fordham, we do have clinical programs. They're not the current currently, the career center doesn't support those, so we haven't tackled that yet. But, we are aware But that's an intentional choice that Borgman made. It's an intentional choice for now, but we do know that Peoplegrove does have the have the clinical add on. So also for context, and we can move on to the next slide because kind of where we are in starting the process. In the discovery and our what was our starting point, was in this benchmarking was we already platform, which was Peoplegrove, which we have been partners for six years for our mentorship only. So we used it for flash mentoring and for our in person mentorship program, of which last year we matched three hundred and sixty five students with three hundred and sixty five alumni. And that was a jump from we had plateaued at two hundred before we created the system within, using the Peoplegrove platform, which we brand as Ram Connect. But that was we were trying to scale it and make more access and get more alumni involved. So our benchmarking and we started with, you know, we know what the end in mind is. It's meeting the internship promise that every student has these opportunities. And we had to identify what are the areas for improvement. This was what happened eighteen months ago. So discovery was eighteen months ago. Development, analyzing, ideation, establishing pipelines and unification, and defining these KPIs and benchmarks, which we were just, part of the development was identifying what we were gonna account for the internship promise that that we can check. And I right now, you know, we're in year one of evaluating this. We have some definite yeses, some definite noes, and we have some we're not quite sure. So we're still working with some of these experiences to determine whether they meet the criteria that we've set. For and I'll give a specific example. Here at Fordham, we have, a pre for first year coming on board, we have a three day called urban plunge. Urban Plunge is three days of coming to New York City, doing service projects, getting to know New York City, etcetera, before the rest of the students come to campus for orientation. That is three days of immersive experience in New York City, and we use New York City, as our campus, whereas Fordham is our school. That's also one of our marketing brands. The reason I point that out is that's not experiential learning specifically, but it is a seed planted to do service. It is a seed to understand what's available to you in New York. It gives you the opportunity to take the subway or metro north into the city to understand how easy it is to get into opportunities there. And then what we're looking to track is so if the student, their first year does urban plunge, do they then go and sign up for a community CCELL, Center for Community Engaged Learning, which are academic programs that have an experiential learning component in it. So we about have a hundred of those. So that's where we're like they may do urban plunge, is not part of the doesn't meet the internship promise, but that was a seed that they was planted that then they explored taking a CCELL class and or doing a GO trip. So GO is our global outreach, that's a service project that is one year long. The students absolutely have supervision. They are supervised. They raise funds, and they get, global immersion. They get several of the core competencies from NACE. So that was a specific example. So then we launched. We launched August seventh of twenty twenty five. So this is so where we are now in the teal is where we are. We rolled it out. We rolled out the experiential learning platform live August seventh. We started our dog and pony show across the campus, meeting with the dean's councils, meeting department by department. We marketed it to the students and, during orientation so that they know what is Ram Connect, what is it used for. They were a part of their admissions was understanding that we're committing to an internship promise, which are these opportunities. And so we started to promote it both to, students, alumni, as well as, faculty and our campus partners. We are continuing to do checks and balances to ensure that everything that students are doing, these experiences are valuable. And we are in the process of this culture shift, I talked about, of reporting the sorry. I was leaving. So does your GO program That's okay. Internship promises and all the students have to participate in GO? The GO program does meet we do several GO programs, that does meet the internship promise. Every that is voluntary. Students choose to do that. That's an, co curricular or extracurricular activity that they can choose, that we then are working with the people that run Go to make sure that the student and or us, input that experience in our experiential learning module so we can track that they did that and it does qualify. Exactly. So And, Annette, I will Yeah. So If you wanna answer that question, then I'm just gonna maybe just do a quick summary statement that you can confirm is accurate to what Fordham's been doing. Okay. The Go project is not for academic credit. Got it. So I think, Annette, when we're talking about kind of the process that Wharton's undertaken, so kind of benchmarking assessment, like, kind of planning on, you know, how are we committing and delivering this internship promise, and and how are we enabling folks across campus and across the Fordham community to kind of take advantage of this as an opportunity? So, again, internship promise is a short way of thinking of, you know, the the accessibility for students. Like, every student will have access to experiential learning before they graduate. Then when we're talking about this launch, what Fordham agreed to as a, you know, that strategic working group was using centralized technology to track those experiences, whether it's students finding those opportunities on a platform, whether it's faculty or staff putting some of those opportunities in, whether it's Fordham alumni, those Ram alum Ram Connect alums who are are engaged and supporters of Fordham who also have those opportunities. Having there be, like, a central repository for these opportunities and almost a marketplace for students to to kind of find some of those opportunities, but then again, track that. So that that launch of that technology, that's what happened in August August fifth twenty twenty five. Right? Exactly. And to that, you know, alumni and relations is very involved, and our alumni and employers can also post on this marketplace. That was the other thing. And research opportunities are key. How can we centralize? How can we go from spreadsheets of the two hundred students in Fordham College that do research opportunities to a platform that we can track and report and manage more effectively? So now we move to the green slide, which is our ongoing continuous improvement. And that's so you can move it forward. Here we are. We've launched. We're one semester in. We're constantly looking at the platform, how it's being used, and, how we can better improve and make these adjustments as we move forward. This is this is not a one and done. This is an ongoing process that you constantly have to evaluate. You have to be nimble and quick and change. So but where we are. So Ram Connect is our experiential learning platform. It is also our, mentorship platform with both flash mentoring and formal mentorship programs. And then it also we also added in our assessment piece, is PathwayU, which we can talk more about that. So, as I said, we started with the foundation of the mentorship flash mentoring and mentorship program with Peoplegrove and Ram Connect, and then we added on as of August, both PathwayU for assessment with students, so that they can see their journey and then, the experiential learning. So so far within the first really once the first semester that we're live, we have nine thousand nine hundred ninety seven active users. Really disappointed. And if any of you are Fordham alumni, please go on and get us to that ten thousand active users. And it active you we have more people signed up, but these are active users. So that's really key. I think we have about twelve twelve or thirteen thousand that are on the platform now, but, right at ten thousand are active. Out of that six thousand five hundred, sixty one are alumni, and our alumni are there for mentorship. They're also there to create opportunities and put projects up, and then three thousand three hundred and eleven students. I'll also say the the students that came on the platform a year or two ago have now moved to the alumni phase. So we're gonna look more and in the rollout, yes, we have ten thousand undergrad students. So we've only, you know, tackled one third on the we've got one third on the platform within the first semester. So that's I'm pretty I don't know what to expect, but I'm pretty happy with that. And I don't know if, Sarah, if you have any Yeah. Data points. So I would just say, from, again, some of the research I've seen, some people own research. We know I think it's safe to say that student adoption of different of multiple tools of technology, students are adept at using technology. It is that adoption adoption and getting people logged on that I think Annette has has talked about at at Fordham, that kind of dog and pony show or the road show of letting students know that this is a service, letting students know that this is the way to facilitate that. It's that information sharing through different campus networks has been really crucial. And so I think from what I've seen, getting getting the that quantity of students in at first semester has been a really strong starting point, and I'm excited to see what happens in spring semester and beyond. Yeah. And just so you know, tomorrow, Thursday, we have our kickoff for this semester, and we'll have a table that will be highly encouraging people to sign up. And so we'll get them hopefully more on board. But then we've got over three thousand connections and thirty four percent connection rate, which is pretty high. And then you can look at so the point of this slide is you can collect a lot of data. These are kind of the KPIs that we're looking to measure. Right now, we're measuring, utilization and activity, which we then know with utilization and activity, results will come, and those results are maximizing our outcomes for both experiential learning and also, first destination. I would actually challenge each of you to think about as you're thinking about this, when you were in college or even throughout your career, how impactful were the experiences that you did? You don't always remember what grade you made on every test, but you remember if you were a leader in a club or a specific service project or some something that you did that gave you hands on exact experience, that then informed your decision into kind of your career path. And I think that's really thinking about the importance. We have the data. We know it's important. How do you integrate that into your culture, into your institution, understanding that we all have roadblocks and challenges? So and then the benchmarking, you can see that later. That's just we're trying to benchmark against, Carnegie Mellon's classifications so we can move on to the next slide. So some of the things that we've done. So we added a job shadowing program to our EL platform this summer, which was really fantastic. We also have a lot of student athletes over the summer, and then we also have international students. So what can we do to help our international and our student athletes that may be challenged with the amount of time to give to a full internship? So we reached out to our alumni. We created some actual shadowing programs and connected them over the summer where they had limited time, but it was a high impact practice. And that is all tracked through the system. Certifications and certificates, we've partnered with IBM Skills and we are part we are school numb we're within the thirty schools that they are working with to, to get all freshmen on IBM Skills Build. So it's a three hour certification, AI experience. And then there are more modules that they can do. We were also we also work very closely with Salesforce with their AI. That's a ten hour certification that students can do for free. They find it on our EL platform. They sign up. They do it at their own pace whenever they want to. I actually made my twenty year old son over the holiday break sit down and do, a couple of these certifications to enhance his resume because he's in the process of applying for finance related roles. And his resume looked like every other student I've ever seen. I said, you've gotta do something to distinguish yourself, and these are things to do. So I'm using it with my own in my own home as well. And I did it too. Actually, my entire team, I was like, if you don't have anything to do This is a good thing to do. I was like, actually, it's like it's nonnegotiable. The way I did it was I said, you have a three hour training. I want you to get the certification done. You can work from home that day, and then you get the rest of the day when you complete it off. So, you know, there are free ways to get things done. And, I have not gone back and checked to make sure everybody did it, but everybody was very excited to work from home because that's a rarity for student for us, student facing roles. And so I'll I'll report back how many of the fourteen I'd be curious to see how many of them have done it in it. So I have a team of fourteen supporting thirteen thousand students. But in summary, what I'm hearing you say in this, and, again, correct me if I'm wrong, is this idea of we've got a centralized location for experiential learning opportunities, this hub. But then what you've also done here is added in these additional supports that are going to make those experiential learning opportunities or that engagement in mentorship opportunities for students that much more worthwhile. So, like, how are you, you know, how do you kind of either how are you making sure that when students are taking advantage of those twin opportunities of experiential learning, mentorship engagement, that they're doing so with a a set of skills behind them? Is that a a way of kind of thinking about it? Yes. So we are, we actually have a competency quest as part of our mentorship rollout for our seniors that starts January twenty sixth. So we're mapping everything back to what's the learning outcome, what are the skills that they're gaining, how can we help them articulate this, put it in a resume, articulate it. We're very fortunate to work with such amazing faculty that gives students a lot of projects in the classroom, and we can connect those dots with how that applies. But in the past, it had people hadn't been connecting the dots. It's like academics is over here. They're doing a project in in the classroom, but we're and then my resume's over here, and this is my experience, but they weren't adding those projects in. So that's where we're we're bridging the gap between academics and, and our office to give that holistic view. Breaking down some of those silos was one of the challenges we talked about. And so, like, this is helping to, again, make room, knock down those walls, make it easier to for everybody to accomplish. And and just to clarify, I mean, I came into this role nine years ago. I've been breaking down the silos for nine years. Fair. We've been doing the work on the ground. It's only recently within the last eighteen months with this internship promise that we're getting the top top down, bottom up approach, to make it a holistic university wide initiative. So, and then the advising. So a lot we support alumni for life as well. So it's full circle from all the way through so they can the alumni can schedule coaching and advising, directly on the platform and not have to go through our other platform as well. So we can move on, but happy to answer. Maybe there'll be more questions. So here is, for the Fordham Promise, our experiential learning hub. This is just a screenshot, and, actually, this is a screenshot from September. I ran one last night, and you can see here on the hub, we have seven thousand two hundred and thirty opportunities that students can search and find and use the different filters. I know Sarah's gonna go more into that. When I ran this same search last night, there are eleven thousand, opportunities, experiential learning opportunities for students, to access. So we have a lot. That's impressive. Yeah. So there there's a lot on here. Yeah. Yep. And I just, was in another training with our development officers as well as all of our deans from all our schools, and they were really excited to learn, about this platform and how we can use that. And I think Yeah. Oh, I will add so someone just asked about Handshake. Yes. Handshake is our career management portal, which is where, our primary portal. Everything we can, migrate and Sarah's gonna talk more about this, but the migration of those opportunities from Handshake to the experiential learning platform, Ram Connect. What I know what came up when Sarah and I did this live was how do you, what's the difference between the flat platforms? For us, each school has to define it the way they want to. For us, you know, Handshake remains our our career management portal where we house all our career fairs, all our events, etcetera, and and jobs, full time jobs and internships. We are we new migrate things over to PeopleGrove, but the PeopleGrove platform we're using specifically for all experiential learning, and all of our research and those things as well as mentorship, as well as a job board for our, experienced alumni, more than three years. So it is confusing. If anyone has any great ideas of how to not make it confusing, I'd love that. But that's for right now, that's how we're we have two highways. We're on two highways, in parallel with each other, complementing and expanding those things. And I will add, we are seeing with the market being so tight and employers not having as many job opportunities, they're putting a lot of, they're posting a lot of things that are really experiential learning, programs on Handshake, and we're trying to migrate all of those to the Peoplegrove platform and keep just the jobs and the recruiting on Handshake. So that's also how we're trying to separate what do you use for what. Okay. Sorry. Keep I don't No. Annette, I love your enthusiasm here. I think there's gonna be a lot folks reaching out to you on LinkedIn or maybe by email just to kind of kinda track and and get some learnings from what Fordham's been doing in a little bit more detail than what we can get today. Yeah. I think it's a resource. Yeah. Yeah. I would actually like we've got a quick poll question that's gonna come up. And, again, what we're you know, in summary, what Fordham has done is really thinking about how do we manage this big, unwieldy, in some ways, internship promise, this commitment that every student has this opportunity? How are we managing? How are we tracking? And how are we really ensuring that all students have access to this? And so Fordham and People Grove have worked together on a technology solution. Really, what we're looking for here in this poll question is tell us how your campus is thinking about the management of your your own institution named Promise and how that fits in. I do also wanna acknowledge I see several questions in q and a. I am looking at that now. I'm gonna toss a couple over to Annette quickly to answer. There are some that is specific about the platform, which I'm gonna talk about in just a minute. You know, what's the technology behind this? So we'll do a couple of questions, and then we'll move into this one. Annette, I think I I want to kind of call out about this matching piece because I think this is an important one. There's a question about, are students matched to internships by interest or by major? Do you wanna talk about the matching or lack thereof? Maybe it's more student exploratory pieces or complementary, you know, kind of multiple ways for students to kind of achieve this. But maybe, answer that bit about matching. So there are multiple ways that they can do that. So the student can use search filters like they're very used to, to identify. It is when students come in and meet with a career center coach or career adviser, we will help them identify some filters or some opportunities. You can favor and star things. They should fill out the first step is when they go on the PeopleGrowth platform, they fill out their interest and a profile. And so once again, the system work for you while you're asleep. Same thing as when you when you log on to Handshake, your student logs on to Handshake, they fill out a bunch of questions that help identify different opportunities so the system, can use the technology to push things to you. So there you it's everything you said, Sarah. You know, it's, it is completely overwhelming sometimes for students. I mean, every student is different and that's we meet each student where they are, whether it's first semester of their first year or whether it's their last semester of their, you know, senior year. We're gonna meet them where they are and try and map out, a step and a strategy for them to to do that. So Thanks for that. I think that elaboration is helpful because, again, you know, leaving that I I don't want people leaving this webinar and think, oh, no. Everybody has to do this matching. But, again, multiple pathways to success there. We all have limited resources. So Exactly. Have to use the technology. That's how we can scale with technology. You know, I've often joked we should put a poll question at the start of a webinar. Who has unlimited what unlimited resources on campus just to see that big fat zero come up? I would like to talk a little bit. And, as I scan some of the questions in in the q and a, so keep them coming. Again, if we can't get to them during this webinar, we will certainly make sure we follow-up with answers. But I think we can we can tackle some of the questions that are in there about talking about the technology. And so the technology that Peoplegrove is is using and that we're partnering with Fordham is is what we call our experience hub. And you heard, Annette talk about maybe that mentorship platform. For any, existing Peoplegrove partners on the phone, many of you might be familiar with, what we're calling our engagement hub or our legacy PeopleGrow platform. I wanna be clear that these two tools, our engagement hub and our experience hub, can work together like Fordham is doing. So they started with our engagement hub, and they've added on this experience hub to facilitate some of those alumni connections, those alumni pathways in with a greater experiential learning opportunity greater experience hub software opportunity. It can also be standalone. So for for folks who are really interested in tracking and measuring those opportunities with a focus on things that might be coming through Handshake, through other integrations, through faculty and staff, and be less with that alumni lens, this is also a stand alone campus solution. So it does not require the other component of our technology to be successful. When we're thinking about this this solution, we kind of are I I wanna call out the four areas that I think our experience hub really helps solve problems on campus. It is a one stop solution for your students to find experiential learning opportunities. It allows for integrations with tools like Handshakes. It allows for individuals to post specific opportunities and becomes kind of a menu or, in some ways, marketplace for students to find those opportunities. One of the nice things about using technology is that it allows students to go to one place. They don't have to go to a specific faculty member. They don't have to go to a specific department. They don't have to go to have to know the pathway of your campus in order to find those opportunities. They can go to one URL. Might be integrated in with a certain website or, you know, I've seen institutions use who have specific student apps where there's, you know, landing pages for all student materials. This can be posted there. So, again, highlighting that one stop solution for students to access this as well as your faculty and staff and other community members. Number two, this technology allows you to verify and document that student participation. What Fordham is doing, again, you've heard Annette say the word track several times. We need to be able to kind of verify and prove that every student has been either offered or or, has taken advantage of that opportunity, and this technology does that tracking for you. It also connects, when you think about the you know, great. It's tracking. Well, how is that tracking information shared? We have robust reporting tools, whether it's reports from the system or reporting or or data connections that connect with other other management tools across your campus. So if you want to make sure that this connects with a different system, we can make sure that that facilitates that information. So a student who has validated their participation in an internship, maybe that goes to another student management database. We can make sure that data is integrated. And then the final thing that this technology allows is that showcasing those student outcomes. So, again, we talked a little bit about reporting. What I wanna also highlight is that this gives individual students that opportunity to present through what we call our co curricular transcript to have a complimentary, to their academic transcript, that complimentary co curricular transcript that identifies those experiential learning opportunities that can be incorporated into a resume, a LinkedIn profile, something easy to be shared with others to show employers or future future employers, future partners that they've got real world experience. And I'll just highlight with that co curricular transcript. This is really valuable, for many reasons. But when you have students that may not have the strongest GPA, but they've been very active on campus and we're all dealing with the challenges with mental health and anxiety and depression with our current student populations. This is really important because they can see on a co curricular transcript the value of where they spent their time on campus if they were actively involved in other things. And it's not just about the success in the classroom, but it helps them really build confidence. And confidence is key to any interview and finding opportunities. So I just wanna Great call out. Yeah. I I appreciate the kind of what's the value outside of the tactical and practical? What's the what's the real value across your student population? So thank you on that. We can go on to the next slide. And so I just wanna offer a couple of visuals as we move forward, you know, kind of tying back to the kind of four components that we're excited about with this with this experience hub. So, again, some of the tracking of these opportunities. You saw, Annette shared a screenshot of what, Fordham or Ram Connect's, kind of menu of opportunities look like. This is just an opportunity to showcase again what what that might look like. So tracking against those opportunities. Students can sort through that menu of seven thousand or eleven thousand opportunities that Annette was talking about for boredom, highlight those that they're interested in, keep track of those that they've also participated in, and complete those participation details that you see. So, again, verifying and validating through these forms that are then approved by selected people on either who have managed the experience or could be within different departments on your campus to verify that this qualifies against whatever standards you have set for experiential learning. But the technology is there to allow students to identify opportunities, track them on their own, and then verify them through participation details. We can go to the next slide. Again, highlighting, I think there's a couple questions about Handshake or other opportunities. Many of our campus partners use tools like Handshake, you know, campus groups, USA jobs, hello from Washington DC, where our federal government is a big employer here. You can import all of these different, sources for these experiential opportunities into your platform. So nobody has to go and look at Handshake, manually add the job. We have, integrations with these existing on campus systems, so that makes it one opportunity. I just wanna highlight in working with your campus partners, Teradata is the one that study abroad uses, and they were very it works very well for them. So in our conversations, it was like, we're not gonna change what you do. Keep using the system you do, and we'll integrate it in. So, those were one of the road or, you know, a question some of our partners had. Great call out, Annette. Again, verifying experiences. Quite a few questions in the chat of, you know, hey. A student said that they did this. Are we sure? Or how are we tracking against specific competencies? How do we know that this is an experiential learning opportunity that has value? Again, our platform provides that opportunity to verify those experiences. They can also be verified automatically from verified external sources. So in your example, thinking about some of the programs that students are starting with that might lead to those specific opportunities where, you know, a hundred students might start with this and then twenty students at the end do a full experience, hundred hours of work in there. That could be set as, a preapproved opportunity. So it's it's it's verified and ready to go without requiring extra work from those partners that already exist within your campus to kind of give that automatic check mark and ready to go. Right. And the Center for Community Engaged Learning was thrilled that we have this because now they haven't been able to track. If if someone does urban plunge, the three day pre Thank you. Urban. Yes. Or yeah. Or what but if they do urban plunge, then how many of those people, out of those three hundred, how many actually did a go project or took a CCELL class? Now we'll be able to track the trajectory of the students, and that brings value to what they do in their department and help support them. We can go to the next slide. Again, just highlighting that we've got in platform reporting. So it can if you're you have a campus that is still kind of working on reporting or not sure where reporting should live, we have this built into our tool. It has been, quite valuable for the partners who are using it so far, but we can also ensure that the, you know, that the data that lives within the platform can be connected to different systems across your campus. So it does not have to live in a single system we are integrating with with other systems that your campus may be using. So I think that's a that's often a question we get of, you know, what what's the data? Where does it live? It can live anywhere you need it to. And then the final slide here, again, kind of highlighting what Annette shared earlier, again, when we're thinking about how are we equipping our students and our future alumni to make sure that they're showcasing these experiences as having value for for their future future success in life and in their career. We've got this interactive report, that cocurricular transcript that showcases, again, these experiences and easy to use, to digest report that can be shared across a variety of services. That can be a really nice complement or in some ways, you know, for your students, as Annette said, where the experiences are are a stronger value than maybe the academic side, this becomes a powerful tool as they're taking their next steps after graduation. And, you know, we started this. This is all about maximizing outcomes through experiential learning, and we will follow-up with where Fordham started. So it's kind of where we started. When we started this, it was the fact that, everybody or all institutions, track first destination surveys. When your students graduate, that was the only time Fordham was asking the question, have you done an internship within your four years? Now we're looking to track this every semester, at through through the process. But what, where we started was with our first destination survey, landed rate for twenty twenty four, which we haven't published twenty twenty five yet. But our landed rate was twenty ninety four percent of our students landed with a knowledge rate of eighty seven percent out of a class size of two thousand one hundred and fifteen, and we'll share that with you. We could we can verify with confidence that our business ninety eight percent or ninety seven percent that year, did an internship. What we recognized was we were unable to verify all of the great experiential learning because our liberal arts students don't necessarily do internships, they do research or other things and we weren't tracking that. So we're missing a huge, a lot of information. And so that's what we're hoping to that's the goal of this using this platform, and the insights that we have so far within the first semester is that the, you know, three thousand students are using it, and they're doing the searches, they're viewing, they're applying, and they're saving things as well. So those are we'll have those data points for you where we are, one semester after official launch, understanding that this has been an ongoing it didn't just start in September. It started a long time ago. So for for you, and I know we're getting short on time, so I wanna make sure we get to the questions. I'll let you quickly summarize this, and then I'll I'll toss out some questions. You know, you're on here because you wanna make a difference in your students' lives. So figure out each institution is different. You have different resources, different structures, and all of that. You have to figure out why are you doing this, and we've got some guiding questions with what are you trying to accomplish, what's the need, who can support you, and how can you sustain this. I feel very confident regardless of what happens. Moving forward, we have a system that we're getting the full buy in that as long as people use it, data is only as good as those of what you input. The output's only as good as the input. So we're that's the cultural shift. But once everyone's used to that cultural shift, we will do it. And then you in your role, you know, do you who do you serve? The community? Is there a problem you're looking to solve? Always put your students first. When you put your students first, the outcomes come. That that's who we're here. That's that's why I'm in higher education. It's because of the students. And you have to facilitate and work with all your stakeholders and collaborators. Number one, I I we have this as the last thing. What's unique about your institution? Leverage that and lean into it. I gave the examples of Fordham. We do use New York City as our launch pad, and the ability because we have, you know, two hundred and fifty thousand alumni in general, and I think fifty or sixty thousand are in the tristate area. Our alumni are key to this success. I will give an example that I met at c, you know, where another institution was in a rural area, but they leaned into that, and they got, they were doing pancakes on Friday because they have an agricultural school that actually creates the pancake mix, and they started using that to get buy in and leverage, to experiential learning. So use what you have. Real quickly, choose your partners wisely. I looked at fifty two different ed tech technologies before, determining that Peoplegrove was the right partner for stakeholders across campus from the very, very beginning. Don't bring them in and give them a solution. Bring them into the problem and solving it. We started with the systems first. If we had a system, we could then figure out the procedures. And so that was really key. And it's also spend more time in the development versus implementation. I also lived and worked in Japan and worked with Japanese executives. And the Japanese, the way that they run their businesses is they spend this much time planning and this much time executing. We spend this much time planning and this much time executing. It's a much smoother process if you put the planning in upfront. Execution goes much more quickly. And then we're all here to support each other. I'm happy to be a resource. Peoplegrove is a great partner and resource for us. And so we're here. So use all of us, work together, and we will all thrive. Thank you, Annette. I, again, really appreciate summary of what Fordham's been doing. Again, I think last question for us, quickly answer, quick poll question. As you think about this webinar, as you think about your own next steps on experiential learning, PeopleGirl wants to support you in that process. So we would really welcome the opportunity to to to support that through whatever next step is is appropriate for you. While we're answering that, I would love to get to a couple of questions. Full acknowledgment. There's some in here that we probably won't get to today, but we will follow-up. We have a question, Annette, that I think is is helpful as you've talked about NACE standards and and using that to really define whether or not an opportunity qualifies. How the question is, how are you ensuring all opportunities on the platform are meeting those internship promise standards, you know, from those external components or things that maybe you are not specifically controlling them? So there's there's a difference between so so we manage what are the opportunities that they have to meet our standards just like you, you know, do in Handshake, what they meet. Every opportunity on there is not gonna meet the internship promise. That doesn't mean that every opportunity that those opportunities that we should, filter those out because they could be meaningful for a student. Some students aren't ready to jump into internships. So what can they do that gives them the confidence to then go to an internship or then do research? So there will be opportunities on the platform that do not meet what Fordham is defining as the internship promise, but those that are on there, we feel that they add some type of value to the student experience. And then that goes back to what we were talking about with that co curricular transcript. So, again, maybe they a student will have multiple experiences that we wanna showcase, and one of those fits a internship promise. But then that student will have that holistic perspect or that holistic report of all of the experiential learning opportunities that they've been able to participate in while at Fordham. So it's that balancing act of, you know, Fordham's been very intentional about not excluding experiential opportunities that are not maybe they don't conform with the internship promise because Fordham believes that the experiential opportunities available will add value in that way. So, Annette, thanks for elaborating on this one. I've got another one here that I think is, is important and speaks to the amazing work that you and your team have done this fall. Is is telling us a little bit about how are you motivating students to self report, and how are you marketing this to get participation across campus? So we motivate students to, self report. We are fortunate enough to have about, like, sixty to a hundred students that work with our office as peer mentors and or student workers, and they serve to be our voice to the students, always start with the students. So we're it's also what's in it for them. When students put that in there, they then see the value of what they're doing, and we can help them with their resumes. We we meet with, you know, student appointments. We had twelve thousand student engagements. So every time we're meeting with a student, what are you doing? Where is that? Do you have it in the system? So it's just like updating your resume. We're trying to incorporate it into the culture that students think about that. We are trying to systemize it and with and this is in the beginning stages because we've got new people on board. When they when student the only people that students have to meet with are academics. Right? So when they meet with their academic adviser, we're teach training the academic advisers on the system to start asking those questions. Tell me what else you've done. Can you put it in, as well? So Thank you, Annette. I, I'm so sorry we are at time. Again, we'll have to make sure next time we talk about experiential learning. We'll have to schedule a couple hours for us to do this. To those of you who are still on the call, we're so grateful for your attendance. Again, we will share the slides and answer questions here. But the summary is as PeopleGrowth is excited to be partnering with Fordham and other institutions to provide the technology solutions that support these amazing opportunities like the internship promise. We can be the backbone while campuses and leaders like Annette tackle the big picture's problems of ensuring that all students have access to experiential learning to help them be successful after graduation. Annette, thank you so much for your time and experience today. We're grateful for your participation. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure. Take care, everybody. Bye.