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215 Communicating About Careers
Spring 2019 / three credits / Comm-B

This course explores the meaning and value of your liberal arts and sciences education for careers in the global, technological, and multicultural workplace of the 21st century -- no matter what your major. Through a series of individual and collaborative research and communication assignments that meet the learning objectives of the Communications B general education requirement, students learn to critically analyze the career and education implications of a diverse and digital workplace, and to critically reflect on their own strengths and values as they prepare to connect their college work with lifelong career success. Students practice academic skills of analyzing scholarly articles, constructing written essays, and presenting formal speeches, as well as career skills of building resumes, writing cover letters, using social networking tools, and interviewing.

Level: Elementary
Gen-Ed: Fulfills Comm-B requirement
Breadth: Social Science (S)
Requisites: Satisfied Comm-A requirement. Open to all students regardless of year or major.
Instruction mode: Face-to-face
Lecture: Tuesdays 11am-12:15pm, 4028 Vilas (75 minutes)
Discussion: Thursdays; time varies (75 minutes)

Credit hour requirements met by 150 minutes of in-person classroom instruction and six hours of expected out-of-class student work each week over semester of 15 weeks.

Professor
Greg Downey
gdowney@wisc.edu
Office hours: Fri 2pm-3:30pm, 301 South Hall (please email first)

Teaching Assistant
Emily Young
emily.young@wisc.edu
Office hours: Tu 2pm-4pm, 4228 Helen C. White (or by appointment)

UW Partners

SuccessWorks Advisers
Andrea Lowe
andrea.lowe@wisc.edu

Xin Cui-Dowling
xin.cui-dowling@wisc.edu

Maureen Muldoon
maureen.muldoon@wisc.edu

L&S Students: Fifteen-minute drop-in advising appointments at SuccessWorks available every weekday. Third floor above University Bookstore.

Not an L&S Student? Find your career office here.

Learning outcomes

Understand, evaluate, and communicate arguments about the nature of work in contemporary global, digital, and multicultural society, with respect to a specific target career community.
Develop and communicate a compelling personal career narrative about your path through a liberal arts and sciences education, with respect to a specific target career community.

How does this course work?

This course involves four different modes for learning each week: individual preparation, lecture, written assignments, and discussion.

Individual preparation: Each week before lecture you must do some independent preparation on your own. This might involve things like working through a chapter of your textbook, reading and taking notes on two articles in your course reader, downloading and reading an article by a career advising expert, watching a short video like a TED talk, or viewing a brief narrated presentation by the professor. All of your preparation reading and viewing should be completed before that week's Tuesday lecture.
Lecture: Each week on Tuesday all students meet for a 75-minute lecture with the course professor. This lecture will usually involve both a scholarly presentation and discussion of career issues and concepts, as well as a more pragmatic presentation of research techniques and UW-Madison resources for your career search. There are twelve lecture meetings, plus two weeks when lectures are cancelled for individual writing conferences. For Spring 2019, lecture meets Tuesday 11am-12:15pm in 4028 Vilas.

The lecture meeting is also an opportunity to work with a number of experts who help us with this course. Several times during the semester, professional academic and career advisers from across UW-Madison will visit your section to provide specific help on things like strength assessments, building a personal brand, or understanding what kinds of skills employers value. Once during the semester, successful alumni from across the College of Letters & Science will Skype into lecture to discuss their own career paths and the ways that their liberal arts and sciences education helped them in their working lives. And once during the semester, representatives from major UW-Madison employers will visit lecture to offer interviewing and job-searching tips.
Written assignments: Each week before discussion section you will be asked to complete one or more written assignments, uploading them to this course web site. Six of these are longer scholarly communication assignments and sixteen of them are shorter reflective career assignments. Assignments are always due on Wednesday evenings at midnight before that week's discussion sections.

The written assignments make up 86% of your semester grade.
Discussion: Each week on Thursday you will meet for one 75-minute group discussion section with your Teaching Assistant to go over the reading or video material you prepared for that week's topic, and to discuss the written assignments you turned in on Wednesday evening. There are twelve discussion meetings, plus two weeks when discussions are cancelled for individual writing conferences.

Participation in lecture and discussion each week together make up 14% of your semester grade.

Scholarly communication assignments

54% of semester grade

Prepared and extemporaneous speeches. Prepare and present a four-minute summary and critique of a scholarly research article on contemporary careers. When called on, without prior warning, present a two-minute extemporaneous reaction to another student’s prepared speech. 12 points total; see the schedule
Leading a discussion about scholarly articles. Along with a fellow student, lead a 30-minute discussion about the week's two scholarly research articles. Your framing of the articles should identify key concepts to remember and several questions for discussion. 6 points; see the schedule
Essay on computation and automation in your career community. Research and write a four-page analysis of your selected career community in terms of the changing computation, automation, and augmentation of the various forms of work performed in those careers, and how these changes relate to the changing outcomes of a liberal arts and sciences education. (Initial outline, draft version, and final version.) 18 points total
Essay on diversity and inclusivity in your career community. Research and write a four-page analysis of your selected career community in terms of its record of diverse employee representation, gender stereotyping of labor, global and cultural reach, and goals for inclusivity, as related to its intended impacts in the world. (Initial outline, draft version, and final version.) 18 points total

Reflective career assignments

32% of semester grade

Resume and cover letter. Create a resume (one-page draft, one-page revision, one-page final). Upload your resume to the UW- Madison service Handshake. Write a formal cover letter that complements but does not restate your resume. 6 points total
Online presence. Set up a LinkedIn site and connect it to the UW-Madison service BadgerBridge. Write an essay auditing your online presence across all public and private social media. 2 points
Personal brand presentation. Craft a written personal brand statement (one page, both draft and final) and then adapt it for a 90-second oral presentation (initial performance and final performance). 4 points total
Mock interview and peer review. Conduct a 20-minute semi-structured mock interview with a fellow student based on their revised resume. Also provide a peer review of their resume. 2 points.
Informational interview with career community expert. Use a social networking search strategy to find an expert in your chosen career community, request a 20-minute informational interview with that expert, and conduct that structured interview in person or over the phone. Write up the results. 4 points total

Critical reflection on your learning goals. At the start of the semester, write a critical reflection your personal learning goals for semester. Then at the end of the semester, write a critical reflection assessing whether your personal learning goals were met, and listing next steps for career development. 4 points total
Critical reflection on your chosen career community. Create a Wanderings Diagram and take an online Strengths Inventory quiz. Select a particular career community to focus on for your research and analysis assignments. 6 points total
Critical reflection on your transferable skills. Create responses for ten challenge-action-result statements based on transferrable skills that employers value. Link these experiences to an educational or work opportunity outside of your major that can help you improve your skills in your areas of least experience. 4 points total

Special FIG section for Spring 2019

In Spring 2019, one of the discussion sections of this course is part of a special First-Year Interest Group with Gender & Women's Studies 103 and Chemistry 104: "Health and Science Careers in a Global, Digital, and Diverse Society". The two linked FIG courses both deal with broad topics in science, health, and society, providing a strong foundation for exploring a future career in these fields. FIG students will meet advisors from the Pre-Health Advising Center and the SuccessWorks career center to learn effective strategies to prepare for health and science majors and careers. All of the courses in this FIG fulfill general education or breadth requirements.

Gender and Women’s Studies 103: “Women and Their Bodies in Health and Disease” — Information on physiological processes and phenomena relating to health (for example, menstruation, pregnancy) and ill health (for example, cancer, maternal mortality, depression). Attention to how bodies are located in social contexts that influence health and illness. Explorations of how multiple kinds of social inequalities shape health and health disparities. Information on roles that female-assigned and women-identified people play as health-care consumers, activists, and practitioners.
Chemistry 104: “General Chemistry II” — Principles and application of chemical equilibrium, coordination chemistry, oxidation-reduction and electrochemistry, kinetics, nuclear chemistry, introduction to organic chemistry.

Our special SuccessWorks career adviser for the FIG section will be Maureen Muldoon
maureen.muldoon@wisc.edu

Textbooks

We use four printed textbooks for the course. The first two are paperback textbooks that are available at the University Bookstore (they should cost about $20 each):

Katharine Brooks, You Majored in What? Designing Your Path from College to Career (2017) Links to an external site.. This book is a comprehensive guide to the job search process, written by an expert in career advising and targeted to liberal arts and sciences university students. It should remain useful to you throughout your time at UW-Madison and beyond.
Don Clifton, Clifton Strengths for Students (2017) Links to an external site.. This book has a unique code in it that allows you to take an online strengths assessment for one of your assignments. If you do not have a copy of this book, or if you purchase this book as a used copy, you will need to spend an extra $12 to directly purchase access to the online assessment.

If the University Bookstore is out of copies of these textbooks, you may download selected chapters from the course web site in order to complete your assignments due on weeks (3) and (4).

We also use a sixteen-article xeroxed course reader and a 200-page custom-printed textbook, both available for purchase at StudentPrint Links to an external site., located on the third floor of 333 East Campus Mall:

Greg Downey, editor, INTER-LS 215 course reader (16 articles)
Greg Downey, Working Toward Success: Building a Career in the Liberal Arts and Sciences (2018)

Finally, we highly recommend students bookmark this online resource and use it to help with assignments in the class: The UW-Madison Writer's Handbook.

Syllabus at-a-glance

The fine print

Grading. Semester grades are computed out of 100 possible points on the standard A-F scale:

93-100 = A
88-92 = AB
83-87 = B
78-82 = BC
73-77 = C
63-72 = D
0-62 = F

Students tend to earn high grades in this course, by completing all of the assignments on time and with integrity. However, you will only get out of this course what you put into it. The assignments cover tasks like reflecting on your experiences, putting together a resume, and setting up a LinkedIn site, which you'll have to do anyway -- so why not get some guidance and credit along the way?

Absences from discussion section. Students are expected to attend each discussion section, arriving on time and participating in the section activities, in order to earn full points for that section. However, a TA may occasionally excuse a student from section for an emergency or medical reason, and the student will not lose points for such an excused absence. Students must request an excused absence within 48 hours of the missed section.
Late assignments. Students are expected to turn in written assignments online through Canvas each week by the standard Wednesday midnight deadline. Any assignments turned in late will suffer an immediate penalty of 0.5 points, increasing by one point for each week after the original due date. (For example, a four-point assignment turned in two weeks late would be immediately graded down 2.5 points.) However, a TA may occasionally grant a student an extension on an assignment for an emergency or medical reason, so that student will not lose points for that late assignment. Students must request an extension within 48 hours of the assignment due date.
Professionalism. The topic of this class is how to connect your academic and extra-curricular university life to your future life in the world of work. Part of what we practice in this class is professional conduct, including such things as:
- respect for the views and experiences of others
- cooperation with both peers and instructors
- participation in discussion without monopolizing the discourse (which includes listening as much as talking)
- appreciation for the returning alumni who give freely of their time to make this class succeed (such as following up with thank-you notes)
Personal Electronics. You may use a laptop, a tablet, a phone, or other personal electronics during class only to take notes or to explore resources related to the lecture. You may not use personal electronic devices during class for social media or any other recreational activity; to do so is disrespectful to the instructors, distracting to your fellow students, and wasteful of your tuition dollars. Judicious and effective use of personal electronics is a crucial workplace habit that you should learn and practice now. .
Academic Integrity. By enrolling in this course, each student assumes the responsibilities of an active participant in UW-Madison’s community of scholars in which everyone’s academic work and behavior are held to the highest academic integrity standards. Academic misconduct compromises the integrity of the university. Cheating, fabrication, plagiarism, unauthorized collaboration, and helping others commit these acts are examples of academic misconduct, which can result in disciplinary action. This includes but is not limited to failure on the assignment/course, disciplinary probation, or suspension. Substantial or repeated cases of misconduct will be forwarded to the Office of Student Conduct & Community Standards for additional review. For more information, refer to http://studentconduct.wiscweb.wisc.edu/academic-integrity/
Accommodations For Students With Disabilities. McBurney Disability Resource Center syllabus statement: “The University of Wisconsin-Madison supports the right of all enrolled students to a full and equal educational opportunity. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Wisconsin State Statute (36.12), and UW-Madison policy (Faculty Document 1071) require that students with disabilities be reasonably accommodated in instruction and campus life. Reasonable accommodations for students with disabilities is a shared faculty and student responsibility. Students are expected to inform faculty [me] of their need for instructional accommodations by the end of the third week of the semester, or as soon as possible after a disability has been incurred or recognized. Faculty [I], will work either directly with the student [you] or in coordination with the McBurney Center to identify and provide reasonable instructional accommodations. Disability information, including instructional accommodations as part of a student's educational record, is confidential and protected under FERPA.” http://mcburney.wisc.edu/facstaffother/faculty/syllabus.php
Diversity & Inclusion. Institutional statement on diversity: “Diversity is a source of strength, creativity, and innovation for UW-Madison. We value the contributions of each person and respect the profound ways their identity, culture, background, experience, status, abilities, and opinion enrich the university community. We commit ourselves to the pursuit of excellence in teaching, research, outreach, and diversity as inextricably linked goals.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison fulfills its public mission by creating a welcoming and inclusive community for people from every background – people who as students, faculty, and staff serve Wisconsin and the world.” https://diversity.wisc.edu/
Other Rules, Rights & Responsibilities. See http://guide.wisc.edu/undergraduate/#rulesrightsandresponsibilitiestext

Testimonials

I want to tell you how I will be graduating in May and received a job offer all the way back in October to work at Epic starting in June. I feel that a big reason I got the job was not only because of the interview techniques I used that I have already mentioned, but also because of the networking I did. Before even applying for the job at the job fair in the Fall, I used LinkedIn to search for UW alumni who work at Epic (as you showed us), reached out to them to see if I could speak with them, conducted informational interviews with them, and then used what I learned in speaking with these current Epic employees to improve and tailor my responses during my phone and onsite interviews. I have no doubt that both the interview techniques I learned in your class as well as the ability to use informational interviews and network with others played a critical role in me getting hired!