Liberal arts students are taking a course in career readiness for the first time. Introduced this spring, COMS 270 is meant to assist College of Liberal Arts students with career focused work, such as resume building, job applications and finding a suitable career path based on a student’s interests and major.
Communication studies professor, Laura Hunkler, teaches the course. Hunkler worked as a career counselor for around 10 years prior to being a lecturer for the school.
“I do think one of the challenges is that most of the liberal arts majors are what we would call academic degrees,” Hunkler explained, contrasting it with professional degrees. “It’s like providing you with a broad foundation that you could take in a lot of different directions. So I think that is a challenge for many students.”
Hunkler teaches another career readiness course for business students.
She said the liberal arts course focuses on career exploration, on top of preparation needed for the possible careers in various fields. Because of the broad range of common careers for CLA majors, many students need help with figuring out where their skills apply among a multitude of career options and determined the best fit, Hunkler said.
In the new section, Hunkler said a variety of CLA students and majors enrolled in the class, with slightly more communication studies students due to the COMS prefix. However, starting in the next academic year, the course should shift to a CLA prefix, according to Hunkler.
“The class is kind of set up like, choose your own adventure,” Hunkler said. “I’m teaching them the skills to do research on different careers and how to get more clarity around what they’re interested in that can be applied towards whatever they’re interested in.”
Rather than giving specific insight into each individual’s career, Hunkler’s focus centers around students’ ability to decipher the careers that fits their skill sets and then giving them the tools, skills and resources needed to look into the potential career choices.
“Having the skills to do a specific job is one thing,” Hunkler said. “It’s entirely another thing to be able to articulate to others in all of these different contexts, in a professional context, in a job interview, that you have those skills. And that’s really what this class is about.”
The class follows Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing style and has a much more hands-on structure, she added.
“We do talk about skills you gain in liberal arts more generally, but then,” Hunkler said. “I kind of set it up like a flipped classroom, where we do a lot of lab time, where students are working.”
While the class is ideally designed for underclassmen, mainly sophomores hence its COMS 270 classification, Hunkler actually sees an influx in seniors joining the course this quarter, which showed Hunkler how necessary the course is for CLA students.
She noticed throughout her time doing the career readiness course for business students that liberal arts students could greatly benefit from a similar program.
“It’s one of Cal Poly’s values, part of their mission is you’re ready day one for whatever you want to do. And I think liberal arts students have so much to offer,” Hunkler said. “It’s about helping them see that and articulate it well to employers.”
She hopes that eventually the course becomes required for all CLA students, and they use it to their advantage.