The College’s Pillars Undergraduate Experience is a groundbreaking framework designed to equip students for academic achievement and lifelong career success in today’s rapidly changing economy. The initiative integrates four key components—research, career readiness, intentional life design, and immersive learning—into a cohesive program that redefines liberal arts and sciences undergraduate education.
At the heart of Pillars is a holistic and ambitious vision to help every student connect the dots between their studies and the pursuit of a fulfilling career and a meaningful life. We aim to determine tangible methods and practices that will make our skills- and career-oriented programs more visible, accessible, and understandable to students as they navigate their undergraduate years and plan for success after graduation.
A transformative experience for undergraduate student success
Four pillars of student success
The Pillars Undergraduate Experience framework is structured around four critical components designed to help students unlock the full value of their education:
- Design thinking
Through required coursework and consultation with academic advisors, our students learn to use design thinking—a planning approach that provides students a toolkit of mindsets and methods for intentionally charting out their futures—to align their academic and co-curricular experiences with their long-term career aspirations. - Research and creative activity
Our students engage in meaningful research and creative activity opportunities across the liberal arts and sciences, while receiving mentorship from IU’s world-renowned faculty. These opportunities begin in their first year and continue throughout their undergraduate academic journey. - Immersive learning experiences
A wide range of hands-on opportunities, including internships, study abroad programs, community service, and creative projects, allows College students to customize their learning experiences to align with individual interests and career aspirations. Our goal is to ensure that every student with need receives access to a funded experiential learning opportunity. - Career preparation and readiness
College of Arts and Sciences students gain a competitive edge in the marketplace by mastering essential skills that employers prioritize. Career-focused offerings and career coaching are integrated with our students’ academic journeys, equipping them with the tools needed to excel in real-world workplaces and professional environments.
Courses
16 weeks | 1 day/week | 50 minutes | Open to freshmen and sophomores
In this course, you will gain a broad range of skills, education, and experiential learning that equip you to be a well-rounded citizen and competitive professional. This course is taught with a structured and flexible process that will build your IU experience to set you up for a meaningful and impactful career and life after IU.
Based on design thinking principles, you will explore your work and life values, strengths and interests, as well as develop plans for continuing this exploration over the next four years. The course will culminate in a set of future-focused plans, critically examining the viability of each plan, and then setting goals for building forward beyond the course.
8 weeks | 2 days/week | 50 minutes | Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors
This course will teach you to tell your unique professional story in a compelling way, helping you connect with employers, obtain internship and job offers, and find meaningful work. The course will emphasize industry and employer research and highly customized, focused application materials.
In this course, you will develop a self-marketing plan based on your unique academic, extracurricular and professional experiences, as well as your individual strengths, skills, and career readiness competencies. You will master telling your story through a variety of job searching avenues, including resume, cover letter, professional social media presence, interviewing, and networking.
Description of the video:
0:03the class is called design your life and
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career and the notion is that students
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can look at their career and look at
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their life decisions and approach them
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through a design lens so it's just
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basically applying design principles to
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the design of how you want to move
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forward in your life we just thought it
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was a really useful lens to bring to
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students to think about how to proceed
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with their college career and how to
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think about the kind of work that they
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might like to do after they finish
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college if you're going to do a job in
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your future you want to do something you
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love something that doesn't feel like a
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job something that feels more like a
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passion and I think with you know a
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freshman coming in trying to figure out
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things I'd look at them and I would say
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this class talks about your passions and
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your future with a job and it basically
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encourages you to go towards what you
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want to do
Career Fellows Program
Through extensive research on career readiness, work with the National Association of Colleges and Employers, discussions with faculty spearheaded by a special working group, and dialogue with a host of employers, the College of Arts and Sciences has identified twelve competencies that are taught throughout our curriculum.
The Career Connection Fellowship is designed to offer long-term faculty the opportunity to workshop—in a cohort setting—a course that they already teach or would like to teach, paying special attention to elevating the awareness of how what they teach reaches beyond strictly academic settings. On the most basic level, the fellowship is designed to aid faculty in helping their students better recognize the far-reaching value of their education and experiences. There are over 300 faculty members participating in this fellowship program. Interested faculty can learn more and apply to become a fellow on the Walter Center’s Website.
Connecting career skills in a creative classroom
Joey McMullen, a medievalist and assistant professor of English is part of a cohort of College faculty members who are Career Connection Fellows. His course “Critical Approaches to the Arts and Humanities: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Roots of Modern Fantasy” required students to create their own fantasy worlds and elucidate how those worlds work—what rules, characters, and characteristics they would have—and that culminated in a final project where students developed and ran their own role-playing games (RPGs). McMullen sought to bring the creativity of the genre and of Tolkien’s Middle-earth and tie it in with career skills, such as creativity, critical thinking, innovation, and ethical reasoning.
“One the most exciting aspects of these Career Connection faculty workshops is you get to talk about teaching with colleagues from other disciplines,” said McMullen. “Ahead of teaching this course I was workshopping it with colleagues from Chemistry and Mathematics, so I got perspectives from different disciplines, which helped me think about things I hadn’t before.”
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The Pillars Undergraduate Experience equips students to connect their studies with real-world opportunities, which in turn will help them define and pursue rewarding and fulfilling career trajectories.
Rick Van Kooten, Executive Dean of the College and Professor of Physics