Blog

I am constantly glued to my hand-held screen. And it seems I am not alone. Walking around campus yields a somewhat unsettling observation – almost nobody walks with their heads up, held high, encountering the natural world as it comes to them. Instead, we are often busy making our way to wherever it is we are going in an aggressively hurried fashion, with our heads planted firmly looking down, encountering our own preferences of the digital world.

Many unfortunate features of the Arizona education system are regularly discussed and documented. As Arizona is set to become a majority-minority state within the next two decades, the Latino education gapthreatens the long-term economic viability of our state. We also face an impending established teacher shortfall, with annual teacher retention rates of only 65%.

As a recent graduate of a Ph.D. program in Molecular Microbiology, I am quite guilty of keeping my eyes “glued to the books” and not thinking about the larger picture of my educational endeavors. I spent five years studying foodborne pathogens, and I often joke about the paleness of my skin caused by always working in lab. At the end of the program, however, I began to reflect on my future and found myself wondering if I was going to be satisfied at the end of my life, if I continued as a scientist in the lab trying to solve one problem? For me, the answer was no.

What are your greatest transferrable skills? How do you market those skills to your future employer? Are you an agile learner, and if so, how do you leverage such a skill in the job hunt? These are the questions explored in UI’s June Snacks and Skills. To see the entire presentation, access the Prezi.

In efforts to address possibilities and solutions surrounding challenges in social embeddedness, the Office of University Initiatives at ASU hosted the first stage of an Action Collaboration Design Process (Action Collab). Throughout this process, we convened multiple community engagement stakeholders from across the institution and collectively interviewed, in rapid-fire fashion, a sampling of them. Participants grouped takeaways on post-its in idea clusters and voted on areas of highest opportunity.

Action Collab I: Wednesday, May 9th

For March Snacks and Skills, UI received an audit… on our LinkedIn profiles. Thanks to Barbara Aarestad, an expert career advisor in ASU’s Career Services on the Polytechnic Campus, we got to see how we measured up on the business-oriented social network. Marketability on LinkedIn is critical, as two people per second join LinkedIn, further saturating a pool of over 227+ million users looking for opportunities. Barbara evaluated critical parts of our profiles and gave overall information about how we can best utilize LinkedIn. Below are five lessons learned: