Episode 106: Maggie Lewis on Integrating Career Developing Into the First Year Experience
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How can you embed career discovery and development into your first year experience? How can you get advisors, faculty and employers engaged in experiential learning activities? How is AI changing the curriculum and career development and placement? We talk through these with Maggie Lewis, Vice Dean for Student Success at Temple University's Klein College of Media and Communication and Interim AVP for Enrollment Management for Temple University.
In the current higher education landscape, the transition from college to career is no longer a finish-line activity. For today's students—and their parents—the return on investment is a day-one conversation. But how do institutions bridge the gap between academic theory and professional practice without losing the essence of the "college experience"?
Maggie Lewis, Vice Dean at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication, has found the answer by weaving career development directly into the fabric of the first-year experience. Through the "Klein Rising" program, career discovery isn't just an extracurricular activity; it’s a required, foundational part of becoming a student.
The Shift from Optional to Essential Career Preparation
For years, many colleges offered career seminars as elective credits. However, Lewis explains that making professional development a requirement—rather than an option—has leveled the playing field for all students. By integrating these topics into the first year, students who may not have a clear career path are given the space to explore their options before they feel the pressure of senior year.
This approach acknowledges a fundamental truth: it is perfectly normal for a first-year student not to know what they want to do. The goal isn't to force a decision, but to provide the foundational tools—networking, resume building, and communication—that can be applied to any field once the student finds their focus.
Building a Professional Foundation in the First Semester
At Klein College, the first-year journey is split into two distinct phases. The first semester focuses on the transition to college life: understanding schedules, academic advising, and self-reflection. Students often use tools like StrengthsFinder to understand their natural talents.
By the second semester, the focus shifts to "Professional Development Basics." This isn't just about theory; it’s about tangible assets. Students leave the course with:
A polished resume that translates part-time jobs (like working at a pizza shop) into transferable skills like supply chain optimization and customer service.
A professional LinkedIn profile, complete with a high-quality headshot provided by the school.
The "One-Minute Pitch," allowing them to confidently introduce themselves to recruiters.
Leveraging the Power of Experiential Learning
One of the most effective ways to bridge the classroom and the boardroom is through experiential learning. Being located in Philadelphia, the fourth-largest media market in the country, gives Temple students a distinct advantage. Lewis highlights "Klein on the Go," a series of faculty-led excursions where students visit advertising agencies, sports arenas, and newsrooms.
These excursions turn abstract concepts into reality. When students see alumni working at companies like ESPN or the Philadelphia Inquirer, the career path becomes visible and attainable. This "flipped" model—where students showcase their portfolios to employers rather than just handing out resumes—creates a dynamic environment where talent meets opportunity.
Adapting to the AI Revolution in Career Discovery
The rise of Artificial Intelligence is perhaps the biggest shift in career development today. Rather than fearing AI, Lewis and her team are teaching students how to use it as a strategic tool. This includes using AI to analyze job descriptions and optimize resumes with relevant keywords to pass through automated screening systems.
In the classroom, journalism and media students are learning to work alongside AI to generate copy and report news, mirroring the actual practices currently taking place in modern newsrooms. By staying ahead of these trends, the college ensures that graduates are not just "job-ready," but "future-ready."
Advice for Future-Proofing Student Success
The core lesson from the Klein Rising model is that career development should be a collaborative effort. It requires the engagement of academic advisors, faculty, and industry partners. By embedding these practices into the curriculum, institutions can maintain high retention rates and ensure that students feel supported from enrollment to graduation.
Ultimately, student success is defined by the individual. Whether a student lands a dream job at Google before graduating or decides to pursue a PhD in anthropology, the goal of higher education is to provide the space, time, and tools for them to reach their greatest potential.
Episode 106 Transcript
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Elliot Felix: Welcome to the Connected College podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and the way they're organized to enable student success. Join me for insightful interviews with higher ed innovators, sharing the stories, stats, and strategies to create better connected colleges and universities. Welcome, Maggie. I'm so excited for our conversation about how you integrate career development and preparation into academics and the first year experience and beyond. Glad to have you here.
Maggie: Happy to be here. Thank you. Elliot.
Elliot Felix: Tell us a little bit about how you got started in higher ed and what you're up to today. I know you are wearing lots of fun hats and doing lots of great things.
Maggie: Yes, I have some new hats, but so I'd say my foray into higher education actually started when I was an undergraduate student myself. I went to University of Richmond and had several on-campus jobs where I was able to meet students and interact with our leaders. So we had a really fantastic dean of students. I was close with our VP of student affairs and I realized that was a career path I could pursue. So I began at Alvernia University. It's in my hometown of Reading Pennsylvania, and started with transfer articulations and actually reading through transcripts as an enrollment coordinator. That was back when we had to do it with paper and pencil and mark it all off.
Elliot Felix: So not even in the era of AI ingesting and reviewing transcripts, but before it was even digital. Nice.
Maggie: Absolutely. From there I went to Widener University in a similar role, had enrollment, but also started to dip my toes into the student experience academic affairs. I was associate Dean for adult and graduate education there. And finally moved to Temple University, really wanting to have the true undergraduate experience and took a role in Klein College of Media and Communication as Vice Dean for Student Success, where I have been for the last seven years. Just now accepted an interim position as Assistant Vice Provost for Enrollment Management, and that's the new hat I'm wearing today.
Elliot Felix: That's really exciting. That must give you an interesting perspective on the student journey because you've been thinking through from the recruitment and the retention side of things and how to create remarkable experiences along the way.
Maggie: Absolutely. As Vice Dean, I was able to look at everything from enrollment and recruitment, still meeting perspective students, and then was responsible for graduation and everything in between. So it was really great to have all of those touch points and really understand the full process for a student. And now I'm able to see it from a university-wide perspective as well.
Elliot Felix: That's awesome. Given that perspective and those experiences I'd love to hear your definition of student success. It was even in your title, which is fun.
Maggie: It was. So I have listened to your podcast so many times that I'm getting a mix of what everyone else has said in episodes proceeding this one. But I would say I view my role as helping students identify and reach their greatest potential. So however it is, they define that for themselves, and part of our job in higher education is to provide the space and time for students to figure that out.
Elliot Felix: Love that answer. And you're right, there is, I ask this every time, and it's either the Achilles heel or the master stroke of the connected college where I don't define it. I talk about a lot of the things that you kind of imply a definition, but there do seem to be like at least three camps. There's the camp you're in, which is, define it from the perspective of the student. So let's say you have a co-op student that gets hired at Google after their co-op, and they actually don't even complete their degree in their mind. That's success. From a metric standpoint, maybe not as much. And that's the second camp is people that are, retention rate, grad rate, career placement rate. And then I would say the third camp is people who want more nuanced metrics and they're saying, it's meaning and impact and ROI and any, a whole host of other things. But I think that's a great camp to be in. And I think defining it from the student perspective is a great approach.
Maggie: I think that's also what makes our job so fun, because all three of those are great camps. And so we can put those different lenses on at the time that it's appropriate. As we approach middle states, we need camp number two. But we also do need to recognize that first student may have gotten exactly what they needed and that was success to them.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. And it is interesting when the metrics and the reporting don't align with the bigger picture and they can create some really perverse disincentives or incentives. I was talking to somebody the other day and they have a program like an OT and a PT program. It's an accelerated program, so you go right into your doctorate and you don't get a bachelor's along the way. So those students show up as not a completion, and by virtue of getting the students to their destination faster, the institution is penalized.
Maggie: Sure.
Elliot Felix: And so there are these weird things when it comes to student success definitions and metrics.
Maggie: You have to have the asterisk there, see additional note.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. And it's not the Barry Bonds asterisk. It's a good asterisk. Yes. So you're thinking about student success from the perspective of a student and their goals, their dreams, their family.
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Elliot Felix: I'm interested to hear the role that you think career development and career preparation play in that definition or in that pursuit of student success.
Maggie: Those conversations start at our open houses with, like you said, it's often coming from the parents first. And then the perspective students start asking the questions. But we, I think because Klein College is specifically focused on media and communication students, we tend to see more students that are almost immediately career focused. They see Aaron Andrews on the screen and they know they wanna be here after their four year experience. So because of the student desire, it often prompts conversations earlier about where they want to go, what they'd like to do. So we really wanted to provide that foundation right from the start. Give skills that would help students land internships earlier. Help them connect with experiential education earlier so that they then felt prepared to launch that career right away.
Elliot Felix: I love that. And I have to say, I have personal experience working with Klein College for an internship. 'Cause I hired a recent grad to help spread the word on my first book, How to Get the Most Out of College. And she did an awesome job and the school was super responsive. So it is like that sort of college career connection ethos, I think you all are walking the talk. And I would love to dig into a little bit how you're doing that as it's called Klein Rising, right? As your first year experience program. Talk to us a little bit about how you integrate career development and preparation and readiness into the student experience kind of from day one. Obviously students and parents care a lot about this. Not waiting till second semester senior year to think about your career makes a lot of sense. So how do you all do that?
Maggie: Yeah. The Klein Rising Program has become a major selling point at our prospective student events. We have had a first year seminar for many years as a one credit optional seminar, and then we began offering a one credit professional development seminar around 2015. And when the pandemic hit, we used that as an opportunity to turn both of those into required courses for our first year students. So we saw good numbers of students opting into those courses, but this really strengthened the experience for our entire entering class. So the first semester, they take a first year seminar with our academic advisors, and much of that is focused on introduction to college, what is a schedule? Making sure they're ready and registered for the spring semester at the time they should be. But we do start introducing the topics of career exploration, getting to know yourself and your interests. In the past we've had them do the strengths finder test and would like to continue to do that as well. We do this at each semester entry point. So the most typical is a fall, spring scenario. But we do offer that to transfer students who come in, or new students who start in the spring, they would take their professional development course in the fall. And that has all of the basics, the foundation level of, what should I include on a resume? Do I need to include the pizza place that I worked at when I was 16?
Elliot Felix: Yes or no?
Maggie: We say yes to the pizza place. If they've not had any other professional experience and we tell them how to tell the story about the skills they learned on in those particular jobs.
Elliot Felix: Optimized supply chain through delivery processes.
Maggie: Absolutely increased speed of box preparation. So we really work with them to give them that foundational level like I said, resume, how to write a cover letter. We have them start their LinkedIn and we get them a headshot within that semester. So we have also had great feedback from potential employers coming to career fairs and other events that our students are really above and beyond at that level of having a prepared LinkedIn profile.
Elliot Felix: I love that. Getting the preparation and having it show up on LinkedIn is so cool. And it reminds me there's a professor of social media at Duke, Aaron, but I saw an Instagram post from him years ago about LinkedIn profile tips and one of them I still remember 'cause it's so great. It's for your profile shot: find a big lecture hall on campus, put your presentation up on the screen and have someone take your photo like you're giving a TED talk and make that your LinkedIn banner.
Maggie: That's a great idea. Yeah. We typically have them, a lot of our students are highly creative, so they'll design their own banner. We want them to make it really come across with their personality and not be the default gray and blue background of LinkedIn. We do also take it a step further by having them start to interact with people they're interested in. So if they know there's a company they want to be working for in the future, they would love to be at ESPN, they would love to be at the Philadelphia Inquirer. We ask them to follow and even start doing some cold messaging to folks that are in jobs they would like to be in. So that's part of our initial experience with the students.
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Elliot Felix: And so you mentioned, students are doing this self-assessment, they're doing this reflection, they're building their profile. They're doing the research and the outreach. How does what they discover connect to their coursework?
Maggie: That's a great question. We highly emphasize among our majors—think of journalism, advertising, et cetera—that the professional development pieces be well connected throughout the rest of the major curriculum. So our faculty are highly engaged with the work that we do in our career services area. We have internship coordinators based in each major, and they also will contribute their thoughts to our professional development curriculum. When they get to sophomore and junior year, our students are already applying to typically multiple internships. That's one of the benefits of being in the fourth largest media market in Philadelphia. Our students don't have to look far for internships and on the job experience. So we focus really those two years on the experiential education piece. And by senior year, our faculty step back in and there's a senior capstone or a senior seminar where our faculty are highly engaged and typically small class sizes like 12 to 18, where they are developing portfolios, demo reels. We have a flipped career fair where our advertising and PR students set up a station with some of them bringing computer screens and show off presentations. Some of them print things out, but they demonstrate the breadth of their portfolio from their four years at Temple University, and we invite our employers to come and view that. We often have a lot of alumni come back and it's always a fantastic senior showcase.
Elliot Felix: How are you measuring the success of Klein Rising quantitatively and qualitatively?
Maggie: Quantitatively we are looking at our retention rates. Over the last five years, Temple's retention has dropped slightly, but we have been able to maintain our retention rates within Kline College. So our last year, our first semester to second semester, we had 99% retention. And then we were looking at around 86% retention from first year to second year, most being unfortunately financial reasons. And the other more qualitative metric is the feedback we're getting from internship offerings and employers who hire our students. We have really great results from our career fair where we have a survey that we send after the fair to ask employers about the quality of students they saw and the quality of their materials. There have been really significantly high ratings on those for the last three years since we made this a required seminar.
Elliot Felix: How would this apply to other parts of the university or other professional schools? Do you think everybody could do this?
Maggie: I absolutely do. I've been trying to encourage others to do it as well. I will say even within our own college, we have two majors that come to mind that are not as clear cut in terms of the career path. One is communication studies, which is our interdisciplinary degree, and then we have a pure communication degree. A lot of those students end up going on to law school or graduate school. Still the focus is on the experiential education pieces, and I'd say that's true across Temple University. So whether you are studying anthropology or engineering, nursing, et cetera, we want students to be experiencing and living the potential career paths they could have in the future. Making sure that we're connecting our alumni, especially who are successful in the field and making sure they all know what is available to them after they graduate. And often this seminar course, I might say, is the most important for those students who don't have a clear career path, because this helps them to understand what their options are and hear other students describe what they plan to do. Often they get inspired or we remind them it is absolutely fine and expected to not know what you wanna do as a first year college student. We want them to explore. But if they have those foundational pieces of knowing how to communicate with a potential employer, knowing how to network, knowing how to give their one minute elevator speech then they can take that anywhere and apply it to any field.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. And it sounds like that exploration, the outreach and the experiential focus, those are foundational. They translate pretty well across disciplines.
Maggie: Yeah, I would say one of our goals at Temple University is to look at this first year experience, and we've been talking a great deal about the importance of faculty involvement and knowing that each school or college is going to approach this a little bit differently. But if the core elements are the same, we can be assured that our students are starting off with that same foundation. And if they change their major, if they move into a different school or college, we can know, okay, at least they've had this baseline information covered and we can build on that.
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Elliot Felix: It sounds like this evolved from professional development being optional to then required. I'm curious to learn what you've learned over the years. What are some things you tried early on and you're like, oh, that doesn't make sense? Or what are the things you added and they've really enhanced the experience?
Maggie: One thing comes to mind immediately, and that is that we have been trying to figure out the best way to get faculty involvement in that first year experience and seminar. And one way we have done that is what we call Kline on the Go. We have a lot of great industry professionals who teach for us as adjuncts. And then we also have full-time faculty who are top scholars in their field. They have great contacts, so part of this first year experience is also offering excursions throughout Philadelphia. One that we just went on, we took students to visit Philadelphia to understand how we advertise our city. We'll go on agency crawls for advertising purposes. We will visit our top sports arenas and talk to the folks who are working in those areas. Those are smaller groups of students. We typically will have anywhere from 10 to 15 students sign up for these excursions with faculty members. But those that do take advantage of those optional activities find them to be truly transformative. And that's where it brings everything we're talking about in the classroom to life for them in a way that is not possible.
Elliot Felix: As you think about AI and other things that might change communications and media, how are you thinking about the future and what advice would you give to other institutions?
Maggie: When I think about the professional development course, we have already started to include a section on the AI tools that folks are using in the hiring aspects right now. We know that when you write a resume and you write a cover letter, most companies of reasonable size are using those AI tools to screen their candidates. So we give them a lot of feedback about how can you even use AI as a tool. If you go into ChatGPT and you have a good structure of your resume and you input that plus the job description and say, "Tell me how I can make my resume perfectly fit this position." There's a lot of keyword work that we do with the students to let them know that is part of the experience now. In their majors, we are certainly talking about how AI is being integrated into all of these fields. Our journalism students are actively out in their writing and reporting classes using AI to generate their copy and their text. It is being used in newsrooms all over the country, so we wanna stay up with what they are doing at the same time.
Elliot Felix: Are there other things as you shine up your crystal ball? Are there other future changes you're thinking about?
Maggie: I would say the landscape at the moment feels highly competitive for our graduates. We are encouraging them to increase the number of internships they do or the number of jobs they have. The majority of our students have at least a part-time job, if not multiple part-time jobs. We wanna make sure that they are doing those things strategically, that they're keeping track of all the things they're doing, and they are making themselves as marketable as possible. I don't see the competition getting any less over the next few years. I especially think of the folks we're training to go into sports media. That's a booming field and it is growing very quickly, so we wanna make sure our students have the best contacts, the best network, and also the best skill development to make sure that they're the top of the pool.
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Elliot Felix: It sounds like a lot of it is really like doubling down on the experiential learning and the work experience to position yourself better in a more competitive market with greater uncertainty.
Maggie: Absolutely. But the liberal arts student in me still says they need the breadth of our general education. They need all of this classroom experience they're getting to really compliment all of those experiential learning pieces.
Elliot Felix: That's great. Maggie, thank you so much for this window into how Klein integrates career development and exploration into the student experience really from day one. I think there are lots of lessons that other institutions can learn.
Maggie: Absolutely. I'm always happy to share what Kline Rising is doing and where our curriculum can grow.
Elliot Felix: Every time I hear rising, I immediately go to the Springsteen song. So I waited all the way until the end for my dad joke. But I'm excited about the rising that's happening at Klein.
Maggie: Good. Yeah, we are too. Thank you.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to elliotfelix.com for more information about my book, The Connected College, articles I've written and talks I've given. There's also tools you can download and information on booking me to speak at your institution. Please support the podcast by rating it and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where all students succeed.