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Career Services on the Move

As many may have noticed since coming back to campus after MLK Jr. Day, the Career Services Center has moved from its perch on the 6th Floor of Wahlstrom Library all the way down to the Garden Level. Other than that, not much else was really known. Some questions I was left with were: Why Career Services needed to move? How long they had been planning to move? and Why move to the Garden Level? I decided to find out from the source and asked the Director of Career Services, Paula Quenoy, to shed some light on the whole event. This is what she had to say.

“How long was the move discussed?” Paula Quenoy told me that even as she was being hired in 2005 the idea was already around to move the Career Services Center. However, this specific move has been in planning since late Fall 2007. It was part of a massive plan that included, in addition to Career Service, the relocation of the International Affairs, International Admissions, and Residential Life offices. All of these offices needed room to grow, so Career Services moved in response to the needs of those offices.

According to the director, it wasn’t just a necessary move, but also a very profitable one. Although the office lost its sixth floor view of the Long Island Sound, it gained a lot. One improvement is that the individual offices of the Career Counselors are now more confidential.

At the sixth floor location, the individual offices had a gap between the
wall and the ceiling, allowing for almost no privacy during the conversations between a Counselor and students. The new offices have solved this problem.

Also, the new Career Services Center has been custom designed to better fulfill its mission of helping students. Its new layout is better able to handle the volume of students that come on a day-to-day basis, as well as providing a private office for employers to use when they come to meet with students. If nothing else, the new location has put the office directly into the regular flow of student traffic, which has led to more walk-ins during the 2 week period since the office moved than there’s been in the past 3 years in the library.

So, in the end, although the move seemed relatively spontaneous, it was something that has been in the workings for quite a while and has already reaped many benefits, both for the office as well as the students it aims to serve.