Back to the future
In this month’s experiment, we are focusing on helping students “transition to the workforce”. I am teaching senior Food Science students, a lot of whom are still unsure of their career paths. This is not because these students don’t have a choice, but they realize that they do not like working in factories. After graduation, the students’ jobs are diverse. Some work in the food industry or related fields. Some pursue advance degrees, mostly in food science. Some may open a small business or work on family business. Some have jobs that are totally unrelated to their degrees. With such diverse career paths, how can we help prepare students for their future?
The key of this question is not how should we answer it, but who should answer it. And who would be better than someone who has already graduated and chosen his/her career? Yes, I’m talking about the alumni.
I got together with my partner in the program and designed a set of questions that asked alumni to reflect on their career aspiration, and how much university education helped them prepare for it. I asked my coworkers to distribute the questionnaires and received 23 responses, which is pretty good for such a short notice.The majority of the responses came from either recent graduates (1 years ago) or more senior alumni (5+ years ago), having job types that are both related and unrelated to food science. One of the first questions asked whether they think GPA is important at this point in their career. Those who said GPA is important indicated that a higher GPA leads to a higher starting salary and more job and scholarship opportunities. For those who said that GPA is not important defended that GPA does not dictate one’s performance on the job. Rather, one’s ability to learn and adapt to the job is more important.
The next questions asked about specific knowledge that the alumni have learned in university and used in their jobs. Overall, knowledge in core courses was used in real life and did not seem to be outdated. However, the alumni also indicated that they still need to continue learning a lot, especially about Microsoft Excel. Some also said they need to learn business, marketing and accounting. These are the areas that my department needs to supplement in our courses.
Another interesting thing is that when asked “had you gone back in time, would you have studied this major?”, most people still answered yes. The reasons were that food science is still in high demand and offers a lot of career opportunities. Those who answered no said that it is not their passion or that the salary is relatively low compared to the hard work they put in.
All in all, the answers from the alumi are very insightful and valuable. They are more or less the future version of my current students, and these insights are like golden keys for us educators to ‘go back in time’ and improve what we do so that the future generations of our students are the best they can be.
