Career Services to change
New director to make plans to help all students
By Nyshicka Jordan
Staff Reporter

The new executive director of University Career Services said she aims to develop plans with Career Services staff before she makes changes in the department.

“I want to work with the Career Services team and come up with some strategies and goals,” said Patricia Bergmaier.

Bergmaier, the current director of the University of Alabama’s career center, was hired last week and will begin her duties at TCU in May, said Don Mills, vice chancellor for Student Affairs.

Currently, Career Services operates under a director. But according to a February Skiff article, the executive director position was created to offer an expanded amount of opportunities for students.

Mills said Bergmaier’s role will be to develop a new structure for the department.

“Structure-wise, we did need an executive director,” Mills said. “The existing staff, with their skills and with (Bergmaier’s) experience will be a nice melding of ideas, and everyone will be able to build on everyone else’s strengths.”

The goal is to strengthen relationships with different university departments so that students will have better contacts, Mills said.

Mills said the university had considered having a career coordinator within each college, but a Career Center that could be used by all students would be a better overall.

“It was generally decided that the most effective use of resources would be to have a centralized career services,” Mills said.

Bergmaier said her goal is for Career Services to benefit students of all majors and she agrees that collaboration with the colleges is one key.

“I think that should be an institutional goal, not just Career Services,” Bergmaier said. “We need to partner.”

Mills said this system will work better because many of the services would be duplicated if they were in various departments. Also, because students are freely allowed to change majors and move easily between colleges, students would have a broader access to recruiters this way, he said.

“However, we do plan to have staff in the Career Services office liaison directly with faculty in each college,” Mills said. “We think this gives the best of both worlds.”

Rhonda Keen-Payne, dean of the College of Health and Human Sciences, said changes to Career Services may be more helpful to other colleges. But she said all students can benefit from the center by learning things such as interviewing skills.

“The Career Center is more helpful to our students in preparing for an interview,” Keen-Payne said. “Almost all applicants need practice and honest, friendly critique to present themselves in a favorable, accurate light.”

Bergmaier said she appreciates that Career Services attempts to include opportunities for all levels of students. She said she would like to continue it further and also provide more opportunities for graduate students and alumni by inviting companies to campus that are looking to fill more than entry level jobs.

Mills said increasing staff size is also needed and the process of adding two more staff members will begin soon. Currently there are six staff members in Career Services.

“TCU has had a much smaller staff relative to student size in relation to other private universities,” Mills said.

Mills said space is also a concern and plans are underway for that as well, but he does not know where or when this will happen.

“It’s too early to know how everything will work out,” he said.

Geoffrey Au, an education graduate student, said re-structuring Career Services is a good idea. Au said as an undergraduate he had tried to use Career Services to help him find summer jobs and that it had not been helpful to all majors. He said he thinks that Career Services is geared toward business majors.

“I think the changes sound better as opposed to telling students to refer to books,” Au said.

Bergmaier said the criticism that Career Services is designed for business majors is a stereotype for many university career centers, but that she hopes to change this perception through marketing techniques and talking to students to see what they want.

She said students have this perspective because companies come to campus visits, but said students do not understand that there are more opportunities for all majors.

n.d.jordan@tcu.edu