Franklin College Innovation Initiative 2025 – the next quarter-century

Part 3 of 3 – Student Success

Franklin College has introduced a three-part Innovation Initiative guiding its efforts and focus into the next era of American higher education. The initiative consists of three pillars designed to complement each other and work together: Academic Innovation, Student Success, and Research Partnerships and Public Engagement. In the third of a three-part series of interviews, Franklin College Dean Anna Stenport unpacks the student success pillar, the progress so far and plans for further engagement on this critical element. 

How should we think about Student Success in the context of Academic Innovation?

Anna Stenport: As our third pillar, Student Success encompasses two broad elements – career preparation and the student experience. Helping students prepare for their careers involves providing multi-leveled layered support to turn academic excellence of Franklin arts and sciences degrees into meaningful and impactful careers. We know that our students are successful post-graduation. Yet we want to help them build dispositions and professional skills during their time as part of the Franklin community so they leave empowered to create careers that combine their knowledge, skills, insights, and resilience for purpose and impact. We will help them empower their Franklin Spark - ambition, curiosity, creativity, and leadership – in service of career success, ensuring that more of our students can become entrepreneurs, with the opportunity to start and successfully scale their own companies. 

And this would be a more formal version of what we have done in the past at the department level, making students aware of existing university resources?

Anna Stenport: Yes, much of this happens at the department level, and offering career development for students happens somewhat unevenly. For example, the UGA Career Center is reaching about 10% of our students, showing us that many of our students are not taking advantage of Career Center resources. Similarly, the UGA Entrepreneurship Program housed in the Terry College of Business reaches less than 1% of Franklin students every year. Yet we have 100,000+ alumni across industry sectors, with many exceptionally eager to give back and support student success.

Therefore, we have established career development positions to support our students and are building out dedicated startup efforts. The College now has internship coordinators in the humanities and in the biological sciences with intended hires in the social, computational, and data sciences. Dedicated Franklin expertise in these areas is a critical component in a suite of new capabilities designed for students, which includes ongoing alumni engagement efforts.

The UGA Career Center is a well-established campus resource. How will the college integrate these new efforts with their focus and strategy?

 Anna Stenport: The Career Center is a tremendous campus resource, and we have partnered with them in the past by encouraging individual faculty members to complete a professional development program called Career Everywhere, which equips faculty with tools and resources to support the career development of all students. The Franklin College will now be partnering with the Career Center through our departments by encouraging all faculty to support students and raise the percentage of faculty who are trained for this work. Alumni are always invited to contribute to these efforts. 

The Career Center also offers the ARCH professionalization program for students, which teaches them how to build a resume, how to network, how to identify internships., It's a very effective mechanism in place, utilized by a small fraction of our students. In our new approach, departments will focus on integrating ARCH professionalization into as many departmental course offerings as possible. We’ve already seen tremendous outcomes when ARCH is incorporated into course curricula. 

We know that the department is the center of the day-to-day work of our students and faculty, so we believe this department-level partnership and commitment to careers will lead to widespread uptake of Career Center resources by our students and increased engagement by our alumni. 

How do you engender this shift across the arts and sciences?

AS: I think there's tremendous interest among students, faculty, and alumni to be actively involved in these important endeavors. Prior research on department-level change in higher education suggests that departments can achieve ambitious changes with the support of the department head and the diligent work of a select group of faculty champions. And, the cross-collaborative element is crucial – when they're working not only with themselves but with champions from other units, they're sharing ideas while achieving broader momentum. As people work together and share ideas, the ideas take on a distinct life of their own in the department. A faculty member can take this work on as a service role, customize the details and start to promote the idea among faculty and students. In terms of culture change, I think that's a longer process, a year to four years.

So, there are incentives that also create expectations?

AS: Yes, the college can provide support by bringing those people together, to create a learning community of faculty career liaisons, to help them do the work they need to do at the department level and with alumni. And we will work to create a path for faculty to get credit for doing this work in their annual evaluations and reviews.

How will the college communicate the importance of this new effort?

AS: We have developed a detailed marketing and communications strategy to support the reputation and recognition of the Franklin College with all of our constituencies. It’s a multi-year effort but it has already begun with the socializing our community to the Franklin spark and elevating the importance of student success as a priority for the college. Our alumni are very excited about this priority and want to help. 

That effort has already created the opening to communicate with those in Franklin and external stakeholders about the new ways we are supporting students’ career development. 

In support of building community among Franklin students, and with our alumni, we will hold an annual Franklin Fest for First years – to engage our students early on in their college journey – introducing them to mentoring opportunities, the Career Center, study away, additional exposure to entrepreneurship and startup efforts, connecting with alumni, and other important career development opportunities. 

How do faculty really learn to support students’ career development when they are prepared for their work in the disciplines and as academics.

AS: As faculty, we are always educating ourselves on new opportunities – that’s part of being a creative researcher and strong pedagogue. We see this as we mentor our grad students, many of whom are interested in careers beyond the academy and in entrepreneurship. And so, we know that faculty who are successfully mentoring their students are doing so by educating themselves about the opportunities and connecting them with additional mentors – often successful alumni. A key component of this work, I am excited to see more of this on the undergrad level and know that our alumni are eager to contribute their networks and provide support.

It's a very fluid time, and with the many rapid changes we are seeing, the disconnect between academia and the private sector can grow as well as fluctuate, so it’s even more important to understand the job market and how to connect people with new opportunities.

AS: Yes, and that's one reason we've introduced yet another tier of support: through faculty who serve as internship and career coordinators, with support from our alumni. 

Our internship and career coordinators help to bring industry and other employment sectors to our students. Our current ones, in the humanities and in the biological sciences, are helping connect our students with industry – arranging internships with writing and publishing outlets or taking our students on visits to biotech companies while also promoting entrepreneurship. 

We envision a team of internship and career coordinators working across the college to connect students and faculty with alumni and industry. As we build this out, entrepreneurship and startup efforts will become more important as well to ensure that Franklin students have access to a variety of career pathways. 

Committed to academic excellence, Franklin is perfect for students who have very broad views of the world, are mission driven, and want to solve major societal problems. Our students, like any student, want career fulfillment and financial success. This can be an AND proposition, rather than either/or. I've become convinced of this just watching the students around me and learning from our remarkable alumni who have pursued precisely such paths. There's been a confluence of things I've seen over the past years that have convinced me that you can have a robust learning environment that builds new knowledge AND ensure successful career outcomes. 

Read part 1 and part 2 in the series.