The College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) recently launched its Pillars Undergraduate Experience, a framework designed to prepare students for academic achievement and lifelong career success. 

“The Pillars Undergraduate Experience initiative integrates four key components—research, career readiness, intentional life design, and immersive learning—into a cohesive program that redefines liberal arts and sciences undergraduate education,” the school explained in an announcement introducing the program. 

“Ultimately, we wanted to take the uncertainty out of the student success equation,” explains Joe Lovejoy, Ph.D., assistant dean of integrated undergraduate experience and executive director of the Walter Center for Career Achievement in IUB’s College of Arts and Sciences 

“Our graduates are in demand, but what we often experience with a liberal arts and sciences degree is that because the career piece has not been as prominent, oftentimes students don't realize how marketable an arts and sciences curriculum can be and the diverse skill sets it’s instilling in them. Through the Pillars Undergraduate Experience, IUB is offering students the opportunity to study what they love and get the preparation necessary to be career ready upon graduation.” 

Elevating Student Engagement Off a Plateau

The Walter Center for Career Achievement—the career services office for the IUB College of Arts and Sciences—was formed in 2015. 

“We had a unique opportunity to build a career services office from scratch around the unique career-related needs of liberal arts and science students,” he says. 

“[We] built this new center and launched new programs and services geared toward our students. All along the way, we tracked our student engagement, and we saw growth year over year for the first five years until we hit about 50%. We got to the point where about half of our students were engaging in career preparation and planning offered through the center.”

However, that growth leveled off. Regardless of the program, service, idea, or approach Walter Center staff introduced, student engagement was locked in at 50%. To explore the reasons for this stagnation, Dr. Lovejoy and his team held focus groups with students and undertook an environmental scan project. 

“We learned some interesting things,” he says. 

“Our students wanted to understand much more clearly the connection between what was happening in the arts and sciences classroom and what was next for them. They were struggling to see that connection and wanted to see required career development curriculum in our school. 

“They pointed at other students in professional schools on campus who had required courses where they were being guided through this process, and we didn't have that. Overall, students talked about feeling as though they were being left to figure out the career piece by themselves.”

The Walter Center team matched what the students said in the focus groups with data about how students were engaging in career preparation and realized that instead of trying to address these gaps with a new program or smaller initiative, it needed to create an entirely new vision. 

“We stopped implementing incremental changes and, instead, pursued transformation,” Dr. Lovejoy explains. 

“We got out of the business of doing career development in the transactional model, which we know tends to serve the students who need the least amount of help the most. Through much discussion and planning, we landed at this place where we could offer an experience that allows all of our students to maximize the full benefit of a liberal arts and sciences education by creating something where career preparation, planning, and support was fully integrated into every student's experience.”

He points out that the Pillars framework eliminates the problem of career services staff having to convince students to participate. By embedding career readiness in the co-curricular space, the College of Arts and Sciences could transform its undergraduate experience and turn the 50% engagement if had stalled on previously into the ideal, but elusive, 100% engagement. 

A Broad Scope

Dr. Lovejoy is quick to point out that the Pillars framework is not a career center initiative. 

“It's a school-wide transformation initiative and, as such, our champions are distributed across our entire environment,” he notes. 

“Because we set out to transform the undergraduate experience, we have literally hundreds of champions across our faculty, our alumni, our administrators. I think that's one of the unique things about our program.” 

The Walter Center worked with College of Arts and Sciences’ deans, associate deans, and faculty to understand the aspirations of the college’s community and to think about how together they could best fulfill the college's mission to provide its students with the best possible education. 

This process led to the creation of a compelling vision to transform the undergraduate experience to integrate undergraduate research, life design, education, experiences, and career readiness, which became the foundation driving the project. 

“By creating this vision, we are no longer leaving student success to chance,” Dr. Lovejoy says. 

“Instead, we are building an experience that maximizes the benefits for all our students.”

The Four Pillars

With the vision in place, the team got to work establishing structures to implement that vision. For example, one of its first steps was to reorganize all of its student services into one unified team—the academic engagement student success team. This team brings together the college’s academic advisers, student recruitment team, international programs team, and the Walter Center team. 

The second step was to engage the college’s faculty and bring them into the process. 

“I think the special thing about what's happening here is this idea of redesigning the academic experience so that all students get to benefit from this,” Dr. Lovejoy says. 

“To do so, the program is built around four pillars that are the focal point of what we want every student's experience to look like.” 

According to the school, the pillars are:

• Undergraduate research opportunities starting in the first year—Undergraduates engage in meaningful research in their first year across the liberal arts and sciences, while receiving mentorship from IUB’s faculty.
• Career preparation and readiness—Students gain a competitive edge in the marketplace by mastering essential skills that employers prioritize. Career-focused offerings are integrated with students’ academic journeys, equipping them with the tools needed to excel in real-world workplaces and professional environments.
• Intentional life design—Through required coursework and one-on-one consultation with academic advisers, students learn to use design thinking to align their academic and co-curricular experiences with their long-term career aspirations.
• Immersive learning experiences—A wide range of hands-on opportunities, including internships, study abroad programs, community service, and creative projects allows students to customize their learning experiences to align with individual interests and career aspirations.

The career preparation and readiness pillar has a new career course, which teaches storytelling to help students learn how to tell their liberal arts and science story through concrete tools, including their resume, cover letter, and interviewing. 

This pillar also features a large-scale career competency initiative in which 300 faculty members participate in a 10-hour workshop over six sessions led by the Walter Center. Faculty members bring a syllabus to this workshop, identify a career competency they believe is already present in their course, and work in collaboration with other faculty from around the college to redesign that course to make the competency more understandable for their students. 

“That has been a tremendously successful initiative,” Dr. Lovejoy says. 

“We now have 300-plus faculty members teaching in the college every semester reaching tens of thousands of students in these existing courses where we're much more intentionally elevating career competencies and helping students see that this is already present in our existing curriculum.” 

The IUB College of Arts and Sciences model is based on the NACE Career Readiness Competencies but  with several tweaks made by a faculty task force that worked for a semester to develop the college's career competency model. 

“Career readiness is now a required part of the curriculum for every student,” Dr. Lovejoy adds. 

“Career services staff engaged our faculty in conversations and collaboration over a five-semester period, working side by side in curriculum committees that ultimately led to a vote of our 1,000-plus, full-time faculty to modify our graduation requirements so that our career courses are now a required component of every student's experience.”

Factors Driving the Success of the Pillars Undergraduate Experience

Making the kind of progress and transformation needed to craft the Pillars Undergraduate Experience requires consistent collaboration. To do so, the Walter Center has aligned efforts across its career services, student services, academic departments, advancement, and alumni relations.

“These partners and stakeholders have been involved in the creation of every aspect of this program over a multiple-year period,” Dr. Lovejoy explains. 

“That's a critical component of our success.”

As an example of sustained collaboration, he points to “the multiple semesters of work that our team engaged in with faculty and curriculum committees to get us to the point where we could have a vote of our faculty to actually change the curriculum.”

Another factor contributing to the success of the program is that its organizers spent time listening. They  sat in on department meetings with faculty, met one on one with department chairs, hosted lunches, and more while talking about the vision. 

“The reason that our vision was effective and resonating with our community is because of the time we spent listening on the front end before introducing that vision,” Dr. Lovejoy points out. 

“That has driven our whole project. We incorporated that feedback we got from those meetings into the design of the program. It has been a continuous and iterative process the whole way. It has evolved and grown as our partnerships have expanded.”

Dr. Lovejoy also hails the excitement that the vision and its development and implementation generated. 

“What the compelling vision did was help organize multiple separate functions behind a common shared goal which is really powerful,” he says. 

That shared goal—in large part, the students’ career success—cannot be the responsibility of the career center alone. 

“Career readiness is not something that can be achieved on its own outside the classroom, so we've built a model that really embraces this reality and is fully integrated into the academic experience of all students,” Dr. Lovejoy says. 

“Getting there has taken a huge amount of time, but I think the transformation that it has produced in our school has been really inspiring and it's going to be long-lasting for our community.” 

And, possibly, for others, too. Dr. Lovejoy and his team believe the framework they helped create could be applied successfully in different institutional settings.

“We're really fortunate that the IUB strategic plan—called IUB 2030—leans heavily into student success,” Dr. Lovejoy says. 

“We do feel that this is a model or a blueprint that other colleges and universities can adapt for their own context. We know that colleges are under a lot of pressure to show return on investment, and we're creating a framework where students can pursue fields they're passionate about while getting real-world hands-on experience that will equip them to pursue their highest professional aspirations.”