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Developing a Backup Plan: Implementing a Career-Planning Course for Undergraduate Biology Majors.

ABSTRACT: Career-planning courses are known to be effective career interventions for undergraduates, but their effect on developing alternate career plans was previously unknown. Forming alternate career plans increases the likelihood that students have viable career options available to them upon graduation because it encourages students to realistically consider multiple possibilities. Here we describe a one-term career-planning course developed in the context of an undergraduate biology curriculum. We assessed whether this course promoted development of primary and alternate career plans using a pre/post survey. We saw a significant increase in the percentage of students indicating they had plans aimed at achieving primary (increase of 37%) and alternate (increase of 48%) career goals from the beginning to the end of the course. Preliminary outcomes suggest that implementation of this course correlates with an increase in the percentage of students who indicate they have a job after graduation (increase of 16%). This type of course could be implemented in many other contexts to support career development in diverse fields.

SUBMITTER: Winters JM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6195180 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Developing a Backup Plan: Implementing a Career-Planning Course for Undergraduate Biology Majors.

Winters Julianne M JM Wang Haizhi H Duwel Laura E LE Spudich Elizabeth A EA Stanford Jennifer S JS

Journal of microbiology & biology education 20181031 3

Career-planning courses are known to be effective career interventions for undergraduates, but their effect on developing alternate career plans was previously unknown. Forming alternate career plans increases the likelihood that students have viable career options available to them upon graduation because it encourages students to realistically consider multiple possibilities. Here we describe a one-term career-planning course developed in the context of an undergraduate biology curriculum. We ...[more]

PMID: 30377467

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Project description:BACKGROUND:In the last three decades there is a growing recognition in the dental profession that dental education must go beyond teaching the technicalities of dentistry and include professionalism and communication skills that the future dentist may need. Such skills are best taught in a student-centered way. Literature suggests that student-centered elements are difficult to introduce in traditional, teacher-centered curricula. This is especially true in post-communist countries where higher education was under strict state control for decades. The aim of the piece of research presented here was to investigate how difficult it is to introduce a student-centered career skills course in a traditionally teacher-centered dental curriculum. METHODS:Considering the needs of our final-year dental students and Super's model of career development, we created an undergraduate curricular career skills course running for two semesters in two languages (Hungarian and English). The primary aim of the course is to help students with their career expectations and develop their identity as a professional workforce. The secondary aim is to teach skills that students can use when applying for a job. At the end of the semesters, we assessed our students' satisfaction with various aspects of the course by using a questionnaire. Results were analyzed item-wise and according to the main aspects of the course (i.e., groups of items organized around a particular aspect). RESULTS:General satisfaction with the course was high, and practical skills training (such as CV and motivation letter writing) got the highest scores. From the answers it appears that the students were the least comfortable with having to deal with their personal values and preferences. CONCLUSIONS:While it is common for universities to offer various forms of career intervention, to our knowledge, no other university offers a curricular career skills course specifically for dental students. Our student-centered course designed in a problem-based learning framework worked even in a traditionally teacher-centered educational environment, where university students are rarely encouraged to be active participants in courses. By sharing our experience, we would like to encourage our fellow dental educators working in similar environments to devise and offer such courses.

Dataset Information

Developing a Backup Plan: Implementing a Career-Planning Course for Undergraduate Biology Majors.

Publications

Developing a Backup Plan: Implementing a Career-Planning Course for Undergraduate Biology Majors.

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