Britney Underwood-Third time's the charm

Hey guys, it's Brit from Lawrence Tech here! This is my third and final year and I am PUMPED for what we have in store! I am more than excited to have the privilege to be here for a third year and I can’t wait to create more longstanding events that help students with their professionalism! Since the Fall 2016 semester has started, we’ve already had two events! We work fast, I know! Our first event entitled “Games of Pizza” was an event focused on increasing the freshman student population in our office. It was a really cool and fun event with board games, card games, and of course pizza. The purpose of this event is to introduce ourselves to the freshmen and encourage them to not only take advantage of our services, but to come to our events and establish those employment connections; it’s never too early to gain professionalism. We had our event in the freshman dorm which gave us great access to freshman and even for the ones who couldn’t come to our event due to class. Overall the turn out for Games of Pizza was a success!

The next event we had was a 3-day event called "Handshake Week". Each of these events encouraged students to create an account on our job portal, Handshake. Our newest feature gives students the ability to make appointments with Career Services for resumes or cover letters directly through the site. Each day of our Handshake week featured fun events and we also had computers to let students sign up on the spot. Our first event was “Shake It Up with Handshake” which we gave out milkshakes. Our second event was “Hoop It Up with Handshake” which we rented the arcade style basketball hoops and let the students play. Our third and final event was “Dance It Up with Handshake” which invited our students to have a good time with Career Services through line dance songs such as The Cupid Shuffle or The Wobble. Each event had music and attracted so many people to utilize their Handshake account! Since we’ve signed with Handshake, we’ve had trouble getting students to utilize their accounts so we are hoping this series of events would help students understand the importance of this great job tool. Handshake (for those of you who don’t know) is our job portal which connects students to Career Services’ events, fairs and even employers directly. The site takes a social media platform so that students would feel more at ease using it, and be more willing to connect to employers as well as Career Services.

I’ve also started with my new community partner Engineering Society of Detroit (ESD) and I believe I will be doing some great work! I will be working to encourage middle schools to an annual competition that ESD sponsors which is called Future City. This a competition in which middle school students would work in teams to build and scale a city of the future that is at least 100 years into progression by utilizing the SIMS video game and actual engineering mentors.  The duration of this competition is from August-January, and in January students would show their model ready to be judged at the statewide competition which ESD sponsors. I would help with promoting this event to different middle schools in MI, more specifically our DPS schools, to encourage more participation. I am looking forward to working with ESD and seeing the amazing work that these students would be creating!
​
So far my third year has been amazing and I hope you guys are having an amazing start to your year as well!

---