Hello all! It’s Brit from Lawrence Tech here! It’s my last 6 months in the 3 year commitment I’ve made to LTU and I’m very excited! I’ve done such great work at LTU, Michigan Works, and more recently the Engineering Society of Detroit, but I’m excited to start graduate school in the Fall! LTU has been great and ESD has been amazing as well!

I started with the ESD this past August, and it has been exciting getting to know the staff and working with the Future City Competition, which is comprised of middle school teams building their own cities to be displayed to judges in a one day event. Throughout the Fall semester, these teams are given tasks towards completing their city and the completed city is what we saw this past January. I was the mentor coordinator for Future City; making sure that each team has a mentor who is an engineer in the workforce to help them succeed in this competition. It was wonderful getting connected with such talented and smart students and employers, and seeing how their hard work came together. We had about 20 teams participate which was more than the last few years, and the competition took place at the Suburban Collection Showplace; it was great! I helped with registration, tallying the winners of the competition and placing judges on the day of the event. I had a really fun time participating in such a great and fulfilling event. In the future I will be connecting with the student chapters of ESD at various universities to coordinate events, workshops, or anything in particular they may need. I will also be working with another competition which is the Smart City competition.

At LTU we’ve had fun coming up with new ways to reach and engage more students with career services. We had an event in January that targeted First Generation College students by providing them with useful resources that would aid in the success of their collegiate careers. We’ve also had our Career Week: 3 days of career related events that would help students gain professional development, networking and other career related skills. Our first event was the Etiquette Dinner, and we invited staff of the university, students, and employers to join us while our Etiquette Speaker, Mari Lash, gave us tips and tricks on what to do and what not to do during an important and upscale dinner. Our second event was Speed Interviewing! Set up similar to speed dating, employers were able to ask interview questions to multiple students during a small window of time. This event was great because employers were able to meet a lot of students and students were able to connect to different employers. Students were also able to get direct feedback from employers about how to answer interview questions and even how to conduct yourself in an interview. Our third and final event was the Future Fair, which I am in charge of coordinating. The Future Fair focuses on more non-traditional post-graduation plans such as graduate school, nonprofit work or the armed forces. We had 10 organizations present at the Future Fair this year with a wealth of information to share!

Overall, I am having a wonderful last year at both LTU and ESD, and I look forward to closing my year of service with an abundance of knowledge, experience, and wonderful connections that I will utilize in grad school!

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!
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So far my third year has been amazing and I hope you guys are having an amazing start to your year as well!

​One of the new events that we had this year was “Career Week,” which consisted of a week of career related events. This week included HotSpots, where we would have pop up stations on campus for students to speak with us about their resume, cover letters and career advice. It also included Speed Interviewing, the Career Fashion show, The Future’s Fair, and the Etiquette Dinner which all were amazing and fun events that engaged a lot of students. We were also able to host an event called “Future So Bright” in collaboration with the National Society of Black Engineers Junior Chapter (NSBE Jr.) which encouraged students to live and work in the Metro Detroit area. We were able to tour a design company name Vectorform in Royal Oak and Hello World in Southfield and each company gave us a lot of unique information about their company as well as held a special event for the NSBE Jr. We have had over 80 events which included speaking in classrooms, workshops, career fairs, career week, company crawl and we don’t plan on stopping soon! We have a strong connection to our students through our wonderful student assistants whom we love dearly. I am glad to be asked to come back for a final year and rock LTU one last time with this wonderful team! I’ve enjoyed all of the people I’ve met and connected with, all of the collaborations and events we have led. I can tell my last year will be my best year but my second year was beyond amazing!

Where do I begin? This is my second year here at Lawrence Tech and I’m loving the amount of experience that I have gained through AmeriCorps. I never thought that I would find my potential career path through this program, much less be able to work with this program for more than 1 term of service. I’ve accomplished so much on my journey and it hasn’t stopped yet!

I am an Assistant Career Services Advisor here at LTU and I help increase employability amongst the students through avenues such as professionalism, career-fair prep, cover letter and resume critiques, and helping students who may not know their career path find their niche in this world.Since I’ve been working here, I’ve helped produce events such as the Fall Career Fair, Architecture and Design Fair, Last Call Job Fair, Co-op Fair and my favorite the Future Fair!

The Future Fair is the event that I coordinate, and the purpose of the event is to introduce students who may struggle with their next step in life to some pretty cool organizations that they might want to get involved with. Some of those organizations include our MNA staff (yay!), Challenge Detroit, Greening of Detroit, the Army, Graduate Admissions from U of D Mercy and Wayne State and many more. I love coordinating this event because I love promoting the cool organizations that people may not be knowledgeable on, such as the program I’m in. It feels good to promote MNA and help others understand the role I play here at the university.
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I’ve also had the opportunity to coordinate with some lucky ladies who are students of LTU to attend a special conference in downtown Detroit called the Women of Color STEM Conference for my second year! The purpose of this conference is to show that ladies of color with careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) are needed and encouraged although they are scarce. It was a wonderful conference that promoted women of color to seek their dreams in the STEM career field through networking, workshops and a career fair. I especially loved coordinating this conference because LTU sponsors these women to attend the conference and there is a lot of gainful experience that even a person that is not going into the STEM fields can appreciate. 

One of my favorite events that was actually both a pilot and success was our LTU Company Crawl. The set up was the same as your typical bar crawl (yes, we loved it too! Lol) except we “company hopped” to about 4 companies including Microsoft, Doner, Bluewater Technologies, and Harley Ellis Devereaux. The purpose of this event was to show students some of the great working environments right her in Southfield, MI and to show them that not all working environments are not your typical 9 to 5 desk jobs. Overall this was wonderful experience for everyone! 

I have done many great projects and events since I’ve been here at LTU, too many to name in one blog, but I look forward to working with my awesome team on great projects in the future! And last, here’s my boss Peg Pierce on Fox 2 Detroit's JobShop!: http://www.fox2detroit.com/money/jobs/job-news/43903748-story