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Ringae Nuek: Welcome to Ways to College, a podcast for parents and students who want to understand how college is evolving and how it actually works, not just how to get in.
I'm Ringae founder of Waysmith. After 20 years in product design, I bring a strategist's instinct to this, understand yourself, understand the landscape, then decide.
On this show, you'll hear from higher ed leaders doing genuinely different things— rethinking curriculum, student support, career integration. You'll come away understanding what actually matters, asking smarter questions and making a decision that's genuinely yours.
On today's episode, I speak with Alex Hernandez, president of Champlain College, a small college in Burlington, Vermont. I wanted to speak with him because Champlain has a really interesting upside down curriculum that flips the usual sequence. Students start taking classes in their major from day one and can be in meaningful internships even during that first year, we talk about why they made these choices, what it looks like for students, and how Champlain has recently redesigned their existing upside down curriculum. If you're interested in schools where work integrated learning is deeply embedded into the philosophy of the school, this will be a good one.
So I thought we could start with an intro to you and if you could let the listeners know your own background, your journey into higher, higher ed, then maybe your journey from, from that point to where you are now.
Alex Hernandez: So my name is Alex Hernandez and I'm the president of Champlain College. I've had a pretty untraditional career path. I started my career in business, went on to K-12 and onto higher education. But I think what really shaped my journey is, my father was a farm worker. And my first job was on Wall Street, and this was incredible leap in one generation for my family. It changed my life, it changed my son's life, and for the last 20 plus years I've been thinking about what does it mean to create opportunity for students and, and through education. And that's why I fell in love with Champlain College.
This is a college that gets students ready, they hit the ground running when they graduate. I spoke to, a number of CEOs about our students, and I often hear things like: I have 900 people, 300 of them are Champlain grads, and they're my best people. And it just made me think like, what is it about this college, about how it's trying to innovate over time that's created this magical place where, students, get to explore their passions in a way that gets them prepared to make their mark on the world.
Ringae Nuek: When you say that employers speak so fondly of Champlain grads, what is it you think you're getting right?
Alex Hernandez: Let me just kind of give some perspective on who we are. We're a career-focused college, right in Burlington, Vermont. Our majors prepare students for future focused careers. So I think that's one of the key initial points.
They allude to careers and things like cybersecurity, business marketing, game design, psychology, animation, creative. So these really kind of future focused careers. Our students, come in and they immerse themselves in experiences in these careers from day one. So we partner with employers.
Instead of waiting until you're a junior or your senior year, like a lot of students do to think about what comes next for them after college.
Our students are diving right in, and I remember meeting one of our alumni. He was working for a digital marketing firm, and I said, how did you get your job? And he goes, well, Champlain does a really good job of connecting us with the outside world. My very first day. We had a guest speaker very first day at Champlain, and they worked for the company that I ended up working for when I graduated. And so it's just a fun example that if you provide these connections with employers, from the very beginning you can design a very different type of college. And it goes well beyond that. You know, our students really dive into, experiences from day one. But, part of that, belief that partnership with the outside world is important. That connection, that experiences matter. That's part of the secret sauce.
Ringae Nuek: What does that look like? Is it co-designed courses, designed together with someone from industry or is it co-ops or what's the model?
Alex Hernandez: We are known for what we call our upside down curriculum. And what that means is rather than waiting until your junior year to start a major, you start a major day one in one of those areas that I described earlier, and so the connections happen at multiple levels.
Like first of all, it happens in the classroom and so we'll have real world projects that students do. So as an example, we holding a course, with an employer partner and their site. They're a leader in sustainable green technology, here in Vermont. We are teaching a computer science class at their site and students building a piece of software, for that company. And they're jointly designing it. So that's one example.
We also have internships on campus for students, and we have this Leahy Center for Cybersecurity where beginning their very first year students can do an internship where they're defending the networks of a local business or a nonprofit and they're tearing apart devices in our Internet of Things lab to help law enforcement with investigations. Again, we don't say wait till your senior year or do it in the summer. You can do it your very first semester. We recently have announced co-ops, which, allows students to earn and learn at the same time, meaning that as you well know, students can go out and work full-time and, get academic credit and we're really excited about that.
Rather than the traditional way where students probably wait till summer after their junior year to think about their first internship, they may or may not be successful in getting that internship. Our students can get a really meaningful internship summer after their first year, and by the time, they graduate from Champlain, they might have 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 internships. Those internships matter. Students who have one paid internship during their time at Champlain make $15,000 more, 10 to $15,000 more when they graduate. They have stronger career outcomes. Experience matters. And that's why we say, experience is included in the Champlain College education.
'cause we've designed our whole school to not just give students the academic underpinnings of their passions, but also give them experiences that help them bring them to life.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah, I was reading the Gallup Purdue report about the six, experiences in your undergraduate education that make a huge difference to, finding a job afterwards.
Alex Hernandez: Absolutely. Yeah.
Ringae Nuek: I could see that there's a risk when you have this approach that because people are doing such different things on different sites how do you control for making sure they're learning what you want them to learn and that it's not scattershot and different kids are picking up very different things.
Alex Hernandez: As we think about our general education curriculum, in a lot of places you take intro to everything and general education is about checking the boxes in a number of buckets. We have a very structured, robust general education program. We just do it very, very differently.
So for example, one thing we do is, we have learning studios through the four years in our general education program. And what we do is. On campus, students are working together from different majors, different backgrounds, and working on projects that are brought to us by employers. And what that allows them to do is a couple things.
It allows 'em to grapple with a real world, problem. As we know, Vermont's the winter sports, capital of the world. What does it mean to, have winter sports during a time that winters might be shortening? What does that mean? And how do you come together around that?
And so we have students working together on those problems from different backgrounds, different majors. And so they're trying to connect the dots across disciplines in a very different way. And then the second thing that they're doing is they're developing these skills of collaboration and communication.
They have to work together to bring these solutions to life. And these are the types of skills that we talk a lot about, but you very rarely see them get taught within the context of a college and the main programs. And I think part of the reason that our students are successful when they graduate is because over the course of four years, they're not just building their academic skills, but they're also building these professional skills that are just as important.
And so while our students are having lots of different experiences at various points, the core design of our program, for example, with the general education program, for example, with our upside down majors, those are very, very structured. So no matter what, interest you're pursuing, you're gonna get a really, robust education that brings these things together in a way that I think we all hoped education can do for us. I see a lot of students come from high school and they come from great high schools and they feel really constrained and they feel like something's not quite right and there's more that they can do with their education. And we love seeing that energy because, we try to unleash them in our programs.
Ringae Nuek: Do you do anything to track the skills. I know some places have a secondary transcript that tracks these things that aren't just the classes you took, but the skills you picked up.
Alex Hernandez: We don't have a secondary transcript. I know exactly what you're talking about. What we do have is we have a set of competencies that we developed, internally but also in concert with, employers. These are really supposed to be the 10 competencies that are really important to life success, not just career success.
So things like inquiry, communication, working with diverse teams, thinking globally, and we use these to inform the design of all courses, our general education courses, our major courses, and so there's these themes that are running really, really consistently across topic areas and subject areas, and so that makes things really, really fun.
You can bring in someone with a background in folklore to teach a class that someone else is coming with a background in economics, and we're focused on the same competencies and trying to develop the same set of skills, but potentially in very different projects and very different, environments. And it makes for a, really creative place.
Ringae Nuek: It sounds like a perfect environment for someone who already comes in knowing, what sort of career they're interested in. And so they use these four years to really set themselves up for that.
Ringae Nuek: How does it work for someone who's more undeclared?
Alex Hernandez: I think most people don't know what they want to do when they're 17 years old. What we love about the upside curriculum is we tell people try something you can always change it, but the worst thing that could happen is you think you, uh, like something, and then it's not, you don't really get into it until your junior year and you realize, oh my gosh, I didn't like that at all. What do I do? So our students are really able to explore something early, see if they like it.
But what really honestly happens is they start seeing the connections from that topic to other topics. And so we had a student who came in. And he was really interested in cybersecurity and then he really this like passion for international issues and these other things.
What happened is, their interest just evolved in these really organic and unpredictable ways, and we've created a very flexible curriculum for students to be able to do that. The way to think about it is, it's like Lego blocks where you can have a major, but you can borrow blocks from different majors to put together something that makes sense for you. And I think that structure's really, really important because it's easy to say, "Hey, we want to give people a lot of choice," but the truth is choice can be paralyzing and sometimes choice can, you know, be a barrier to really fully exploring your interests.
And what we find is if we put students in a scenario and keep just helping them move, advance their interest. And making it really easy for them to reach outside of the subject area that they're in and pull in other pieces or move over. We had one of our most successful students in the last class, she traveled through, I think four different programs and from computer programming to creative media, and she ended up taking a job in industrial design for an incredible company and that job was designed to borrow from all four of those areas that she traveled through as a Champlain student. And so this idea of pursuing your passions and really kind of borrowing and mixing and matching can be really, really powerful for a lot of students.
Ringae Nuek: Advising work. I know some places they have a major advisor, they have a pre-professional advisor. How do you support students as they're navigating that?
Alex Hernandez: Absolutely. We have an advising group, who, especially as students who are coming in their first year, who are global comprehensive advisors to help students think through both their path and some of these different options that they have. And then our students also work with our faculty members who really kinda have deep expertise in these fields of study. So it's a partnership between, this group of, advisors in our faculty.
Ringae Nuek: Going back to the connection to Vermont, do most of your students end up staying in Vermont, working for local companies after or, or not so much?
Alex Hernandez: No, they go all over the place. The reason we talk so much about Vermont is. Vermont is this place that gave life to Burton, it gave life to Ben and Jerry's. There's so much creativity innovation that happens here. And so when students come to Champlain, they have access to that.
Oftentimes you think, okay, I'm gonna go to this college and this college happens to be in this city. No, you happen to go to Champlain College and you're a part of this Vermont innovation community when you come here. We have a signature partnership with a startup accelerator called HULA and HULA, has about 60 of the leading startups in Vermont right now and students go in and have access and go work for those startups, and that becomes part of their experience that, they'll either keep and work in Vermont or they'll take with them to Boston or to Los Angeles. And so the reason we talk about Vermont and these partnerships so much is because part of the Champlain College education, and it's what allows you to hit the ground running, regardless of where you choose to go. And,
Alex Hernandez: And we have students who go internationally. And actually one of our best experiences, that students get is the opportunity to intern, in one of five Asian cities through the Freeman Fellowship. And it is just another way of thinking differently of study abroad where you're not going to sit and take classes, in, a city, which is great. We have plenty of students who do that, but these students are actually going to take internships, in places like Thailand and Japan.
Ringae Nuek: Can you give examples?
Alex Hernandez: One of our students, transferred to us a couple years ago and she had this interest in games she wanted to do games in Japan. She came in and took full advantage of, everything Champlain had to offer. She built games at Champlain. She did projects with different companies. She actually built her own game that got recognized by a national magazine. And then she took this summer and worked in Kyoto, for a company around game design. And she graduated a few months later, she announced the world on LinkedIn. My dreams came true.
I had this intention that I was gonna go design games in Japan, and many of us have dreams and we know life can take us in different ways, and she was able to take all these experiences and bring them together to create this career, in Japan, halfway around the world.
Ringae Nuek: You get more integrated with the local community than, you know, if you're taking a bunch of classes, potentially just hanging out with a bunch of other Americans. I can see how that'd be good.
Ringae Nuek: I read that you are redesigning the curriculum again right now, or maybe you just came out of a fresh redesign.
Alex Hernandez: We've come out of a, yeah, really exciting redesign of our curriculum.
Some of the features of it is the general ed curriculum that has this studio component that's interdisciplinary, focuses on professional skills. One of the, components, our majors are structured like Lego blocks so students can, really kind of bring them together in ways that make sense for them. And then we also have this Flex 30, uh, curriculum. And what it is, is it's about, uh, sorry, it's not curriculum, it's Flex 30 credits and it's about a year's worth of credits that students can do different things with to drive value into their degree.
And what I mean by that is a student could say, Hey, I want to do an online graduate certificate in this area to really enhance, my, competitiveness in a field they can choose to do one to two co-ops, with an employer using those credits and still graduate on time. As you know, many people do co-ops, but you basically a full-time student anymore and it extends your time to graduation. And we think experience is education, is one type of education that's really important that we need to incorporate. And we don't think students should have to delay their graduation in order to do that.
They might do a double major or, go abroad. So we really want students to have some ability to drive value in that degree, but no matter how you look at these different features and the redesign, I think the idea is we have a lot of hardworking, talented, achievement oriented students who know that education can be different and by matching the right experiences against their passions, we keep doing that. We know at some point their passions just catch fire. And, they're really able to do some impactful things out in the world. And it's really kind of fun seeing our alum.
We recently had one of our graphic design alums design an NFL jersey that was on the field and it was one of the first times the NFL had actually let a team do their own design for a jersey. And when you look at all the experiences this student had that led up to that achievement, I mean, they're just constantly in this orientation of how do I create, how do I put my ideas out in the world? How do I do? And we want Champlain to be a place where you're gonna learn about stuff, but you don't just learn about stuff, you're actually gonna do stuff.
Ringae Nuek: What was the impetus behind the redesign?
Alex Hernandez: I think it was a recognition that while the principles of experiential learning of upside down were right, the world's changing pretty rapidly right now. And if you look at how artificial intelligence, for instance, is reshaping the workplace.
Students who can connect dots across different things are really valuable right now. Students who have very strong professional skills are really valuable right now. And those are two things that our curriculum is really designed to do: help you connect dots across, help you develop your professional skills.
The space between idea and reality is collapsing right now because people have so many tools at their disposal. So how do you, create a curriculum, how do you create a college where, students are able to bring their ideas to life? They're able to build the world that they want to see. And so those are some of the things that are going on in the world that tell us that what we designed is really, really timely and we think has long lasting value. And technologies come and go. Employers change their mind about how they approach things. But these skills that I'm talking about are enduring skills that, are becoming recognized as more and more important given how the world's changing today.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah, I think one criticism that I have heard of some more work oriented programs is that they can be a little shortsighted and that they're setting you up for that first job, but they're not setting you up for long-term success.
Alex Hernandez: And that's not, yeah, that's not the approach at all. And if you, think, hey, we're actually, we're training students around these competencies. We're training students around professional skills. We're helping students think about like, what does it mean to create, what does it mean to innovate? We're gonna put tools in your hand to innovate and create in whatever that means in 2026. But we know those tools will be different in 2027 and 2028.
And so when employers see their students are ready, it's not because solely because they just know whatever the latest technology the moment is that's gonna be different in six months, which I think where a lot of that criticism comes from. But students have developed these skills that higher education hasn't always focused on. And like these professional skills, like these competencies and they've done things and they've practiced doing things and if, if you do things differently two years from now, like that's okay too because you've developed the skills to evolve for the world and be future forward in your career. And that's what we're trying to do with our students.
Ringae Nuek: You've done this curriculum redesign, but are there other ways that it's making you rethink how you're approaching everything?
Alex Hernandez: I mean, there's clearly more questions than answers around AI. From an education standpoint, while there's lots of ideas about how to incorporate AI and teaching and learning. The bottom line is students need productive struggle. They need to put in the work. You need to be challenged.
Anything that, takes away from your ability to challenge yourself, is gonna be hard. And it's not gonna lead to the outcomes that we hope for. And so I think, for us and many others, there's that conversation on the other side.
In this world where space between ideas and reality is collapsing, need students who are figuring out how do you create, to be entrepreneurial. What does it mean to, do things out in the world using whatever tools are available to us? Because what that looks like right now is very different than six months, 12 months, 18 months ago. So it's really balancing these two things, which is very hard to do. And things are moving so fast, two weeks from now, we could be having a totally different conversation. That's how fast things are moving. But this is also why I think our relationships with employers are so important.
Right before this podcast, I was meeting with the CEO of a brand new startup here, that was doing his extraordinary things in the AI space and he was basically asking, I'm really engaged in a startup, but what can I do to support your students? And he probably shared with me two or three things that I didn't even know about and probably couldn't have even known unless you were talking to someone who's doing the work. Right now, in this moment and out of that conversation, I'm thinking, how do I connect this incredible human being to our classrooms, to our faculty, to our students, and those connections, that's what makes, part of what makes the community, really, powerful for our students.
Ringae Nuek: Well, I can see, especially with some of your more popular majors, like game design and cybersecurity, like are gonna be at the frontier of being impacted by AI, either for good or for bad.
Alex Hernandez: AI is reshaping a lot of different jobs and I don't want to over index on AI. We are gonna need people who understand computer science. And the question is, what does that look like in a world of AI? We're seeing computer scientists now can do the work like they're 10, 20 people because of the tools that are available to them. What does that mean for how we do computer science?
What does it mean for, thinking about the role of agents in organizations? I don't think these areas of expertise become less important or they go away. The question is what do they look like in the future? We want institutions of higher education thinking about what do these look like in the future?
Not just what have they been over the last 50 years and what will they continue to be?
Ringae Nuek: Um, I'm curious, as you've done this restructure of your curriculum, how have you consulted students and gotten, user feedback from them?
Alex Hernandez: We had, our VP of Student Affairs talk to, a bunch of students, over the course of a spring. I think, if I'm getting that correctly. All, of our coursework, a lot of our curriculum, it's very, very iterative is what I would say. And so while we're kind of developing the shells, I think, you know, we're talking and interfacing with students in different majors, in different areas about like how does that come to life for them?
When I shared with some students and also alumni about, what do you think about having more flexibility? They gave some really sharp insight into, how that could be beneficial for them. And we had incredible academic model, I thought, before, and it's what inspired me to come to Champlain College.
And as we started talking to more and more students, you know, it, it told us, where they could benefit from different areas. Things like, flexibility, things like being able to combine their interests. And so, each one of those, features of the curriculum that I've talked about, there are students who I can think of right now who kind of represent and embody, the why behind some of those design choices.
Ringae Nuek: Okay, so for families and high schoolers who are touring right now, juniors who are interested in the kind of thing that you're offering as they're going on info sessions at the various colleges that they're considering, what do you think are questions that they should be asking to probe whether the college is actually offering the things that maybe it says it is when it says, oh, we do experiential learning. We care about your career outcomes. We have co-ops and all of that. What should they be asking to figure out if this is marketing versus something that's really done genuinely well?
Alex Hernandez: On the experiential learning side, do the experiences you see ever happen in the classroom or in the core of what the institution does or does it always happen in the fringes? And I think that's something to really look at because we're in a world now where everyone's saying, we do career, we do internships. And oftentimes it's, we'll do that, as long as it's at a distance from, the core kind of sets of programs. So I think that's one.
From an employment standpoint. I would really look at, every college will say, we've got really high career outcomes. We have really high employment outcomes. And oftentimes if you ask them what percentage of the class they survey. And oftentimes they'll say, oh, we surveyed 20 to 30% of the class and our, employment success rate is 95%. Every year we survey 80 plus percent of our class. And so last year we had, I think 86% of our students had a successful employment outcome, within six months after graduation. That's 80% of the class. I mean, we're, we're tracking everyone we possibly can. But I've done tours with my own kids where yeah, they're like, well, it's based on 30% of class, so just, you know, peel back on the statistics.
And then third, for the schools that have internships and co-ops, what are the schools doing to help their students gain access to those or just students left on their own to fish. And we think having a, this kind of continuum of supports is really, really important. So when a student comes into Champlain, they might start with a real world project in the classroom. Or they might do an internship on campus and then they might turn that into an internship off campus and then turn it into a co-op or a, contract job, a project.
But, you know, to what extent are people at the college or university helping them make those connections, side by side with them, giving them advice around them, that connectivity, that coherence you should be seeing throughout the institution.
Ringae Nuek: When you say an internship on campus, what do you mean by that?
Alex Hernandez: Yeah, I mentioned our Leahy Center for Cybersecurity earlier. At any given time, we have a hundred students on campus working cybersecurity, data analytics, marketing. They're, earning, sometimes they're earning pay, sometimes they're earning credit, sometimes they're doing both. But they actually can do this with incredible employers, without actually leaving campus.
They're doing it, on our campus, under the supervision of our faculty and staff. So that is a really important bridging experience from my perspective where, you've gotten real experience. You haven't just, shown up and, made coffee, somewhere, but you're doing real work, within the support of your community, which gives a lot of our students tremendous confidence as they head out off campus for their first set of internships.
That's an example of what I mean by that.
Ringae Nuek: Okay. And they have some sort of concrete deliverable at the end.
Alex Hernandez: Absolutely. I mean, this is real work, not everyone can afford cybersecurity services, small companies, small local nonprofits, and so we have a group of students who defend the networks of local businesses and nonprofits here in Vermont.
So this is real work with real clients, with real accountability. And they do it here on campus at Champlain and, that makes them very attractive to people who, are also, interested in, providing opportunities in cybersecurity. And we actually have an employer partner, New Harbor Security, who opened an office, right on the other side of the hallway from the Leahy Center.
And New Harbor Security. When I joined here at Champlain, they had about 130 employees. Half of them are Champlain grads. So there's this incredible bond and connection between them. But if you think of yourself as a student, wow, I can get real world experience here on campus. And there's this incredible employer that, you know, seen so many things that I can learn from, just right across the hallway.
You know, that's the type of, environment that you want to create to help students. And it's not just for cybersecurity. Like I said, you can walk right down the street to HULA and you got access to 60 of the best companies in Vermont ranging from, digital marketing to there's one company that does, virtual reality for video games.
They've really engaged our game studio students to test new technologies there. They're called OVR Technology. And so, again, as you see, if we kind of create these gardens of, community and innovation and experiences, students really thrive and blossom.
Ringae Nuek: I'm curious why this approach work integrated learning, why it's relatively rare in the US and why in Canada it seems so relatively mainstream.
Alex Hernandez: I mean, for me, the first factor is just culturally. A lot of higher education wasn't wired this way. I remember going to a university and they very proudly said, "We prepare you for your fifth job. We don't think about your first job." And that was the belief of how good education worked. It actually takes quite a bit of effort and design choices, I think, to have, a really robust, integrated work environment. You can't just tack it on to something else where you're not thinking about that all the time. And so from a design standpoint, I think it's relatively challenging.
Businesses, employers need to be able to see the benefit of working with young people. And I think that's probably more established at the undergraduate level. It's even a bigger, leap at the high school. You see models like Cristo Rey and a few others that have tried to really breach that in some meaningful ways, but if it's not gonna make sense for the employer, it's gonna be hard to grow these programs. And so part of what organizations like Waterloo and Champlain and others need to do is figure out how do you help make this both powerful for the student and make sense for the employer. And so I think all those things come into play, but again, just think it's really hard to do if you don't have, a lot of your organization oriented toward in this direction.
Ringae Nuek: So that's actually why I was asking that question a while back, around how parents can tell when it's done well, because I feel like as I, 'cause I have a junior actually, so I've been doing a lot of tours.
Alex Hernandez: College? Oh, high school. Got it.
Ringae Nuek: High school. Yeah. Yeah. Um. Everyone has experiential learning, right? And they all often talk about it a lot because I think, I don't know if it's that it's a little boring to talk about your curriculum, or it's hard to talk about it broadly because so many, you know, so many people might be in different majors.
Or it's just, maybe it's the experiential learning that gets people interested when they're sitting in, their second info session of the day. But so. I'm sitting in these sessions, I'm like, well, how do I know who's doing this well? How do I know who's really rocking their study abroad versus outsourcing it and then it's mediocre or there isn't much attention paid.
And I feel like that's one of the things I'm trying to do with this podcast is really of drill down into how do I know if it's good, whatever that thing is.
Alex Hernandez: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, talk to students, talk to current students. I mean, they're the ones who will, tell you and, part of, what I love is I can pretty much go out to any student and I can say, Hey, what experiences have been really meaningful to you?
And it doesn't really matter if they're a first year or second year, or third year or fourth year. They're gonna tell you about some experience that really enhanced what was going on in the classroom. Sometimes it's predictable. It's a program I know really well. Sometimes it's completely unpredictable, like, wow, I didn't even know we were doing that. But because, we have this ethos and this value around experiential learning, it gets pulled forward in both predictable and unpredictable ways.
Ringae Nuek: What are you hearing from them in terms of things that you should be doing better?
Alex Hernandez: Yeah. Great, great question. I think there's places where. We have really explicit strategies and explicit supports and other places where it's ad hoc and when it's ad hoc, student experiences will be varied. Some students will have really great experiences and other students will be like, oh, that's not how it worked for me. And so I think more and more how can we be systematic around, some of these things, across the college is, what we're thinking a lot from a design standpoint.
We have some programs that are larger and some programs that are smaller. And so think part of making our curriculum more modular and more flexible to move between them is we wanna give students exposure to, their peers and other majors. And doing really, really meaningful work together. You know, if you're in the game studio and you're designed to work with some other majors over the course of four years, like you're gonna get that experience.
What the new curriculum facilitates is for some of the other majors who might not have gotten, that type of experience, like with the studios and other things, they really appreciate those opportunities to have these experiences. Because it's sometimes easy to say one part of the college might be getting something different than another part of the college. And we're really trying to pull some of these things that students have liked across all our majors.
Ringae Nuek: Well, I also think those group projects where you're building something together that does emulate the real world, right? Like where you have your CS person, you have your design person, you have your product manager, that kind of thing. I did a design master's in Italy, and I did sort of UX interaction design.
We had a couple projects where like we partnered with the fashion person, and did some kind of hybrid project, but it was fascinating to get that point of view and that skillset and us to be working together. It was more engaging than the ones that were pure, just us, all US, UX people together.
Alex Hernandez: And what we are seeing with, the workplace shifting and with AI is that students are spending less time, going way, way deep in their domain, but being asked to go reach outside of their domain and get stuff done with people all across the organization.
So when I say interdisciplinary, these professional skills really, really matter. They do. And it's because the work is shifting between people, to make connections between functions and between people versus just spending all your time deep, deep, deep in your own domain.
Ringae Nuek: Okay.
Ringae Nuek: Just so one last question I had. Going back to what we were talking about showing the value of this to employers, what do you think Champlain has done that. Because it sounds like you have very much done that. How did you do that?
Alex Hernandez: I really think it's two things. We've been around for about coming on 150 years and every 25 years, Champlain College has evolved into something new based on what the world needed at the time, and we were always focused on not just how we can create the best education, but how can we help support the community and how can we partner with employers?
And we started off around kind of business and technical skills in the 1800s, then we became a two year college. Then we became a residential two year college and a four year college. And then we're going into a really major transformation right now I think it's, while we've evolved based on what the world needs, employers have always appreciated that, they see in Champlain grads that they're evolving to what the world needs.
We've evolved, our students have evolved and we've just done that consistently over a long period of time, and so that allows you an employer to look back and say, Hey, I've got 75 Champlain alumni right now in my, and they range from 20 years old to 40 years old or 50 years old. And it's just this kind of consistency. But these, these themes of readiness, of creativity, of passion, those things are really, really consistent across the generations.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah, okay, thank you so much.
