.svg)
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.
My guest today is Brian LeDuc. Brian's a design strategist with 15-plus years working across higher ed, corporate learning, and design. He now runs his own consulting practice, Learning Designed, helping colleges to build programs that connect learning with what comes after.
So the reason I was so excited to have you on is because I feel like we, have a similar background in a lot of ways of approaching or thinking about higher ed in terms of experience design, service design, I'm always looking at, in my case, how to help students get in, but also how to just think about what they're getting into in terms of the student experience and how you can interrogate that, both as an admissions consultant, but I'm also a parent to a junior.
So as a parent, at one level colleges all look super great on paper. You get these glossy brochures, you go to their website, they all look amazing. But then the actual reality can sometimes be great and sometimes be not so great. Having worked with institutions on the inside, I'm sure you have a ton of insight into where those cracks are and maybe how you can identify them. So, that's what I'm hoping we can talk about today. But before we dive into all of that, I'd love it if you could just share your origin story as it were.
Brian LeDuc: I'm excited about this conversation because, I'm always interested in connecting with students and aligning experiences to what their needs are. And so this is sort of the reverse of that conversation
I came into this work, actually after being a first generation college student myself. So I, did not have a whole lot of fluency for what higher ed looked like. My sister is nine years older and she did go to school, but. You know, but between then, I don't know that there was a whole lot of new insight that we gained, or a lot more clarity that my parents had in being able to give me some good instruction about what to look for beyond that, higher ed was important to pursue, and I was in the middle of my class as a high school student.
I was semi involved, but, did a lot of wandering. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I had some vague ideas about maybe marketing or business, and so I was really focused on looking at schools that were supportive of that goal. And I think I lost some things along the way. In that search. But I was grateful now looking back that the school I ended up choosing, or maybe better said, chose me after a couple of rejection letters. and not getting into that what I thought was, you know, dream school, which I think is sort of a myth by the way. that I ended up at a liberal arts institution that had a business school, but also had a lot of other courses of study.
I graduated as a psychology major and had a lot of different ways to get involved on campus. And a huge change of pace from my high school persona. When I graduated and started college, I was freshman class president and got involved in orientation and residence life and leadership programs and was involved on campus and in regional initiatives that, were really supportive of what I wanted to do in my career. And so I had those opportunities because of the kind of school that I went to that turned out to be a great fit for me. But it wasn't as if I was proactively making those decisions. It was sort of that I was in the right place or had discovered a campus that met the needs that I had
Ringae Nuek: So I'm curious, it sounds like you sort of, ended up at the right place. What made it right?
Brian LeDuc: Yeah, I think, when I was looking at schools and looking for what I thought I wanted out of my initial fit, I was, really focused on major. I was really focused on, the academic experience and I wasn't really looking more broadly at the range of options that I might have if I changed my mind, or the more well-rounded experience of what campus life looked like.
What I ended up at versus what I was looking for was a campus that there were a lot of activities outside of the classroom, really strong organizational life. I was really involved on campus. I was able to change my major pretty seamlessly from a business major in my freshman year into psychology, And because I was looking at careers in higher ed, I was finding that there were more opportunities to grow in my leadership roles on campus to get a paraprofessional experience on campus. And so for me, those things just ended up working out really well, And so this campus that had a lot of options and a lot of ways for me to, find my way and find those experiences, made a huge difference in retrospect.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah, so one of the things you said that is interesting to me is like this thing around discovery,
A lot of students, are semi undecided, they know the things they don't like often, but. What they know they like is so limited by their high school experience.
Some kids figure it out on their own, but then others flounder
or others take six years do you have any thoughts on what colleges are doing a good job with that and how they could be thinking about supporting students there?
Brian LeDuc: It's really a difficult dynamic for many institutions to balance the role of discovery and then the role of sort of clarity and structure for an academic course of study. Even in high school when you talk to students, the question that they're getting at their barbecue for the celebration that they're graduating high school is, what's your major?
And what I've started to say to the students that I end up crossing paths with who are asking for advice about college the most successful way to navigate that experience is ask the person who's asking you what their major was and whether or not they use it.
Ranging from like 50% to 80% of employers say the major does not matter. When you look at that against the expectations that colleges have around the way they're structured, it's all about the degree and what is the degree based on other than the major, which is a collection of very specific classes in a very specific order that you've got to take. So the role of discovery is kind of always in tension with navigating successfully.
The colleges that are doing this, especially well realize one that when you're 18, especially if you're a traditional age college student with not a lot of, career experience or life experience or exposure to a wide variety of potential paths, you probably don't know what you want.
And so, especially the liberal arts are really helpful in giving you a wide range of exposure to A number of different disciplines. So like even if it's not about that class, it could be an English class, an early level English class, but in that class you're reading a book that includes a profession that is useful or is solving a problem that you agree needs some more attention to it. That can be useful in helping you define what is the problem that you wanna solve and therefore what majors map well to that sort of experience. There's a great book called Hacking College that reframes the idea of major selection, more about problems and the types of problems that you want to solve.
So that idea of discovery, I think happens in some of those early classes that often get overlooked as the entry level, or general education type classes. If they're used, well, those are slots for you to use that time for discovery and to say like, what is interesting to me? What do I want to maybe spend more time on? What do I wanna learn more about that could help inform what I want to eventually go deeper on and, and focus on in more detail.
How do you spend more time in those early classes using them as discovery moments, and then as you go through your major, really being thoughtful about the experience of academic advising or time with faculty members going to office hours and just learning, from those different professionals to help say this is what I think I might want to do. How can I get some early experience or work on some projects or, get some interaction with professionals that, are alongside the classes that I have to take that maybe have some options that give me some exposure in those areas, but that maybe help me prepare or set myself up to learn about whether or not I'm interested in this path,
Ringae Nuek: I really like that idea of framing everything around, like the problems that you want to solve, and then that reflects back on what are my values and you know, what is my purpose in this world,
rather than this sort of loose collection of shiny objects that can be super interesting, but potentially don't add up to something coherent.
Brian LeDuc: I think there's a framework that really resonates with me. Ikigai is one that gets thrown around a lot. But I think you can simplify this to what are your interests? Like, what are the things that you like to do? What are. Your skills, what are the things that you're especially good at? And then what does the world need or who do you want to serve?
When you give these frameworks interrogating those three questions in that discovery place of what do I care about most? What am I good at and what can I uniquely contribute to the world to focus on this particular, need that I see? You can end up in a lot of very interesting places, and that's probably a more, aligned, motivating, purpose-filled life than saying, what's your major? Which is a very sort of transactional, one dimensional kind of answer to. You know, any of those questions?
Ringae Nuek: I think it helps you shift too, because you're not shifting the thing that's at the core when you move majors, you're shifting The way in which you're doing the thing that's at the core.
Brian LeDuc: Campuses should be set up as a place where they know who they serve. If it's adult learners, if it's commuter students. And this is sometimes hard to take immediately from the marketing materials, but I think it's really important to look at how are they actually set up to support the students that they serve. Working with a lot of first gen college students. For example, this discovery question, this exploration question, of what we're talking about here and what those systems require. It's really important, and if your student's, a first gen college student, they're looking for, what they want to do with their life.
It makes a huge difference for a university who is set up to support that kind of student versus those that, you know, maybe that's less likely to be the case. And so they're in classrooms with students who have a lot more, maybe social capital or experience or networks just built into the way they've grown up in the environments that they've experienced that are gonna be different for them.
What are those key moments across the student journey where those interventions are important? So, you know, we're talking now about, the academic advising experience, you know, picking your classes each semester.
Some campuses are set up with large professional advising centers that are unique to each college, or that offer cross-disciplinary advising or Advising for undeclared students, that can be really helpful in that wayfinding support in advising or in other experiences in the first year.
A signal is maybe if you see some of those similar supports in sophomore year and junior year. So some of these interventions across the student experience alongside things like your course planning for each semester. And how much time advisors spend with students in helping you pick your class or decide your major or find faculty members who are gonna be well aligned to a project or a problem or something that you're interested in.
And then if there are structures internally that are focused on student listening, like going to and understanding what are the challenges that students are focused on or are experiencing on campus? Is there a continuous improvement attitude?
Because higher ed and education in the world are changing so fast and. University is being expected to be adaptable and agile and without a structure for that listening and a way to bring it into their practice, it's really gonna be difficult for them to keep pace.
The last thing I'll say here, is just like, what is the philosophy around the humanity of support on campus?
You see, a lot of big companies as an example, looking at AI as a solution for efficiency and for scale. And, so they're making choices to replace what used to be human jobs with. Computers. And if you've ever, you know, called to, change your cable plan or change your cell phone plan.
You probably are talking to a robot first. Maybe even one that sounds convincingly like a person. But it. As you start to see campuses that are really big and implementing AI, you might start to see that what used to be a human interaction, especially in advising or something that requires a lot of scale, is now, you know, slowly becoming a computer interaction or a chatbot or something like that.
And what's the situation about is on your campus, on their website, it might say the faculty to student ratio is 10, 15, 20 to one. And when it comes to what classes you're taking, what major you're in, what career you're looking at what support you need to decide what your major is gonna be. Or what, you know, what career you wanna focus on. If some of those are being boiled into transactional systems that start with a chatbot before you ever access a human, that may be more frustration in that experience than you really want, to validate.
Ringae Nuek: I can also see that having a good AI to get you through those initial questions where they're very easily answered, could actually be a better experience than trying to schedule an appointment with someone who's hard to come by.
Brian LeDuc: I think, there is a big set of decisions to be made for campuses around how they're using AI, and what role it plays and whether or not it fits with the brand of their institution. And so I say that yeah, if it's helping. To reduce some of the burden administratively for really transactional answers that are just about helping you figure out a really difficult to navigate website and getting to the right page so that you can self-serve yeah, I think. That can be a really wise use of AI.
I think campuses may be getting a bit distracted by what it can do to optimize or create efficiency inside of a system if we look at it and think carefully about what we would want for our student, you really want the human connection and that cultivation of who that person is out of the campus experience.
And that's gonna come with a lot higher touch or a lot more humanity than the interaction with a chatbot. So I think it's just a balance of what job are we expecting it to play, and. What is the right role for a human versus a robot?
Ringae Nuek: I read an interesting post just yesterday, I think about how, um, what is the role of AI, and this was talking about schools, not not colleges, but same idea of. if they lose their center as a place of human gathering and human discussion and human creativity. And then all that's left is this transactional exchange of knowledge and skills. You might come out qualified, but there's something that's been been lost in certain humanity that you haven't had the chance to build up as you go through.
Brian LeDuc: Yeah, I think we've pretty clearly learned in the midst of, COVID that, school is a lot more than content. Connection and belonging and anxiety start to impact students. As technology use goes up, the social connection, the, human relationships are really, I think, an important part of the university experience.
And they've got to be well balanced.
Ringae Nuek: You made a point earlier about working on campus and how, you know that. prepared you well for your job. I'm wondering to jump to that for a second. You see the student as the learner and then you've got the faculty, you've got the administration. But I think that there are ways that students could do more substantial work that could then be tied into launching them out into the world.
Brian LeDuc: I think universities could be great places to work and get great work experience and there are a lot of campus jobs for especially. First gen students or students who are getting, significant financial support. A lot of times, they actually have funding to. Earn, while they work on campus in specific jobs that are set aside for them for work study.
So the system exists? There are a subset of campuses, been connected to through Arizona State University. They have what's called their work plus collective, and they're really looking closely at this idea of work study and creating meaningful campus employment experiences. And I would say for many of them it's about like, what is that first job?
So if you maybe had, a babysitting job in high school or you were, working in, a restaurant as a server and you maybe don't have, more professional office experience, or more traditional type, work environments an on-campus job can be that first tier, first experience.
And in those cases, I would say it really is important to pursue those earlier on in your career on campus and to try to get some of those experiences. Sometimes you maybe even get the benefits of tenure over time and working on more advanced projects as you stay on, or, balancing your schedule a little bit more dynamically as you stay working on campus.
But there are campuses that are focused on the work study experience. And trying to create, meaningful outcomes out of those experiences.
Some questions that a parent might ask are, if you're talking to a student on campus or stop them alongside the tour or ask the tour guide, they might have really good things to say because they're in a high engagement job and they're probably working while they're in front of you, walking them through campus.
If you were to stop a student on campus and ask them if they're working on campus. You might be surprised, at what percentage of students are actually working on campus. It might be a little bit lower than you think, in which case there are some jobs on campus to pursue. And then ask them what the quality is like, what types of things are they doing in their job?
And for some you might hear that they're studying or they're working on homework. But when you start to hear about a student who's got a specific project that they're working on For their on-campus experience, or, That they're doing something interesting as a project.
It gives you good signal that there was some thoughtful design. I would say in many cases it's probably dependent on the supervisor. So you might even ask, are there resources on campus that support supervisors who, are, employing students on campus that help them in their development?
Because it, it's a unique and kind kind of job to employ a student as opposed to, you know, hiring a full-time professional. So, and that in some cases is addition, in addition to the work that that professional is doing on campus. So hopefully you get a good, opt-in choice, you know, but like work at many places.
Your manager makes a lot of your experience.
Ringae Nuek: This kind of ties back to, earlier you're talking about one of the things you want to look for is a university that's taking student feedback into account.
Brian LeDuc: Yeah.
Ringae Nuek: And I wanted to ask how, they do that typically, but this makes me think of going beyond feedback and
building experiences together, especially ones that are less back office and more really things that students interface with every day. They're right there. Why not have them participate in the actual construction of the thing,
Brian LeDuc: Yeah. On many campuses you'll see without being, too hard on university leaders, you might see some superficial signals that there's student listening happening on campus. For instance, you know, you look at, the dean's office or a college. Or even, some leaders on campus, or within student government, and you might see student advisory councils.
And what can happen is you've got Student leaders who are really involved on campus, who are really engaged, who are part of the system of support, who are real big fans of campus, and they, they maybe are not the student.
If we go back to our earlier conversation of who is your campus designed for, they may not be the great example of the student who is the growing population of students on that campus. In other words, they're a full-time traditional. On campus resident college student, when the majority of students who are on that campus are working full-time, or a part-time student or not really representative of the student who is giving that feedback on the advisory council.
So I think one thing to look for is, are there students that really represent the student body who are informing the insights for the campus and directing and giving feedback about what their experience is like? And so sometimes that may not be as obvious to the untrained eye, an advisory council or something like that.
And it may be that there's more of an ongoing way of. Getting student feedback in the form of an innovation lab or some subset of work in a university college or in continuing education that maybe is a little bit closer to the pulse of what students are saying, you know? So it's beyond the organized group.
Of defined set of students who are kind of in a role just to give feedback, but they're done in a more ad hoc way. That there's a consistent engine that, university leaders are looking for students to give feedback on what their experience is like and that there's some kind of organizational structure, a department, a team,
Someone who's in a leadership role that's focused on innovation and strategy, who has a group of people that are working with them who are not only doing that listening, but then are helping to coordinate what actions, what activities come out of it. You can really often hear this from even university leaders.
You'll see strategic plans and if you look across universities, marketing materials looking similar or the same, or having similar messages. You might say the same about strategic plans for many campuses, they have often, overlapping priorities.
But if you start to uncover what are the stories that the university are telling, you know, what are they talking about? What are leaders, Bringing attention to, and what are they reinforcing about the things that the university is doing and what they need to be focused on? The university listens to leadership and takes their strategy and direction.
And so if you're getting signal that feedback is important, the student voice is important, at, you know, a minimum, it's, It's a leveraging point to say, I don't feel like I'm being well heard. But maybe importantly too, it's signal, that says this is an attitude, this is a muscle, this is an area of focus that we have.
At University of South Carolina, vice President for Student Affairs is really focused on curiosity. And I think, it's a really interesting lens to take in because, it starts to orient people around how are we asking more questions?
We have the connect. It's basically saying we have the connection to students. We have these mechanisms to be engaging with them in a regular way, but how do we learn more? How do we ask more questions? How do we get clear about what the needs are so then we can start to improve the way that we approach the work that we do.
Ringae Nuek: Can you give a couple examples that you know of where, due to listening to students, a college has implemented a specific change?
Brian LeDuc: There are a number of small and large ways that you see this happening on campuses. A lot of the work that I'll do is within a design sprint. So this is a couple of days and, I'll work with a team who is learning about design and also using it as a methodology for, building change.
University of South Carolina is a fresh example in our conversation here. Their career center team was really interested in what the experience was in preparation for graduation. So they brought their whole team, We looked at what are the common challenges that students are experiencing and prioritized some of what those are. Oftentimes it was about not being aware of what services were, being offered by the office or how to get connected to them. In learning about this idea of curiosity and listening, they went out into campus and they stopped students as they were walking throughout the campus to ask them what holds you back?
What are the challenges? What friction exists? Do you know that the career center exists? And they were surprised to find that your average student walking across campus was not thinking about the career center.
Or maybe if they did, there was some barrier to whether or not they felt like they were ready to go pursue, Starting a conversation with someone. And so, it's helped, their team to understand better who they're designing for, where it's not just about getting the communication out, it's about more proactively inviting students in, and, being more visible.
To build more awareness so that they can then get them funneled into more specific programs. And so, that's an ongoing challenge for them. It's not like it's a one size fits all, you know, immediate flip the light on kind of solution. But I think the two things that are really standing out in the work that they're doing is they've developed this culture of listening.
And they're realizing that, To be effective. They've gotta find their way into awareness out on campus in new and different ways. And so they're running a bunch of experiments to try to build that awareness and, monitoring and seeing how that's going. So they're in the midst of the design process now.
Ringae Nuek: I was a little surprised how there don't really seem to be design teams at universities at all. The chief Experience Officer seems to be this pretty new concept that exists at, a handful of universities, but it seems to be the marketing people who are more leading with voice of the user and just having that point of view on things.
Brian LeDuc: Yeah, I think that's a good observation. A lot of times when I've seen. Experience surface. It probably is in some overlapping place around enrollment, marketing, student success, which are, much closer to revenue. They're closer to the tuition, functions, and revenue.
And I would say the places that are. Student focused, are in student affairs but they're often functioning in some ways in silos, so they're not well aligned or connected to what other initiatives are doing. So when you find a campus that is really thoughtfully connected, the journey of the student across those different touch points, campuses are really big. They're really complex. They've got a lot of different departments, and, every department is doing something different for the students.
So the places that are thinking about the technology, the touch points, the cohesion across what a student journey looks like, The other area that I think, has emerged, and it was probably even true before COVID is in online experiences where it's a little bit clearer to kind of map out what the student experience looks like and what those touch points are. Design, Tends to have a, stronger foothold in those areas as well.
But, if I have anything to do about it, we'll see more, campuses, across, academic affairs, that is the teaching structures and student affairs, the co-curricular structures on campus being more connected and more, coherent across what the experience design looks like.
Because of the silos, as a visitor you might go into a mall, and see like one heading and thinking that you're going into this unified place. But the university, fits this parallel because, if you go into one store and then go into another. The awareness that that first store has about your, entering the second is pretty low. It's very rarely that you see anyone looking at, who's going to multiple of these things and aware of the conversations that are happening across all of them.
Their silos exist in such a way that you could go, you know, to. Meet with a faculty member, and talk to them about something, go talk to an academic advisor and talk to them about something, and those two would not have an awareness of the conversation.
But then if you went and talked to someone in residence life or in housing. And then, you know, interacted with someone about your student involvement on campus or a club that you're part of. Very little likelihood to see any awareness of the conversations that have happened with those different people.
In a way, you know, you're in the mall and you're like, I'm in one place. But the stores, they're not aware of your presence in the other places.
Ringae Nuek: Do you think that. Colleges or universities that have much more rigid, direct to major type, applications and switching out of the college is very hard. Do you think that those places tend to be more siloed?
Brian LeDuc: I think the structures that, that create the, the silos sometimes can be part of the academic experience. But you know, in many cases, if you look at the way that budgets work on campus, it's about like. What program you're in, what college you're in, and where your headcount is. And then within student that is campus life or, on campus housing or the union.
It might be more about. Utilization of those spaces. And then some small part of the fee that students pay in their tuition that gets distributed across these different student services on campus. And so, where budgets are, you know, often show some of what the values are and that translates into how well resourced those places are, and then how connected they can be
Ringae Nuek: Okay,
I want to switch gears. There's a real tension that parents and students sit with where they don't just want college to be vocational training, they also want their kid to graduate as someone compelling for whatever is coming next. So how are you thinking about that, especially with how much work is changing now?
Brian LeDuc: There's a dimension in here about, the role that AI is playing, both in work and in. and in universities, when you look at way that AI is starting to impact the workforce, AI is taking over a lot of different aspects of work and, we're starting to see some of the initial impacts of that. But all of these impacts are design choices from leaders in those companies, right? It's what they're optimizing for. Are they looking for efficiency or scale or profit margins?
And I wonder a little bit if we might see a push to reconsider like. we know that humans may not be the most efficient, but we also have a system that is based around work in one way or another. And so one of the predictions that I see consistently and I think I mostly adhere to is that what's gonna be left, in work are the skills that uniquely humans can do, you know, and some of those, we're even seeing this happen in the immediate term in computer science, right? Like, you can immediately code many things. And obviously it's not perfect and it's coming along and it's having some impact on, what work will look like and what entry level job looks like.
But there are, human skills, like making meaning of a circumstance or, what your moral imagination looks like, these are skills that uniquely humans can do and they're more qualitative, evaluative judgments that take in more than just the data that sits immediately in front of them.
So I think those human skills are gonna become increasingly important. And so skills are a component of that. But I don't think they're gonna be the technical skills. I think they're gonna be the creativity, communication, problem solving, like they're gonna be human-driven, relational skills of how we make meaning of our world and how we interact with both the machines and the people that are the part of the future.
And you know, this is almost a tale of two stories in some way because, the big companies, are likely to be moving faster and moving at scale. And they already have large teams with big AI models That's gonna leave some opportunity for maybe non-AI enabled professionals or businesses in small and medium sized spaces, to start using and integrating those tools. And I think that it creates. An interesting set of circumstances. One, students who are prepared with AI fluency could go into small businesses and have a big impact in a very short period of time because they can help bring in process and tools and, some, some thinking around how AI can help a small or medium-sized business in a much more outsized impact way than if they were to go join a big company.
And I also think your local, small or medium sized business is gonna be more likely to be looking for entry level talent, you know, that are coming directly out of school because they just need, they need hands on deck, to help them in growing their business. So if they have some of those skills, there's an interesting opportunity.
And so it means, I think for a college student, where you go to college. Is often a regional decision, you're making a decision within a couple hours of your house. I wanna say like 80%. It's within a few hours of your house. And then, it also has an impact on likely where you're gonna work after. So the career centers at most universities think in a regional way.
In fact, recruiters of even big companies think about their recruiting pipeline by building relationships to regional outposts, universities that are near the offices that they're responsible for recruiting for. So if you're a Midwest recruiter, you're in Minneapolis and you're looking at the schools that are in that area and looking at how many graduates you're gonna hire from this school versus this school versus this school. And so that regional talent pipeline becomes really important for you to think about, yes, your school choice upfront, but also kind of where you wanna launch your career from. And if you're a small, medium sized business, you're also probably working in a regional way, at least for finding talent.
You know, it's funny, the skills conversation that starts in a very, unassuming way, becomes quickly about like what are the skills of the future and also where are you gonna be more likely to get the experiences that help you prepare for early career jobs? And I think more than skills, employers generally are looking for students that are prepared with projects and relationships and experience that are gonna, help them be successful. So, I try not to get too caught up in the skills conversation 'cause I think it's a packaging. It really is about how the academics and content are being packaged and framed.
And I think it's important for students to be aware. Of how what they're learning in the classroom has relevance outside. When human skills are becoming the most important things, students being able to get those experiences and describe how they've built them, To me, are maybe even more important than saying, we focused on, critical thinking and you have this critical thinking badge
Ringae Nuek: Yeah. I think there's this missing storytelling piece that I think young people often have picked up all these things in college, but they don't. At some level, they don't necessarily realize it. And then if they have, they don't know how to tell that story in those first interviews. It's the sort of thing that an executive coach type person helps people who are already out in the workforce
Brian LeDuc: Yeah. It's a balance, I think because, we touched on briefly the role that advising plays in classes and picking majors. I think the other piece that now is sort of merging in, in part with advising is often like career preparation and how that conversation starts to fill in.
It's interesting because the campuses that are most Proactive about this are realizing that, when I said there's a freshman experience and then you maybe have career and the senior experience, As those conversations about advising and career are starting to merge, they realize that they actually are like starting in the freshman, sophomore year, and they're about discovering your career and they're about discovering your purpose and what is the life that you're trying to create and what problems are you going to be be solving. And then how does that reflect into the types of classes that you're pursuing or the major that you're interested in, or the projects that you're getting involved with, or the research that you're doing with a faculty member? And then how are you collecting those experiences over the course of your time at a university?
And then how are you packaging them, and then how are you translating them into the interviews and conversations there? So, It's easy, I think, and it goes back to the story of, University of South Carolina. It's easy to think that, a senior can show up to the career center and say, okay, I am ready to find a job. And really the work of, starting to navigate and position yourself and tell your story and build intentional experience starts a lot earlier.
Uh, And you can really create a powerful. story and narrative and portfolio around your college experience. If you can learn those things through discovery, by finding out interesting things to do and trying stuff throughout your college experience, and then the packaging of it with the career center in a resume or in interview prep becomes so much simpler because you've already. gained those experiences.
What I think is the challenge for campuses that are maybe less student-centered is that they're leaving those things to chance, or they're letting students way-find them on their own instead of embedding them directly in the academic experience, which would naturally pull them a lot earlier so that students can be thoughtful and proactive as opposed to showing up in senior year and saying, I'm ready to go to the career fair. Do I need a resume?
Ringae Nuek: Yeah. Absolutely. Alright, so to wrap up, what questions should parents be asking and students when they show up on campus as juniors or seniors thinking about whether or not this is the one to apply to.
Brian LeDuc: Yeah, there are a couple things that really jump out to me. To prepare to get a good snapshot of what the campus experience is like. When you are going to a campus, you're probably signed up for a pre-scheduled campus tour, and that's gonna be a great place to get a very particular experience that is curated with a, you know, the, it's got a script, it's got very specific stops on the tour, to show you snapshots of what that experience is like.
And that is all valuable. I would say, If I were sending my nephew and my sister on a college campus to start deciding what they wanted to, pursue, spend some time walking around campus without your tour guide walk off the tour route, go to a different pocket of campus, go in through a different entrance, find a different guest lot somewhere else. Get lost and ask for directions. And just see, how people respond, how people react. Go to the student union, go to the library, go to coffee shops on campus and just see. what the environment feels like, on a random day midweek, or a Friday, middle of the day, alongside a Saturday scheduled campus visit, that sort of thing.
And then stop students on campus. I know that your student's probably gonna be embarrassed about you doing this. So you could even have them lead it with, we're lost and we're looking for X building. But, asking those students around campus things like, uh, What's one word you'd use to describe this university? And why? And just get their unfiltered reaction about what you know, how they experience the campus. And ask that question of 5-10 students as you walk across campus. Maybe ask them, what's something you wish you knew about this university before you got here? A combination of that, snapshot of the word cloud of words that stand out to you. And what's something that they wished they knew before, that they've now since learned, I think are really interesting. Kind of status of the campus culture.
And then when you're on your campus tour, ask the guide, who are the two people on campus who have helped you be successful and how, one is kind of a slam dunk question because they're gonna say something about how they got their campus job. But the second one I think will be really informative to you about what the campus culture for support looks like and where the sources of it come from. Is it from professionals on campus? Is it from faculty members? Is it from faculty members that are their advisors or faculty members whose classes they're in?
Who stood out to that campus? Because when you. are on a campus where you feel, supported and like you belong, you're much more likely to graduate, and have the network to help you succeed.
Ringae Nuek: Okay. Well that was awesome.
Brian LeDuc: Thanks for the opportunity. And, you know, excited to hear the ways that, parents are gonna be newly prepared to, interrogate what the student experience looks like, and make good decisions to find their students' best fit.
Ringae Nuek: And if people want to find you, where can they do that?
Brian LeDuc: Find me on LinkedIn, Brian F. LeDuc on LinkedIn or on Substack. I write about my work in progress and share updates about the work that I'm doing with campuses. Those are probably the two best places. You can find an email for me, reach out anytime.
