Nearly every member of the Class of 2025 for whom Dartmouth has tracking data launched a career, enrolled in further education, or began a fellowship or military service within six months of graduation.
The 96.1% success rate, based on information from 86% of the class, is one sign that the Center for Career Design’s expanded approach is working—at a time when college graduates across the country are facing a tough job market.
As Dartmouth charts a new course under Executive Director Joe Catrino, the center has doubled its staff over the past year from 11 to 22, including seven full-time coaches. It has launched six Career Communities open to all undergraduates regardless of major or class year.
And in January, Dartmouth announced that it had raised $30 million in endowed funds to support internship opportunities, allowing students, regardless of means, to gain invaluable professional experience in sectors from global health and public service to the arts, media, and conservation.
Through expanded programming, the center is emphasizing close coaching, AI technology, and hands-on experiences such as internships for undergraduates throughout all four years of their college experience.
“Dartmouth has a responsibility to help students graduate with the knowledge, critical thinking skills, and experience to build a life of meaning and purpose that reflects the great investment they and their families have made in their educations,” says Nina Pavcnik, interim dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. “The Center for Career Design is where students can go to discover how they can carry the lessons they’ve learned in the classroom and tight-knit campus community into the world.”
Students feel that way, too.
“You can come in with a blank résumé and a dream, and the center will meet you there,” says Grace Caldwell ’26, who works as the program and lab engagement lead at the center, where she says she tries to help fellow students think about their careers in a broader way.
Caldwell herself has completed internships in visual storytelling and in educational advocacy for incarcerated youth—“jobs that I would not necessarily be able to be exposed to” without funding from the center, she says.
“The center is not only thinking about postgrad outcomes. It is also invested in your overall experience at Dartmouth, whether that is taking an off-term, gaining exposure to different industries, or applying for internships, funding, and mini-grants that allow you to explore,” Caldwell says.
Building partnerships on campus and beyond
Key to the center’s vision are partnerships that connect the classroom to the professional world.
“Partnerships with employers, alumni, and other interested parties are central to our vision because career education is learned through experience and relationships,” says Joe Hayes, director of external partnerships and special projects. “When you have such an invested Dartmouth community filled with incredible experiences and knowledge, it’s a no-brainer to get as many partners involved to help students.”
On campus, the center is providing workshops and engagement with campus partners, from Pathfinders—a Tuck School of Business-based career exploration program for first-year undergraduates—to the Academic Skills Center, the Writing Center, academic departments and centers throughout the university, and all of Dartmouth’s graduate and professional schools.
Beyond campus, the center is cultivating the Community Impact Leadership Program, a first-of-its-kind co-curricular collaboration between Dartmouth and Teach for America that prepares students for careers in policy, nonprofit leadership, and public service. It launched its first cohort of 10 sophomores and juniors in January, combining coursework in the social sciences with career development and experiential learning in the community. “We’re always open to creative ways to engage with industry partners, alumni, and parents,” Hayes says. “If you have an idea, we’re eager to explore it together.”
One idea gaining traction: short-term project-based internships built around tangible assignments.
“Experience does not have to come only in the form of a 10-week structured time period,” Hayes says. “It could be just one project that they need help with for two or three weeks. Students can get meaningful experience they can then leverage to their next opportunity.”
Career Communities create connection
Coaching and connection are also central to the approach. The six Career Communities unveiled this fall are designed to be “hubs of knowledge and connection” open to all undergraduates regardless of major or class year.
Broadly organized around professional sectors—Arts & Creative, Business, Good & Green, Government, Law & Policy, STEM+, and Exploratory—each community has a dedicated career coach as well as a staff member devoted to cultivating internal and external partnerships.
The communities grew out of “a shared commitment across our team to reimagine how we support students,” says Leyou Belayneh, associate director of career and life design coaching. “At the core of this work is our belief that students deserve a personalized, customized coaching experience that reflects their individual interests, goals, and career needs. We wanted to clearly communicate that we are invested in supporting all career pathways.”
Within the career communities, students can meet like-minded peers, network with employers and alumni through virtual chats and campus visits, and find internship opportunities and immersive events.
Examples include last month’s Business of Fashion Career Trek in Manhattan during New York Fashion Week and the Boston Exploratory Career Trek, which highlighted Boston-area employers across a range of industries, earlier this month.
“The idea is to create an ecosystem around those industries and the trends that are happening in them, and pull in partners,” says Catrino. “I think of these communities as ultimately doing what a professional school does, without the classes—giving skills in different ways, through internships, student organizations, and so on.”
Within a month of launching the Career Communities, the program had about 1,500 total signups from approximately 700 individual students.
“That tells me that, in true liberal arts fashion, students are exploring multiple communities, and that’s what we want, because there’s tons of overlap,” Catrino says of the signups. “We want to give the students as many resources and as much access to information as possible.”
Focus on the future—from day one
“What’s magical about our center is that our coaches want long-term engagement with students” across all four years and beyond, says Janice Williams ’92, who joined the Center for Career Design last year as director of career and life design coaching after three years in the First-Generation Office.
The center’s engagement with undergraduates begins in first-year orientation programs, including during the First-Year Summer Enrichment Program for first-generation, low-income students, who may not have the same job-search skills and experience as their peers.
The center has also piloted a Sophomore Summer program, combining classroom sessions with hands-on, project-based experiences with nonprofit organizations.
Beginning this spring, the center will offer the Career and Life Design Immersion Program. Led by Chris Jordan, associate director and career coach, the eight-week, experiential program combines in-person sessions with independent work on employer-based projects.
“We have a curriculum for designing your life. Each student has a unique position and wants to blend interest, skills, desires with curiosity,” Williams says. “Each coach gets to work with students to craft an understanding of what they want to learn and how to proceed, beginning as early as their first moment on campus.”
And while a major focus is on serving undergraduates throughout their time at Dartmouth, Catrino says the center is not just for students.
“We’re offering alumni career development for any and all undergraduate alums to come back and get career coaching,” Catrino says. “A lot of schools are cutting back on that type of resource. We’ve expanded it. We’re saying, ‘You’re Dartmouth—for life.’ ”
