New Summer Skills Accelerator Launches

Each year the Center for Career and Professional Advising (CCPA) helps hundreds of Fords find and apply for summer jobs and internships. But with the COVID-19 pandemic making travel difficult and in-person work experience unpredictable, the Center leaped into action to create new programming to support students and broaden their skills.

The result is the CCPA’s new Summer Skills Accelerator (SSA), a curated collection of free, non-credit seminars, workshops, and self-guided learning opportunities designed and led by Haverford alumni, staff, and friends of the College and aimed at current and graduating students. So far, SSA’s summer-long schedule, includes more than 30 seminars led by alumni, staff members, and friends of the College.

Panos Panidis ’09, the founder of Aesop Academy, led a workshop on data analysis on campus in January that he is reprising for the Summer Skills Accelerator.

“As soon as classes went to virtual learning and our work went remote, we realized some of our students’ internships and jobs were going to be canceled, postponed, or deferred,” said Amy Feifer, dean of career and professional advising.“We couldn’t control that, but what we could control was coming up with ways to provide a forum for students to develop and enhance professional skills or gain industry knowledge that they would have gotten from a summer experience.”

Feifer notes that the almost 2,000 spots available for the live workshops filled up quickly, and some popular courses, such as one on data analytics presented by Aesop Academy, a group founded by Panos Panidis ’09, have wait lists.

Other summer offerings include “‘Persuasive Legal Writing,” taught by commercial litigator Helen Chae MacLeod ’90, a workshop on GIS mapping basics with Haverford Instructional Technology and Training Specialist Sharon Strauss, and one on fundraising for start-ups and nonprofits with Oscar Wang ’14, founder of College Together. Haverford College Libraries staff will present a series of workshops on working with primary sources, project management, and more.

In addition, the Summer Skills Accelerator will offer students the opportunity to learn basic video production and communications strategies, and find out about careers in consulting, science, and language instruction. Keith Weissglass ’05, director of marketing for Give2Asia, will present a workshop titled “Capitalism Survival Guide: Money, Housing, Jobs, and Other Real World Skills,” and software engineer Brian Guggenheimer ’16 is leading a seminar on “Coding for Non-Coding Majors” that proved so popular two additional sections had to be created.

“While employers recognize the unique circumstances of these times, they will also be interested to know how students spent their summers,” said CCPA Fellowship and Career Advisor Jason Chan. “Any of these workshops would be great to include on a resume.”

—R. R.