[00:00:00] Announcer: Welcome to the Student Loan Podcast. Here, you'll find practical advice on tackling student loan debt, paying down your higher education expenses, and inspiring stories about paying off student loans. We're your hosts, Daphne Vanessa...

[00:00:13] Shamil Rodriguez: And Shamil Rodriguez.

[00:00:15] Announcer: Please rate, review, and subscribe to the Student Loan Podcast by visiting the Student Loan Podcast on Apple Podcast or wherever you find your podcasts. This is not professional advice, and we speak from our own personal views and opinions. The Student Loan Podcast is brought to you by Start New, where you can serve your community and get rewarded with tuition and student loan payments. To check out if Start New is on your campus, visit startnew.com.

[00:00:41] Shamil Rodriguez: Welcome to another episode of the Student Loan Podcast. Today, we're going to have an episode that goes into the five ways that you can improve your experiential learning program at your school. Whether you're a professor or in charge of student success, this is the episode for you. So, let's begin with the first way to improve your experiential learning program.

[00:01:05] Daphne Vanessa: Well, the first way that you can do that is by connecting with nonprofits in the area that need help in your area of academic expertise. Now, what would that look like? It would probably look like going to a nonprofit's open volunteer opportunities to see what is related to your area of academic expertise. If you're a professor that focuses on writing, perhaps there is a grant writing opportunity that where they're looking for help, or maybe they're looking to lay out their nonprofit mission statement. Any sort of activity that improves on the core skill set that you're teaching academically can teach students different ways of writing in a practical sense for how it applies in the real world.

[00:01:52] Shamil Rodriguez: A great example, and another one might be let's say you were a graphic arts professor and you wanted to communicate with the leadership of these nonprofits and help them with a brand guide or a website update or marketing materials would be a great opportunity for your students to gain real-world experience that they can add to their portfolios so that when they are looking for other opportunities post-graduation or during their summer internships they have actual experience and not just classroom projects that they've worked on for their portfolio.

[00:02:30] Daphne Vanessa: Exactly. And if you can't find nonprofits in the area that have your area of expertise, don't worry, there are also nonprofits that need help virtually. So today, in this age, there are so many ways that you can connect virtually and nonprofits can still benefit from that help. So, if you look through volunteer listings and you find something that says virtual and it's not near your school, that might be an opportunity for you as well.

[00:02:59] Shamil Rodriguez: Very good, I agree. All right, so number two is read job descriptions to understand which skill sets employers are currently looking for.

[00:03:09] Daphne Vanessa: And this one may take a little bit more work, but the outcome is so maximum. So, the outcome that you're looking for is having your students that are graduating career-ready. We know that historically employers have stated that students may not be graduating ready to work. But you have the opportunity through experiential learning to make sure that's the case. How can you do that? Scanning job descriptions for actual skill sets that are going to be needed in in the real world. And there's no better way to do that than looking through job descriptions. Job descriptions are indicators of so many things. It's indicators of what the next boom is of of talent that's being looked for like that. You know, which areas of study are I don't want to say most important, but they're being prioritized maybe in in the corporate world. So, those are all great ways to find out what areas your students need to work on. And then, more specifically, which skills your students need to be excellent at to land the job.

[00:04:23] Shamil Rodriguez: Often times, a lot of schools will rely on surveys that they have with employers after the fact, whether it's internships or pipeline programs that they have, but this really gives you an opportunity to be proactive in allowing for your students to work on those skill sets while they're in the classroom, which is really a big benefit of experiential learning in the first place. So, reading those job descriptions is really a great way to have a sneak peek into the vision of the future as Daphne had mentioned of that that company that you are reading a job description for so that your students are ready for the workforce.

[00:05:03] Daphne Vanessa: Awesome. Let's go into the next one.

[00:05:05] Shamil Rodriguez: All right, the next one is ask students what relevant experience they are looking for.

[00:05:11] Daphne Vanessa: This one, hopefully, will be easier. In this instance, you're asking your students what do they want to be good at? If they're taking your class, odds are that they're hopefully interested in an area that's related to your academic area. Maybe they know, since they are the students, they're in the market that are looking for jobs after graduation, what they'd like to be good at, what areas they see themselves working in. And by leveraging that information from students maybe via a survey or direct student-to-student interaction if the pool is small enough, you have the opportunity to really please your students as well, right? And that that can never be a bad thing.

[00:05:54] Shamil Rodriguez: Yeah, I agree 1000% and you want to make sure that those students are feeling motivated and gain that experience so they can take it on to the next opportunity that that they're presented with. And when these students end up traveling for break or whatever the case may be, often times you end up updating those that are keeping up with you and your progress in school about what you've been up to, and now that you can actually speak about real-world experience, you might open up another opportunity or door that you never knew existed because you shared it with a family member during a dinner or, you know, shared it with a mentor during a conversation or a call, and they say, "Hey, you know what? I didn't know you had gained that skill or you worked at this company for a little bit or helped this nonprofit. How about you help me with this or help this other person who's looking for someone to fill in that slot while you're in school?" So, really just a great way for your students to either stay motivated like Daphne had mentioned and gain that that experience, but also I see it as a second, third network effect that may occur once you start sharing your real-world experience with other people around you.

[00:07:05] Daphne Vanessa: Could not agree more.

[00:07:07] Shamil Rodriguez: All right, so let's go with number four.

[00:07:10] Daphne Vanessa: Leveraging your existing philanthropic relationships to see what opportunities are out there. This one is especially interesting because it leverages your existing relationships to go deeper. And the reason why we say this is sometimes universities are siloed where the office of donor relations is doing something or advancement, then professors are doing something else. Your academic affairs career services people are doing something else, and you can really benefit from working together. So, walking over to the office of advancement and saying, "Hey, I teach this. What are some of the career areas that our major donors are involved in?" They can maybe give you a list of who those people are, and combined with career services, you have the opportunity to see what job opportunities they have that are upcoming, and relatedly maybe even connecting you with somebody at this this donor's philanthropic arm to see if they have maybe volunteer opportunities where they would welcome students to participate with them. You have a double benefit here of really providing that experiential learning opportunity directly with somebody who already has a good warm fuzzy feeling about your university and also giving students a networking opportunity to who knows, get a job in the future.

[00:08:35] Shamil Rodriguez: Absolutely, and I really like this idea of connecting with this, the philanthropic arm, because you end up like you had mentioned there Daphne, having already a warm and fuzzy feeling, one of my favorite catchphrases there, but you end up tightening up the pipeline and improving communication between those different siloed portions if your school is set up that way. And it may not be set up that way on paper, but you can look at the reality of what's happening at your campus to determine whether or not, hey, is there good communication occurring between these different arms that have an impact on experiential learning for our students, which ultimately leads to their success after they graduate and while they're in school. So, absolutely a great idea on that one Daphne for sure. All right, so let's go with number five. Incorporating student outcomes in your grading by leveraging the data.

[00:09:31] Daphne Vanessa: This one is the one that I'm most excited about because it deals with math. So, there's no better way to assess students than with real-world practical advice. But how are you going to do that through experiential learning? You're going to need data points. You're going to need what were some of the key performance indicators during these service opportunity or during the experience with the donor arm to meet the success of whatever your area of academic expertise is. So, I think I'll go with an off-the-cuff example. Let's say this is the same writing example for the grant. So, maybe one key performance indicator would be successfully meeting the technical requirements of the grant, right? Because grants have instructions where they say title must be this long, they want it to be this many pages, each section must be that many pages. So, did the student follow instructions? Maybe one KPI. Another KPI may be, did the student write the paper with no grammatical mistakes? You know, another one may be... and you'll want to leverage these with what's related to the level of of skill set that you're teaching in your class. Then another one may be, did the student write in the proper tone? Were they writing to a business audience, a government audience, or were they writing creatively, and maybe that's not the appropriate audience for that that writing opportunity. So, there are different ways that you can break that out into metrics and then combine those metrics to give a score to the student on their opportunity. It does seem very involved. There are tons of technological solutions that can help you with that. But, the most important thing is that you accurately measure the success of the student. And that, to me, is the greatest area of opportunity because now we're measuring people based on what they've done, as a true meritocracy.

[00:11:38] Shamil Rodriguez: And I also think that some... this allows for you, especially if you leverage some of the online technology that's out there, to also gather more data if you're a professor that's leading the class in experiential learning, to also get feedback from the students as they're going through the experience and actually gain feedback from their supervisors as they're out there, so that you're not only improving their technical proficiency, but their ability to interact in a job setting, right? So, this is also a part of the real world of dealing with not just the technical aspect, but what it's like to report to your higher, how you interact with your teammates, and I think having let's say a journal opportunity for students can at least give you some of that insight to improve the program as you move forward for that class and the next class. So, you can definitely leverage some online opportunities to capture the on-the-ground perspective from the students, and then you can also grab some details from the supervisors while they are happening because often times if you see people will wait until the end of the semester when grades are due or deadlines are coming, and then they'll ask for these summaries or, you know, evaluations from their supervisors, and then at that point you're really setting up the student for success or failure, but based on a bias, right? Recency bias may come into play versus giving you an accurate data point as that student is progressing through the experiential learning program.

[00:13:14] Daphne Vanessa: That's right. And we have a bonus one for you guys that you're probably already doing. Externships. Externships are one of the best ways to have real-world experience. And without real-world experience, our students are not graduating career-ready. That's the bonus one. I know you're already doing externships, guys. If you're not, definitely reach out to us, but I'm sure you're already doing externships at your school.

[00:13:46] Shamil Rodriguez: No, absolutely. So, with that being said, for more information, visit thestudentloanpodcast.com/episode83. That's thestudentloanpodcast.com/episode83.