Good evening. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us tonight for our second webinar of the spring semester. My name is Jason Meier. I use the he/him/his pronouns, and I serve as the Associate Dean of Student Engagement at Harvard College. It is my distinct pleasure to be one of your moderators for this evening, right along with my good colleague, Katie Patrick, who I will let introduce herself right now. 

Awesome, thanks, Jason. Hi, everyone. My name is Katie Patrick. I use she/her pronouns, and I serve as the Coordinator for Orientation and Family Engagement. I work alongside Jason and Lily Castro to coordinate our orientation programs and family engagement events such as these. As Jason mentioned, this is our second webinar of the spring semester. 

We are hosting four webinars throughout the semester. In the first one, we discussed house, life, and housing day. Today, we'll be discussing career services. Next, we have commencement and the Harvard Alumni Association. And finally, we will have a 2023-2024 academic year wrap-up conversation with some of the leaders from around the college. 

This webinar series was designed to allow us to share information with families all at one time, instead of just during our family weekends when these conversations were traditionally happening. We also started a series like this during the summer for our incoming first-year families, and we had a really great turnout. And we had a lot of fun, and so we wanted to extend that experience with all of our families. 

Tonight, we have some amazing folks that are going to be joining us to discuss career services and what opportunities and resources are available for our students. Before we move into our discussion, we have some quick tips and tricks for tonight. First, the session is being recorded, and it will be posted to our parent and family engagement website, and that link will also be shared in our next family newsletter. 

Following this session, you will also receive a quick survey. Please take a few moments to complete that. Your feedback really matters, and it really helps us be able to provide the best experience that we can for you all and make sure that we're hitting all the different topics that you are interested in. 

Thank you for those that joined our last webinar and provided that feedback. It was all incredibly helpful, and I really, really appreciate it. During this webinar, we will also have the Q&A feature open and active. So as soon as your questions pop up, please ask them. We'll do our best to grab as many as we can and answer them in real time, but we may not be able to get to all of them, but we will do our best. 

Also our panelists are really excited to share all their deep knowledge about career services. But if you have any questions that live outside of this topic, please know that we have a few more upcoming webinars that your questions may be more relevant to. And if you have anything that lives outside of the realm of the topics that we are discussing, I'll have our information on a slide at the end. So you can send us any questions that you do have that live outside of those topics. 

That's right, Katie, and the last piece of information that we want to share with you is regarding a law that parents and family members of all college students should be aware of. And this law is known as FERPA, which is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. In short, this is a law that states that students records belong to them and them alone. As college students, they are now in charge of their own records and information. 

And we as faculty and staff cannot share that information with anyone but the student. So if you have questions regarding your student's records, their address, their grades, the courses they're in, be sure to talk to them. Ask them really good naive questions about what's happening with their experiences on campus and be sure to have those conversations. And as Katie just shared in the chat, there's a whole lot that you can learn about FERPA in the link that was just shared. 

Awesome thanks, Jason. So now I'm going to bring all of our panelists forward, and each one is going to spend a couple of minutes telling you about themselves, their offices, all the different resources and things that they provide, and how they work with your students. So first I'm going to have Tom join us. 

Hello, Katie, and hello, everyone in the audience. Thank you so much once again for making the time to be here with us this evening. My name is Tom Hamel. I take the he series, and I'm the associate director of undergraduate research and fellowships here at Harvard. And again, I just want to reiterate my gratitude to you all for not only making the time to be here with us tonight but also for sharing your student with us. 

We hope that they're having a wonderful experience here at Harvard thus far. I was a student here myself many moons ago, as you can probably tell by my hairline. And I had a fabulous experience, and it is the primary reason why I've stuck around here is the opportunity to work with students like y'all's. So just thank you again. 

I'm going to take a quick moment to share two slides total. I promise this will not take very long, but I just want to give you all a very brief sense of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. It's a mouthful, and we want to just give you a very, very brief synopsis of what it is that we do. 

So I will go ahead and see if I can figure out how to get things into presenter view here while I'm on the spot and being recorded. And just to give you some sense, so our office works very closely with the other ones that are here represented with us today. Part of why we present together is because we hope your students will work with one or all of us at some point during their undergrad careers here. 

So we break down what we do at URAF into roughly four separate but overlapping categories as the name implies. The first thing that we do is support undergraduate research here. Our goal is that if an undergraduate at Harvard wishes to have a substantive research experience at Harvard, then at some point during their four years here that they will have the opportunity to do so and ideally to help get some funding to support that. 

So our goal is to help connect students with programs, with funding, both primarily at Harvard, but then also in some cases beyond the Harvard community as well as much as possible. So again, the goal of that is because we think that having a substantive research experience at Harvard does a couple of things. The first is that we hope it deepens a student's engagement, not only with their academics, but with their education writ large. 

They might come to research having never been inside of a lab or a historical archive before. Maybe they do come into Harvard and have had some prior research experience. Whatever a student's prior background is, we hope they will feel comfortable coming to us because our goal is to be the first stop for students as they're starting to navigate their careers in research to and through Harvard. 

So we also support students who are interested in postgraduate opportunities. This is a little bit more of where the postgraduate item comes into play here. And that's, again, where the fellowship aspect of things really takes over for us. There are a few fellowships available for undergraduates and returning undergrads, but most of the ones that we support are for students who are outgoing undergraduates. 

So some of those are ones that maybe you have heard of. We support students aspiring for Fulbright grants, Rhodes scholarships, Marshall scholarships, and many, many more. And then also some other ones that maybe you nor they have ever heard of. And so our goal, again, is to help avail them of those different kinds of opportunities both to and through their time here. 

So some of the ways we do that are through workshops and information sessions throughout the year. We also have both in-person and virtual advising available throughout the academic and during summer both in person and virtual on a drop in and a scheduled basis. So again, we try to be as approachable as we can be, and we hope that your students will feel comfortable coming to us with questions that they may have about different kinds of opportunities. 

And just to give you a very quick sense of those different kinds of opportunities that we support, that we fund, these are a few of the different categories here. Many students will be interested in service of some kind, public service, civil service, those different kinds of categories and more. And Harvard's very lucky to be able to have funding available not only through our office but through some of the other offices that you'll hear from here tonight to support students who are interested in service in some capacity, either while they're currently here at Harvard or beyond their time at Harvard. 

They may also look at academic opportunities. Again, that's where a lot of that overlap between research and fellowships often comes. Students may want to do research towards a senior thesis as part of their undergraduate work here. They may want to do research that's completely separate from their academic curriculum here, and that's OK too. We want students to feel like they can be supported with those academic goals and interests, both while they're here at Harvard and for potential graduate degrees. 

Again, some of the fellowships I mentioned before support graduate degrees at institutions across the world. So that's category two. Category three is teaching. We're really lucky. Again, lots of overlap with service there but to be able to have some teaching fellowships and other kinds of partnerships, both here at Harvard and beyond the Harvard campus, that support students aspiring to professions, careers in teaching, or maybe just a shorter term teaching fellowship if that's something that they're interested in. 

And then the last thing is purposeful travel. This is one that I think a fair amount of students maybe don't think about as much or haven't considered quite as much before or even sometimes during their time at Harvard. But there is some overlap in terms of study abroad here, although the purposeful travel is typically in a slightly different sense because those fellowships that we support are typically less focused on a classroom experience or what's thought of as a traditional study abroad experience. 

There may be some meaningful aspect to a person spending time either within the US or abroad, volunteering with the community, engaging with a particular activity or project. And we're very lucky to have funding to support those kinds of aspirations that your students may have as well. So those are just a few of the different kinds of opportunities that we have available. 

We hope that you will not hesitate to be in touch with us. We hope your students, first and foremost, won't hesitate to be in touch with us. And I know that Katie and Jason will share out our contact at the end of this presentation. So I'm going to go ahead and stop talking now and say thanks to you all for having me here. 

Thanks so much, Tom. 

And as a friendly reminder to all of the people who are watching, please be sure to use the Q&A feature for any questions that you might have of our panelists. We would love to bring them all back to chat a little bit more so make sure we are putting our questions in there. 

Definitely, and thank you so much again, Tom, for that overview. Next, we're going to have Anthony join us. 

Thank you so much, Katie, really glad to be here. Welcome to all of the families that are here with us this evening as well. As Tom mentioned before, we're really grateful for the time that you're spending with us today, and we're really eager to share with you a bit about the offerings of our different offices. So my office is the Mignone Center for Career Success and I am the director of undergraduate career advising and programming at the Mignone Center. 

And so we're the office on campus that really helps students think about and plan for their next steps, while at Harvard as well as post grad after they've graduated from Harvard. I have a few slides want to share with you so you have something to look at while we chat so bear with me while I get those slides up here. 

There we go. That should be good to go there, right? All right, excellent, all right, so now you can kind of see on the slide in front of you just a quick overview of the different offerings, the different services that the Mignone Center for Career Success has. And it's important to note that we're here to support students wherever they may be on their career journey. 

Some students have a really strong sense of their interests and their skills, and they maybe need some support finding opportunities. And we're happy to help provide advice and provide tips, and other students may feel overwhelmed at the choices available to them, or perhaps they even feel lost or confused about the path they may wish to pursue. 

But regardless of where they are on their journey, our team of experienced advisors are really, really great at brainstorming options, illuminating otherwise unclear pathways, and trying to bridge the gaps to the professional world. So we do this a few different ways. One of the ways we do this is through our educational programming and trying to educate students about career paths, offering individual and tailored advising services, and also facilitating connections to alumni and to employers to help students build their network. 

So I really strongly encourage students to consider attending some of our programming and meeting with an advisor to best position themselves for their post-grad plans but even for their summer plans as well. So starting with educational programming, we offer about 300 programs a year in the spring and the fall across many different, what we call, pathways. 

So these pathways are different industry areas or different industry clusters. So for example, we might have a job search success series in the sciences or in the creative disciplines where we represent different fields, different sectors, and talk about tips and timelines for breaking into these industries. We might offer panel discussions with alumni who might come back to campus and talk a bit about their experiences in these different industries. 

So this wisdom that alumni share helps illuminate these different diverse pathways, but it also provides an opportunity for students to make connections. And we hear time and time again that a student might go up at the end of a conversation and interact with that alum, and that alum may be able to offer an introduction at their place of business or may be able to even offer an internship to that student. 

So we really encourage those connections in these conversations and these panel discussions. We also offer, of course, advising, individualized advising. So we have drop-in in hours every day from 1:00 to 2:00 PM virtually, and 2:00 to 4:00 PM in our office. So wherever students might be-- sometimes students might be across the river, for example. 

Sometimes our athletes are across the river or our engineering students might be across the river, and so they can tune in virtually to chat with an advisor, or they can come by our office from 2:00 to 4:00 PM, or they can schedule an appointment with an advisor. We have 30-minute appointments that are schedulable up on our website. 

And the goal of these appointments is to provide advice and to help students set job search goals. Anything from a quick resume review to interview preparation, maybe brainstorming about a field or a potential job or maybe interest that a student might have. But what's most important is that we always want students to leave our meetings with concrete next steps and potential alumni contacts. 

So they're leaving with a plan of action. They're not just coming by to discuss the sort of philosophy of their career plans. It's really much more tangible and much more concrete than that. I think it's also important to note that students shouldn't feel like they need to have all the answers before coming to see us. 

We're happy to help students find the answers to questions like, what are my interests? What problems would I like to help solve? What skills do I have to offer? What skills would I like to build? What's important to me in the work that I do or that I will do? What impact would I like to make? These are the kinds of questions we sometimes ask students when they feel a bit stuck, and we want to help them get unstuck. 

So guiding students through these questions ultimately helps them make informed and reasoned career decisions. We have lots of different ways that we engage with student. So we email students once a week. They get a newsletter from us based on their class year. So every sophomore will get a sophomore newsletter every Sunday afternoon from us. Every senior will get a senior newsletter from us every Sunday afternoon. 

We also have other mechanisms to check in with students. So for example, we check in with every single senior in October and November of their senior year to just see how they're doing, to inquire about their job search, to help them think through what their next steps may be, and also to encourage them to come in and see us if they haven't seen us yet so that we can help them and support them in their job search goals. 

So we have these different touch points and connection points throughout the year where we try to engage and stay engaged as students navigate their way through the college. It's also important to note that we don't just advise on jobs. We also advise on graduate school. So we will help students think about, for example, pre-med and pre-health and Oona and Rob are here to talk about that in just a moment. 

But we also offer student support when considering law school, business school, and other specialized master's degrees and PhD programs. So if students are thinking about graduate school, we're happy to help them think through the timeline of that process. We're happy to help them think through the types of programs they may wish to apply to, as well as what the long-term career prospects of those decisions might be. 

And then finally, the sort of third piece of the work that we do is really around connections and helping students make connections. So landing a job really does take a lot of careful preparation and building a network really in any economy but certainly when there's some stagnation or inertia in the hiring climate, which we're seeing a little bit of right now. 

So a lot of employers will connect with our students on campus, through our job postings, through our career fairs, through our information sessions and networking events. Our panel discussions, as I mentioned before, are great examples of ways that students can learn from and connect with alumni. And these connections often lead to internships and job opportunities. 

But in addition to that, we receive about 8,000 jobs and internships each year from employers, many of whom are alumni. And the majority of these postings are specific to Harvard, and they get added to our database, which is called Crimson Careers. And students can review the postings in there and apply to those opportunities, which is really great for our students to have this as a way to apply to really great jobs and internships. 

I also want to share with you a bit about some of our career fairs. So I'm going to jump ahead here to our slide with our career fairs, and this gives you an idea of what our career fair calendar looks like in a given year. So of course, we're well into the spring term now so we've passed some of these events, but we host about 20 career fairs a year, representing a very wide swath of industries and fields such as biotech, media, creative careers, business, social impact, data analytics, technology, engineering, climate and environment, government. 

You name it, we do cover it. So students can interact with recruiters. They can interact with alumni, and the benefit of these events is it sort of helps you skip the screening process, and you advance right to that sort of first face-to-face interaction with an employer. So these are robust ways for students to really engage with our employer partners and with our alumni who want to come back to campus and recruit our students. 

All of this information, by the way, is available up on our website. So we encourage you to take a look at it. You don't have to have any sort of special login or anything like that to view our career fair calendar or to view our information about our services and offerings, including our career pathways page, which I'm actually going to show you now. 

This is an example on our website of our career pathways. So you could see the dropdown menu at the top, and you can pick the pathway you're most interested in and then learn more about these industries and these pathways. We have videos here from alumni. We have information about salaries entering into some of these industries. Lots of information about landing jobs and internships. 

So it's really a great way to learn more about these sectors, about these industries, and be well informed as you start to think about what those next steps might look like. All right, so I think what we're going to do now is we're going to bounce over to my colleague Oona. Is that right, Katie? 

Yeah, well, Jason were there any questions in the chat that we were going to-- 

Absolutely, Anthony, you gave such a good overview. I think you've sparked some curiosity. So I want to cover a couple of questions really quickly with you. So lots of questions in the chat about who should come to help to-- who should be coming to you for help? Should a first-year student come to help for summer jobs? Should a graduating senior who is already headed to a PhD program come to you for help? What would you suggest? 

Yeah, yeah, great question. I would say that it is never too early to come see us, and it is never too late to come see us. So we love seeing first-year students who are really just mapping out their plan and their strategy and maybe just wondering about what different concentrations might equate to in terms of careers. We love seeing juniors thinking about summer internships. 

We love seeing seniors thinking about post-grad plans. Even if a student feels like they have everything set, it never hurts to have an impartial third party to talk to. So as parents, and I'm a parent myself so I can say this, we're a bit biased. We want the best for our kids, and we sometimes have very specific views about what we want for our children. But you know, I have no horse in the race with your sons and daughters. 

So send them in and have them come talk with us, and we're happy to give them a bit of advice but also help them think through what these steps might mean and how they might plan a few steps ahead. So for example, let's say your son or your daughter has a good sense of what their grad school plans are. Maybe they've already been accepted to a graduate school, and they're planning to enter in the fall. 

That's wonderful, but they may still want to come in and talk with us, and we may still want to chat a little bit about what that next step beyond might be and maybe even that summer between right after they graduate and before they start their PhD program, for example. So there are a lot of different things that we could talk about to help them feel ultimately the most prepared for their next step. 

And there's some great follow ups to that in the chat. What services are available to graduates or students that are on leave? 

Yes, so a student who's on leave has almost full access to just about everything that we offer. So advising remains available to you if you're on leave. Our programming remains available to you. Our career fairs, our job postings, really just about everything remains available to you. There are some exceptions. The main exception of what's available to you is our summer funding. 

You have to be a currently enrolled student to be eligible for funding for summer experiences, like study abroad or internships. But outside of that, pretty much everything else remains available to you. 

Awesome, and then the last question I want to tackle live. You've kind of talked about it a little bit. What are your office hours? 

9:00 to 5:00, Monday through Friday. So you can see that the drop in hours are up on the screen there, virtual 1:00 to 2:00, in person 2:00 to 4:00, but you can schedule an appointment for any time between 9:00 to 5:00 to meet with our advisor. And you can see on this slide that we cover pretty much every area you can imagine. Our advisors are super talented, very experienced, and very knowledgeable about lots of different industries. 

Awesome, thank you so much, Anthony. So now we are going to bring Oona and Rob forward. And before they introduce themselves, I know Anthony had mentioned that they are a part of our pre-health pre-med advisory team. And I know Anthony mentioned that there are a lot of different types of advisors. 

We are just very lucky that we have these two specialists in pre-med pre-health, but there are a lot of other advisors. So if you would like to learn anything more about them, all their information, and you can reach out to Anthony, Oona, Rob, and you can learn more about other folks that are in that office. So now I'm going to hand it on over to you two to introduce yourselves and tell us more about what you do. 

Thank you, Katie. My name is Oona Ceder. I am the director of pre-medical and health career advising, and we're joined here today by my colleague, Robert Harrington. Rob. 

Hi, everyone. My name is Rob Harrington. I'm the assistant director for medical and health careers advising, and I'm, again, honored to be here and answer all of your questions. Just a reminder, please feel free to throw them in the Q&A, and I'm happy to jump in and tackle them while Oona talks a little bit more. 

Great, so the Mignone Center for Career Success is the home for Harvard's central pre-med and pre-health advising office. So Rob and I advise and support every student in the college and alumni who are exploring pre-med or another pre-health career pathway. And that actually includes-- I want to emphasize this-- anyone who is unsure and still undecided. 

It is perfectly fine to be exploring multiple career paths at the same time, and sometimes students tell us that they didn't book an appointment because they weren't sure yet of pre-med pre-health. So if that's your student, definitely encourage them to still come and see us. We love the undecided conversations we have with those students. 

So since pre-med pre-health involves both academic and pre-professional planning, and they're very closely intertwined pretty much throughout college if your student arrives thinking that this is what they want to do, our advising services-- both individual advising as well as workshops, webinars, and other events that we do with employers and medical schools, other health professions schools-- will toggle between and involve both academic and pre-professional preparation. 

So we do cover all of that. And in terms of timeline, we work with alumni all the way through their application process. So as an example, if your student comes in knowing they're pre-med or pre-health, we may meet with them starting in August of their first year. And if they take two gap years, we will have known them for six years by the time they attend their white coat ceremony. 

So we really do get to know a lot of them very well, but I'll come back to timeline a little bit later. But in a bird's eye picture of our pre-health population, we have about 250 to 275 applicants every year to M.D. Medical school as well as other health professions programs. Dental, veterinary, physician assistant, nursing, we cover all of the health professions. 

The majority are pre-med, but we do have robust numbers of especially pre-dental and pre-veterinary students. And in terms of going straight through versus taking time between college and med school, our data are very consistent from year to year. About 75% to 80% are alumni, who take one or more gap years. The most common time frame is two gap years actually. 

And then the remaining 20% to 25% are seniors who go on directly to medical school after graduation. Rob and I also work very closely with the house pre-med pre-health committees and tutors. So there are the 12 houses. Each of them have four to six pre-health pre-med tutors, and the Dudley Community is smaller. 

If your student is in Dudley, they have one pre-med tutor reflecting their much, much smaller number of students. So we work closely with all of those groups of advisors, and as far as the pre-med tutors, they're usually medical students, or they are in residency while they are also living at their house. So in addition to offering individual advising and programming both here at MCS and in the houses, the pre-health tutors as well as we will work individually very longitudinally with your student. 

So the idea is that there is sort of a seamless set of resources across houses at MCS, but we do know that some students don't realize how closely we work together because we're not located in the same place. So we try to provide roadmaps and orient them through our various programs and other information. So one highlight that the houses handle that we do not at MCS is the committee letter. 

So Rob and I are happy to answer some questions about that, but the committee letter is written in the houses and Dudley Community by the pre-health committees. And they're sent to medical and dental schools every year. For those of you whose student is a junior or senior, I want to make a very quick comment about the MCAT. That's the Medical College Admissions Test the standardized test that is required by every medical school and is a focus of a lot of anxiety amongst students. 

So for most students, especially if they take one or two gap years, they will be taking the MCAT during their junior winter, spring, summer before senior year or sometime during senior winter or spring. We do have sophomores asking us if they should be taking the MCAT prior to junior year. So I just want to say that is most often not advisable. 

It will depend on individual circumstances, but we do a ton of individual advising, so do the house tutors. So if that is something that your student has mentioned to you, make sure they're talking to us, and we'll be here to support them with their MCAT planning. And with that, I will turn over to Q&A, and anything you'd like to add, Rob. 

Yes, actually. Actually, Katie, can we go into a question now or should we wait for a little bit later? 

You're good to go. 

Awesome, there is a question in the Q&A that would like to answer live about a student who may be in their senior year or perhaps even an alum who has already graduated who is just starting this journey in terms of thinking of following this pathway, studying for the MCAT, looking to make connections or start volunteering. I think Oona and I can both express very profoundly that it is really never too late to start this journey. 

And we do work with alumni up to five years beyond graduation, and that's really part of our weekly routine is to meet with applicants and students who are at such different points in this journey. So even someone who's in their senior year who is just thinking of starting this journey right now, absolutely book an appointment with either of us. 

And we can talk through what that timeline is going to look like from right now potentially in their senior year as they're about to graduate all the way through when they would complete requirements, best take the MCAT, and then matriculate to medical school. And we can walk them through every single step of that. 

There's definitely a feeling potentially for students, even just after first year if they're making this decision, that they are somehow behind. And we want to definitely make it clear that they're not behind. Each student's journey truly is different at the end of the day, and they have that support beyond graduation. So please just encourage them to book with us to talk for a bit. 

I'll just briefly say that it's almost like the notion of a non-traditional applicant is no longer descriptive because something like half of pre-meds are non-traditional in one way or another, whether that be in timeline or how they arrived at this decision. So it's really becoming a very diverse group and feeling like you're behind is so common at pretty much every step of the way. 

It may be one of the first things students tell us. Am I behind? I feel like I'm behind? So absolutely encourage them to connect with us. I'll say a bit more in a moment about first years and so on. But it's really never too late to connect with us, whether you were pre-med pre-health already or you were not. And in my next talking point, I will talk more about first years. But since you see the slide here, I should just briefly-- some of this actually comes back in my next question, Katie. 

But I will just quickly say because you have the slide here. Pre-health 101 is our orientation, which we aim at first years and sophomores. It's repeated both live. It's offered in person at our building. It's offered as a webinar on Zoom. Those are also recorded so your student can catch that really at any point from arriving here through sophomore year. 

Once they're juniors, they often-- they can still come, but this is aimed at the earlier couple of years at the college. And for the first years, it is actually a required step in order to be activated for one-on-one advising with me and Rob. So once they come through there, they will then be starting to meet with us one on one. 

And then gaining traction workshops is a series of workshops that builds on pre-health 101 on topics like summer planning, clinical experience and shadowing, research, different paths to medical and health professional school, and being underrepresented in medicine. We have alumni and students who address that experience and what underrepresented students bring to and represent so many needed skills and perspectives that the medical profession wants. 

And so medical schools are absolutely looking for those voices, and we help students see that they are needed and seen and wanted in these next steps that they're planning for. And then navigating pre-med pre-health is really just the name we give to the onboarding curriculum so that they like that I think the positive ring of navigating. So we're here to do that. 

Wonderful, awesome, thank you so much, Oona and Rob. We will definitely be bringing you back for some other questions, but we are going to bring back our final panelist. Travis, if you would like to join us and tell us about yourself and your office. 

That sounds great, Katie. I'm having a little trouble with video. It's saying I can't start video because the host has stopped it. 

Oh, no, well, let's fix that right now. All right, there we go. 

Well, Jason and Katie, thank you so much for offering us a platform to connect with our Harvard families and connect with our students and their loved ones and just really appreciate the opportunity to share out about our work. And so I'm Travis Lovett. I'm here representing the Center for Public Service and Engaged Scholarship, and our charge is to support civic life at Harvard and beyond. 

And so part of what we'll do is just provide-- I have one slide, and I'll provide a brief overview of public service and civic work at the college and will then be happy to-- I'll be looking out for questions in the chat. So I'm going to attempt to share my screen. Let's see if that looks-- looks like we're good to go. 

And so at our center, you'll see that we've highlighted four different initiatives that are focused on three specific issue areas. One is volunteerism, and so we offer over 110 different-- through 110 plus different student organizations, we offer volunteer opportunities in the greater Boston community. We do that through the Phillips Brooks House Association, which for anyone who's familiar with Harvard's campus, is-- so we're based at Phillips Brooks House, which is the undergraduate home of public service and social justice work on campus. 

And so we have about 2,000 active volunteers at any given point in time, and you'll see that our work begins by introducing our incoming first-year students to service through our global day of service. So that's actually built into orientation week by design to help to connect students to Harvard and connect them to their-- connect them to their new home. And so we then-- as students get acclimated to Harvard, we also offer a wide range of courses. 

So our Mindich Program and engage scholarship offers about 45 community-focused courses that offer students the opportunity to bring classroom and community together. So this includes research work. This includes language work, cultural engagement, and just thinking through ways that Harvard students can use their education to serve society. 

So the Mindich Program provides us with a great platform to be able to do that. I imagine a lot of folks will be interested in the work of our Pathways to Practice team. So our Pathways to Practice team offers summer internship opportunities. So we offer about 350 summer internships across the globe for students to do public service work. 

About half of those opportunities are placement opportunities that we've lined up with community partners around the globe. So we design and work with community partners to develop internship experiences as building blocks for students. We also offer grant funding for winter break opportunities for students to explore working with nonprofit and government organizations. 

We also offer opportunities as well for students to be able to pursue summer work. We find that summer is really a transformative building block for students to really deeply engage with fields of public interest law, education, environmental work, public health, and several different other areas. And so students can navigate both through the MCS Crimson Careers platform and also through the CARAT system, which is our research and travel grant platform. 

They can search through opportunities to find what fits their needs. We also do a lot of really deliberate work with graduating seniors who are trying to find jobs in public service. And so I know there's a question in the chat about careers in arts and entertainment. We work to amplify and support the MCS team to identify pathways to public service for students who want to go into-- want to pursue post-graduate public service. 

So that's a mix of offering fellowships through fellowship funding to setting up relationships with organizations looking to recruit through our public service recruiting day platform in the fall, which is a co-sponsorship of the MCS team, the Institute of Politics, the Harvard Global Health Institute, and our center. 

And so there are many, many different ways that we try to bring students together to focus on civic life. And so we also, through our student engagement leadership team, offer workshops in this space. So trainings and workshops to help to educate them on how to serve effectively and how to pursue a more professionally focused public service experiences. 

One thing that's going to be new for the class of 2025 is we're launching the certificate for civic engagement program. The certificate is the first way that we've developed that actually recognizes civic work on a Harvard students transcript. So students complete three civically focused courses. They do a 300-hour practicum, and they complete a capstone reflection assignment and participate in a capstone reflection experience just prior to graduation. 

And so we're actually going to be rolling that out over the next few weeks, and we look-- there will be a launch announcement coming out in the next few days, and we'll be offering info sessions later this spring for students who are interested in pursuing the certificate for civic engagement work. 

But our work is all focused on social welfare and just helping students to find a sense of public purpose. And so you can find out more information about us. You can go to our website. It's publicservice.fas.harvard.edu. You can also follow us on Instagram and Facebook @harvardserves. And so I'll pause there. 

Yeah, thanks, Travis. We do have a good question in the chat. Is there a religious affiliation with PBHA? 

So there is. So the current affiliation of Phillips Brooks House is not religiously focused. So Phillips Brooks house is named after Phillips Brooks, who was a prominent 19th-century minister, and many of the programs that evolved out of Phillips Brooks House have a focus on hospitality, charity, and just thinking through social services and social services support. 

So in the early 1900s, so when Phillips Brooks House was built in 1900, it did have more of a religious focus. But today, that work is very pluralistic, and it's not religiously-- it's not explicitly religious, but there are programs like Habitat for Humanity, some partnerships that we have with programs like the YWCA. We do work with religious groups on campus to connect students to service activities, but the mission of our department is not explicitly-- is not religiously focused. 

Thanks for that, Travis. Another great question in the chat. Is the Pathways to Practice aspect of the Center for Public Service different from URAF in what Tom was sharing earlier in terms of post grad opportunities in public service? 

So I would say there are definitely some similarities in terms of the ability to be able to provide funding and support to students in this space. Our Pathways to Practice team is explicitly focused on advising students on finding the right path for them. So I think that when we think specifically about developing community partnerships, we try to identify organizations and partnerships where we're really thinking intentionally about the student learning experience. 

I would imagine that does parallel URAF in a lot of ways with some of the research partnerships that URAF has curated. So I think, yeah, that the intent is very much the same. I would say that all of us work really collaboratively together to try to make connections. 

And if a student comes to us, and we're not necessarily-- if we're not well equipped to answer the question that they might have, we make a lot of referrals to our partners, including the folks who are on the call this evening just to think through how we best support our students and their exploration of the spaces that they're most interested in. 

That's right, Travis. If I can reiterate what you just said because it's really important, we all try really hard to make sure that if we're not the right answer, we're going to connect with someone who will be. So while sometimes the door may not be the perfect door to walk into, we'll certainly get your students directed to the right spot. And I absolutely believe that. I think, Travis, those are our questions for you for right now. So I'm going to toss this back to Katie. 

Awesome, thanks so much, Travis. And keeping an eye on our time, I'm going to have each panelist join us, and I will present the questions that we have remaining. And hopefully, if we have any questions in the Q&A, we can tackle those as well. So, Tom, thank you. If you could take just a few moments to share how students work with your office to begin planning for summer and post grad work, and is there a best time to engage in your office and with you? 

Yeah, it's a great question. I guess maybe the tongue in cheek answer is that the best time to engage is anytime. I think that we really welcome outreach from students even from the moment that they are exploring Harvard. I think most, if not all, of our offices have visitor's programming all the way up to and through as folks have seen in the Q&A some support for some programs for alumni and alumnae as well. 

I guess the other tongue in cheek answer is that it depends, and that's part of why I say the best time to engage is anytime. I think because we really want to be able to talk through things with students and to be able to maybe help them clarify some of the questions that they have and help them, again, open some of those doors to which Jason was referring that maybe they didn't know existed around campus, or maybe they didn't walk through. 

I guess I'll specify on behalf of research and fellowships and say that for research opportunities, in particular, I think the emphasis is on just about any time. We really want students to know that they can get funding for their research during the academic year. They can get it during the summer. They can do so on campus. 

They can do so off campus. I did see one question in the chat before. And in case folks missed the answer, we are really lucky to support some wonderful research programs, especially during the summer where the college is able to provide housing and dining for students in order to conduct that research. And not just to conduct that research but to be part of a community of researchers to, which we really value. 

If folks have not heard of the research village, I would definitely encourage you to look that one up because it's a fabulous group of research programs on campus during the summer. So that's research. Fellowships, just to maybe I guess put a little bit more clarification around that, most of the fellowships that our office supports are going to be ones that students come to a little bit later in their Harvard careers. 

So for your own frames of reference, we typically don't start doing really focused targeted info sessions outreach for a lot of fellowships until student's junior spring semester. And then we really kind of hit the ground running. So right about now actually for the juniors is when we are going into the houses around campus to conduct info sessions, conducting Zoom webinars that, of course, are recorded on our website and accessible for students after the fact. 

So students should never feel like they are putting us out in terms of when they're coming to us obviously, but I would also want to reassure students-- for students thinking about things like-- I'll pick on the Rhodes Scholarship because that's a famous one that many folks have heard of. Students who are coming to us in their first or second year thinking about that. 

We normally say something to the effect of like, hey, you know, it's awesome that you're interested in this. Please stay in touch with us. But right now, you really want to be focusing on your classes, and I think about the fact that Rhodes asks for up to five to eight letters of recommendation for their candidates. 

And students at that point in their academic careers may literally not have had the time to get to know that many people who could write them that detailed a letter. So again, we want to encourage them to be students first and to prioritize their academics, their residential experience at Harvard always. But again, just come back to my answer to say really the best time is anytime and happy to have others weigh in of course. 

So thank you. Jason, were there any questions or anything in the chat right now? 

I don't know if you'll have a great answer here, Tom, but I'd love to find out. So if a student is doing research throughout the school year, what's the general amount of time per week that the average student is spending doing that? 

It's a great question, and I would love to be able to provide a one size fits all answer. I don't think that there is one to be honest. I mean, it's going to vary so much by discipline. It's going to vary in terms of what the student and the research host may have worked out in terms of an arrangement. I do think that we expect that in our experience most students who are doing research during the academic year, especially if it's not a part of their core academic curriculum. 

In other words, if they're not doing thesis research in most cases. But that's going to be much closer to a part-time commitment. I would say that the vast, vast majority of folks are doing no more than 20 hours of research a week during the academic year. And the closer number is probably 10 to 15 hours a week in most cases. 

Now there may be some hosts during the summer who invite students to work with them, and they may ramp things up then for-- a lot of those research village programs I was talking about. The expectation is that research experience is something closer to a full-time experience. 35 to 40 hours a week. So again, I do think that there is some fluctuation there, and there really is going to be no perfect answer. But that's kind of my best ballpark I can give you at the moment. 

That's a great ballpark. That's a sports reference. Also in a similar vein, so if a student contacts faculty member directly for a research opportunity and isn't going through URAF or MCS, are there still ways that you can help them with housing? Where can they go to start that process? 

Oh, absolutely, they should absolutely come talk to us. And in fact, in most cases, a student is really doing the right thing by reaching out to a faculty member or a laboratory host, such as a PI, a principal investigator, or another kind of research host proactively and directly first. That's typically what we recommend and have students do. 

And for students who maybe haven't had experience with that and don't have a lot of experience or comfort with cold emailing or even cold calling a professor or showing up to office hours, we certainly help them talk through that and strategize and even sometimes do some mock role plays of having a conversation with a professor. But those students can absolutely, and in most cases, in fact, do get support from us. 

And really by virtue of having set that up kind of first and directly or initiating those conversations and then coming to us to say, OK, you know, I've had these really productive conversations with the professor. They seem like they've got something for me to do. I'm excited about this, want to be a part of it. 

Can I get some money for it please? And happily, in most cases, the answer is yes, whether that's during the academic year or during the summer. So again, they're doing the right thing by proactively reaching out to those faculty members, and we're happy to help support that along the way. 

Awesome, thank you so much, Tom, really appreciate all of the information that you've shared tonight. I'm going to now ask Anthony to join us. And if you have any questions in the Q&A, please send them along and Tom will be there to answer any questions. Anthony, if you just want to take a moment to either answer either of those questions briefly about when's the best time to connect or what are some different things that you do for summer and post grad. I know you touched on it a little bit or just some general advice that you want to leave for families. 

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, so what I would say about that is that every industry hires on a different timeline. So the answer to the question of when to engage often does depend on the industry that the student is most interested in. A good key for most people is our career fair grid because the career fairs are planned around when a lot of industries hire. 

So we very purposely plan our career fairs. For example, our business-focused fairs are really at the beginning of the fall term because that's when those industries hire most frequently. We have a climate and environment fair. We actually had it last week because this is the time of the year when environmental organizations and energy firms tend to do a lot of their hiring. 

So I think our career fair grid is a good indicator of when those different industries look to hire their talent, but that said, I think a student should come and see us whenever they feel ready. We've definitely had students who will say, I've been busy focused on studying for this particular exam or writing a thesis or whatever the case may be. And then after that's done, that's when want to come in and talk more about what my summer plans are or what my post-grad plans are. And that's totally fine. So it really is dependent on what the student's needs are. 

Awesome, thank you so much, Anthony. Just for the sake of time, I'm just going to move on to our next panelist. But again, if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the chat, and Anthony will be there if you have any questions. And I'll, of course, share contact information at the end. So now I'm going to ask Oona and Rob to join us and same question. I would love to hear just any last bit of advice, or when is the best time? What does summer planning look like for you all? I know you touched on it a little bit, but any last bit that you'd like to share with the families. 

Certainly, so for summer I'll just add echoing what Anthony said. So we actually have a summer opportunities and funding fair in December of every year. That's a wonderful place. A one-stop shop for meeting both Harvard offices that run programs and then our funding opportunities here to get all the deadlines and sort of before the winter break so you can plan ahead and know what you're most interested in applying for. 

And also in addition to that, for the post grad side of things as Anthony said too, for the pre-med pre-health crowd much, of the hiring in areas that pre-health students are interested in happens later in senior year. So they're not behind if their opportunity isn't posted and listed until say even March, April, May. 

These include opportunities like clinical research coordinator positions in hospitals, working with patients, biotech pharma. We have a member of Anthony's team, Megan, who oversees that area of work. So Rob and I will refer students to other MCS advisors to make sure they're also connecting with them. 

But for each of these areas, health consulting, regular consulting, doing health care work, another common bucket for pre-med pre-health students. So again, the timelines vary, but for seniors who are pre-med pre-health looking for gap year, opportunities one or two year long, much of that actually happens-- the hiring happens in the spring. 

So that can be reassuring. And then before I let Rob say a few final words, I would just say, anytime is a good time to connect with us. But if your student is already thinking pre-med pre-health when they arrive, it's great if they meet us early on because we notice that a lot of students worry unnecessarily about that one B they got. You can get any grade, and you-- our students do get into med school. 

We just figure out what they need to do to get to their goal, and grades are really not as much of a focus as they sometimes think. They are important but not the be all and end all. So we have juniors saying to us, I didn't want to meet with you before I got my GPA up. So don't wait. We are here to help, and we love to meet them as early as they wish to meet. But anytime is a good time. Over to you, Rob. 

Absolutely, and just quickly I would just echo that. You kind of stole my words there that we really are a judgment free zone, and those times when a student may be feeling the most vulnerable is an important time to talk to us through that so that they can plan for the future. 

And then final push if you're talking to any of your students who are pre-med or pre-health, ask them to absolutely check their monthly MCS pre-med advising newsletter as we pack a lot of resources, including summer and post-graduate opportunities into there. Thank you. 

And I'll also tie-in and emphasize what you said. Regardless of your student's concentration or desire for future exploration in wherever they want to go, now is the right time. Anytime is the right time and so really reiterating to be in touch with MCS for that assistance and really just normalize that asking for that kind of direction is the right thing to do. 

Definitely, thank you so much Oona and Rob. And last but not least, Travis, if you could join us one more time here and leave us with a little bit of advice, thoughts of when's the best time to work with you and summer post grad planning. Anything you'd like to share. 

Yeah, thanks so much, Katie. I think just kind of echoing what several folks have said just that anytime is a good time to connect with us. We definitely encourage our students to engage with us early and often. There are some natural sorts of rhythms to the school year, though, that I think that just as people are seeking out summer internships that some of our initial summer internship deadlines have passed. 

I saw that was a chat question that someone had asked, but this is something that right now we're moving to the phase of students proposing their own internship projects. Many of the internship projects that we've curated had deadlines over the last couple of weeks. So if any of your students are returning next year or looking to apply down the road, those summer internship opportunities will be available again. 

We start reaching out to our partners in the fall, and we tend to have early February deadlines for the Harvard Global Health Institute for the Center for Public Service and Engaged Scholarship and the Institute of Politics and Phillips Brooks House Association. With any summer opportunity that's available with one of those programs tends to have a deadline. It's typically the first Sunday in February. 

And so that gives students winter break to give them time to apply to opportunities that we've curated just because it gives us time to make referrals to community partners. But I would say for a student proposed projects or any second chance opportunities, now is a great time to explore and for students to submit proposals. 

We have a common grant proposal-- or a common grant application linked through CARAT It's available through our-- available through the public service website. I would also just love to plug that we offer a session in collaboration with the MCS team and the Institute of Politics and Harvard Global Health Institute and PBHA. There's a program called It's Not Too Late For Summer. It's going to be happening this year on March 29. 

And so for any of your students who are feeling a little bit lost, there are always second chance opportunities and funding sources that are still available through about mid-April for students who are seeking out summer internships. Across the college, we support over 600 student projects every summer. Last summer, it was 601 students who were sponsored to pursue full time public service work during the summer. 

It's a really, really great opportunity for students to-- we want our best and our brightest to serve and find ways to be civically engaged and involved. So we continue to try to meet the demand as best as we can. I would say that we end up sponsoring or supporting about half of the students who apply. 

Last year, I think it was just over half, but this is something that for students, it's all about just finding the right space and connecting with our advisors and connecting with projects that connect with their coursework and connect with their vocational interests. 

I think that's right, Travis, certainly never too late. So thank you so much, Travis, for your insight and advice to all of our parents and families who have been hanging out with us tonight. 

Yeah, thank you all so much. I know we went a little over on time, and time just flew when you're having fun. So I really appreciate everyone that's stuck around with us. I know I saw a question in the chat about is this session being recorded. It absolutely is, and we will be posting it on our website. And I will also send the link in the newsletter reminder for our next webinar. 

So the dates will show on the next slide, but here's all the contact information for our fabulous panelists tonight. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to them. And here are our next webinars. So on March 20, we will be back again. We'll be meeting with the Commencement and the Harvard Alumni Association team. And then on April 10, we will have a 2023-2024 academic year wrap up. 

And finally, this is Jason and I, and if you have any questions that maybe didn't get answered, or if you'd like some more information or connect with some different folks, please email us at the parents@fas.harvard.edu email. And I'm more than happy to connect you with those resources, and thank you all so, so much again for tonight. We really appreciate you all, and hopefully we'll see you for our next webinar. 

See you in a few weeks.