Denison gets $9.3 million gift to endow career programs

GRANVILLE - Denison University has announced the Austin E. Knowlton Foundation has pledged $9.3 million to support Denison’s work to create the benchmark program for helping students transition from the liberal arts into the professions.

The gift will create a permanent endowment to support the college’s Center for Career Exploration, which has been renamed “The Austin E. Knowlton Center for Career Exploration.”

“Denison is profoundly grateful to the Austin E. Knowlton Foundation for this transformational gift,” said Denison University President Adam Weinberg in a news release April 14.

“The world of work has changed,” Weinberg said. “Colleges must help students and recent graduates access the on-ramps into the professions, and we need to ensure that our graduates have the ‘day-one’ competencies that employers and graduate schools require.

“Over the last 24 months, we have been talking to CEOs, HR directors and others across the professions and have developed what we believe will be the model for career exploration,” Weinberg said. “With this support, we can launch it.”

Denison’s new approach, called Denison@Work, takes a different approach to career exploration, starting with three assumptions:

• Career exploration needs to be a process that stretches across a student’s college career, and it extends as recent alumni make the transition into the professions of their choice,

• To do a better job using the 40 percent of the year that falls between semesters to focus on pre-professional readiness training and networking,

• Alumni and parents are an under-leveraged resource for students.

As part of the Denison@Work model, Denison will be among the first colleges in the nation to formally support students post-graduation as they make the transition into the professions.

Online resources will be made available, and students will have access to Denison Connecting, a new program that brings together Denison alumni in cities across the country and the globe for evening networking receptions.

As part of this effort, they can join career communities of Denison alumni in particular professions who provide support to each other as students seek jobs and entrance into graduate programs.

“The goal for college students should not be just to find a job, but to build a life,” Weinberg stated in the news release. “We need to help them explore the kinds of lives people lead and the ways they develop careers to support those lives. Our model is comprehensive and unique. It is a Denison model.”