By Kyle Francis
Way off in old Mac Hall, comfortably nestled into a quiet corner is the Counseling and Student Development Centre. Inside, the odd student mills about, filling out forms or looking through information booklets, but space certainly isn’t a precious commodity in this waiting room. The excess of space here isn’t because the services offered in these offices are below par, but because many students don’t know it exists, or what its qualified staff can do for them.
“What tends to happen is that students get really entrenched in their studies and they realize that many of their courses are not what they would be, and now [they think] maybe they’re in the wrong major,” said Anna-Lisa Ciccocioppo, the Career Development Coordinator from the Student Development Centre. “We tend to get a deluge of students kind of close to December.”
Rather than waiting until December to change your focus of study, or pick a focus of study as the case may be, Ciccocioppo urges students to come in early and take one of the inexpensive workshops that the center offers to help students decide on a career and pick a major.
“We provide a number of different career workshops for students,” informed Ciccocioppo. “In our workshops, we go through a career decision making model because career decision making is a process. I think that sometimes students are so keen to make a decision that they don’t thoroughly evaluate all the things they need to look at to make a good decision.”
Although the “Choosing a Major” workshop is the most popular clinic offered by the Counseling and Student Development Center, they offer a multitude of others such as those in the “Personal Assessment” vein and even some for graduate students. So, if you feel like your degree is going nowhere or if you don’t know what your going to do with you’re education after you graduate, with the help of the career counseling it will only take a few hours and a little dough to find out what your options are.