Pathways: What Works and What's Fluff
Anna VanDoodewaard appreciated the career advising, but she could do without the balloon games and stress balls.
Welcome back to Perspectives on Pathways — a compilation of interviews intended to make public a wide array of viewpoints on Furman’s two-year advising initiative.
This week, we bring you the perspective of Anna VanDoodewaard, a junior French and History major.
VanDoodewaard speaks in defense of Pathways, highlighting the key role that her Pathways advisor and the curriculum’s career exercises played in helping her select her major. VanDoodewaard also criticizes the less substantive aspects of the curriculum, and offers thoughts on potential program reforms.
Tell me about your experience in Pathways.
I’ve had a really good experience with Pathways. I think the best and most impactful part of it was really the advising. My advisor was incredible, and she was always there for us. Her office door was always open for my classmates and me, and we could go to her at any time with questions, concerns, or anything else that we had on our minds. I remember going into her office multiple times and just brain dumping things I was thinking about, be it academics or career ideas, and she would patiently listen and ask insightful questions. It helped me untangle and process things, and also allowed me to discover new talents and interests that I hadn’t known about before.
I actually ended up changing my major partly because of this advising. I had come to Furman as an intended Politics and International Affairs major and really wasn’t enjoying my first-year classes, but kept thinking I would just push through it and things would get better. My advisor saw that it wasn’t a good fit for me though, and helped me think through other options. She pointed out that some of the other classes I was taking as GERs were things that I obviously enjoyed much more than political science, and she encouraged me to explore more before committing to the Politics major. So that ended up really changing my Furman pathway.
I declared a French major first, and then a History major a year later. I’ve never had any regrets and feel that thanks to advising, I’ve made the right academic choices, which is something I’m very thankful for. I have friends at other schools that don’t have Pathways advising who have graduated either with a degree that they regret or just wishing that they’d thought outside the box and explored other opportunities. I don’t know of anybody at Furman who that’s happened to, and I think a huge part of that is the Pathways experience.
Was your advisor a faculty member or a staff member?
She was a staff member in the libraries.
Why do you think so many students are discontented with this program?
The time commitment is the reason I hear most frequently. That’s never really held water for me though. The class is an hour a week and the homework takes maybe 10 minutes. If the assignment is a reflection paper, it might take an hour or two. That’s really not that much time.
I think people also complain that it’s a really easy class that doesn’t deserve academic credit. I understand that, but I think you don’t have a lot of options. Making it zero credit means that a lot of freshmen won’t take it seriously at all, and you’re just going to end up with people skipping out. It also definitely should not be a two-credit class. I could see condensing the curriculum into one year instead of two and keeping it at one credit, but I do think the credit incentive should definitely be there.
There are also a lot of students who feel like it’s just busy work, and that a lot of it is meaningless. There are definitely some assignments where I thought, “Why are we doing this?” I remember one day where we played games with balloons, and another where we just made stress balls. I know that the intent behind these activities was good, but I really don’t think that things like that have a place in a university classroom, and definitely not in a for-credit course.
Do you think it’s possible to separate the fluff from the soft-skills training?
I think so. There were definitely some soft-skills modules that I found really helpful. As students, we’re looking at a very different career landscape than our parents and maybe a lot of faculty members did, and I think that in today’s digital age soft skills are more important than ever. I think the program does a great job of making us aware of the value of soft skills and how to go about utilizing that in the job market.
So, I think that a lot of those modules are helpful, but it can be hard to take seriously, especially if you’re somebody who is very academically driven and wants to be in courses where you’re getting things done and really engaging intellectually with material. To sit for an hour hearing about how to listen actively or ask good questions might feel unnecessary or even useless to some. But I do think these skills are really important for relationship building and networking, and that the usefulness of it will become increasingly obvious as we go into our careers.
Why is the fluff there?
I don’t know. It’s something I’ve wondered about before. I think part of it is wanting to make the class fun and interactive—which, again, I understand—but I’m like, I can also just sit here, pay attention, and have a conversation without having props like balloons or stress balls. We aren’t in elementary school anymore! So yeah, I’m not sure.
You mentioned potentially compressing Pathways into one year. Do you think the aspects of the program that were really beneficial for you could have been done in one year? Is there any particular advantage to two years?
I think the biggest advantage to the two years was the advising experience. A lot of the second-year career modules were helpful, as well as some of the initial freshman orientation modules. I do think that there was more fluff in the first year, so I think condensing it into one year where the first semester is more freshman orientation type things, followed by a semester of career competencies, could be helpful.
The two-year advising period really helped me get to the point where I had both majors declared, I understood what my interests and career goals were and were not, and I felt like I had a very strong foundation that I was really excited about.
Would you talk about the social benefits you derived from Pathways?
Yeah, I think another benefit of Pathways is that it throws you into a group with students who you wouldn’t talk to or even really meet otherwise. My Pathways cohort was a really diverse group of students from all over the country. We had folks from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, tons of different majors, student athletes and musicians—it was really all over the place. Getting to spend two years with those people and actually get to know them—building relationships, hearing about life experiences and perspectives that were very different from the ones I grew up with—was just a really good experience. I still have friends from my Pathways class who I hang out with.
Are there drastic differences between Pathways classes? Do some have a really good experience and others don’t?
There are definitely people in my Pathways class who didn’t love it and were very glad when it was done, but I do think most of us had a really good relationship with our advisor. I know there are some of us who still go and talk to her about things. As a class, I would say we probably had a great experience. That said, everyone is different and every Pathways course is different, so a lot does depend on your classmates and your instructor. But I think most people who I’ve talked to had good experiences with their advisors, even if they haven’t always enjoyed the course content.
Were there any particular career skills that you found really helpful?
It was probably less career skills than looking at potential careers themselves. There was one assignment where we had to research a career field we were interested in—which for me was law, particularly family law—and then meet with a Furman alum who was working in that field. That was a really great opportunity for networking, but also for getting to know what the field is really like—what’s the day to day, what are the pros and cons, etc. That experience of actually getting to talk to somebody about their job completely changed my career trajectory, and I realized I didn’t want to go into family law (or maybe the legal field in general) after all. I’m very grateful that I had the opportunity to find that out before committing to law school and going down that path, and then realizing later that this isn’t what I want to do.
What do you think of the CliftonStrengths test?
I have mixed feelings about it. I think there’s only so much personality tests can do, and I do think to some extent they limit people by putting them in boxes. Students label themselves as their five Clifton strengths: “This is what I can do and this is what I’m good at.” To a certain extent some students think “If a strength is not in my top five, then I’m not good at it.” So I do think there are definitely weaknesses to it. There are positives too though. When I took mine, there were definitely things that came up in my top five that I thought were accurate in representing who I am—my beliefs, my values, and my strengths. It’s an easy way to give potential employers a glimpse of your personality and strengths, but like any personality test, it can’t accurately capture all of who you are. So I think it’s a very mixed bag.