Alumni share global careers

Though St. Olaf students may reside in the farmland of small town Minnesota, they think big. Each year the college sends 800 students abroad, and more than two-thirds of its students study abroad before graduating. St. Olaf also ranks as one of the top 20 small colleges and universities in the nation in the number of graduates who serve in the Peace Corps.

Monday, April 6, St. Olaf’s Center for Experimental Learning hosted an event called “Oles Gone Global” that introduced students to six alumni and a world of international career ideas.

“This array of people is here to engage us with international thinking about other places and other people,” said English professor Jonathan Hill, who was involved in organizing the event. “It’s a vivid demonstration of what some Oles have done with their liberal arts education.”

The event consisted of individual discussion time with the alumni, a dinner for the guests and faculty to discuss how an international perspective can be taught in the classroom and a panel for students with a more in-depth explanation of their international jobs.

The event’s theme, “Find Your International Fit,” attracted over 100 students who wanted to explore the options of working beyond the United States’ borders.

Patricia Smith, who works for the CEL and helped organize the event, enjoyed watching students become inspired and connect to the individual panelists. “The alumni who return for this event reconnect with faculty and often spend time with individual students who are touched by a particular story, thus becoming a wonderful networking resource for students,” she said.

The panel consisted of six alumni, each with different ideas and advice for getting involved in the international picture. The guests ranged from a 1975 graduate who now serves as a Foreign Service officer with the U.S. State Department, to a 2007 graduate who invented her own major in sustainable international development at St. Olaf and now conducts research in Ethiopia on food security for children to a 1994 graduate who works as a Fishery Policy analyst.

One panelist admitted it’s okay to be uncertain. “Mine was a story of being lost,” Bill Stauffer ‘88 said. Stauffer currently works with immigrant and refugee health issues and tropical medicine at the University of Minnesota’s Medical School and Center for Disease Control.

Since his years at St. Olaf, Stauffer has worked overseas with infectious diseases primarily in Tanzania, Haiti and Peru. During the past two years, his project has been in Tanzania developing a respiratory disease surveillance network as well as working in Burundi/Rwandan refugee camps.

Another speaker, Carrie Nordeen ‘94 directly credited her experience at St. Olaf to where she is today.

“I ended up in my career path by coming to an Olaf panel exactly like this. Things are exposed to you here,” she said. “The alum network here is also really good. Graduates would love to sit down and talk.”

In addition to using St. Olaf’s alum network, panelists strongly stressed the importance of networking as a first step toward an international career. “I did two study abroad programs through St. Olaf and used them as opportunities to sample what [working abroad] would be like, knocking on doors, talking to business owners, and in this way I learned about my options; I developed a network,” Chloe Stull-Lane ‘07, who is researching nutrition in Ethiopia, said.

Those involved all emphasized the benefits of talking to people. “You can learn from others about a particular type of work, an organization that might be of interest to you, the skills that are valued as you move into full-time work, career-building opportunities, how best to balance work and family and the challenges of pursuing different careers,” Smith said.

The alumni all mentioned St. Olaf as the foundation for their international work. Anders Davidson ’89, who now works as the director of business development and innovation at the Honorary Norwegian Consulate, stressed how international affairs factor in to any kind of career in this era and how St. Olaf prepares its students for this type of work. “You’ll have to actively avoid an international career. It’s there. It’s real,” Davidson said.
 

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