If you're nervous about finding a job in the struggling economy, fear not - roughly one third of all federal employees are currently eligible for retirement, and the government is looking to replace those retirees with college graduates.
Brown is one of five schools to have received "Call to Serve" grants this year from the Partnership for Public Service - a nonprofit organization geared towards helping connect potential recruits with government agencies. The grant provides $3,000 of funding as well as personalized consulting to help the Brown community embrace federal service. The money, received in January, must be used in advancing the partnership's goals within 18 months.
The federal government is trying to fill positions in sectors deemed "mission critical" - those areas where agencies would be unable to carry out their designated functions without additional manpower, said Tim McManus, vice president for education and outreach at the PPS. Eighty percent of the projected new "mission-critical" hires are projected to be in five broad occupational categories: security, protection and enforcement; medical and public health; accounting and business; engineering and sciences; and program management and analysis, he said.
Along with the monetary assistance from the grant, the PPS is providing personalized consulting to all of the grant schools - which are California State University at Sacramento, Washington University in St. Louis, Western Michigan University and the State University of New York at Albany, in addition to Brown - to help them tailor their campaigns specifically towards their student bodies.
The goal of the "Government at Work" project, as it is called at Brown, is three-fold: to educate the community about available opportunities in government service, to train faculty at Brown so that they can help students navigate the application process and to build relationships with more federal agencies in which students are interested, said Jennifer Slattery-Bownds, adjunct lecturer and manager of career and employment development at the Taubman Center, who also wrote the grant proposal.
The project is being jointly run by the Taubman Center and the Career Development Center. The Taubman Center plans to bring speakers to campus who could educate students about the shortage of employees, Slattery-Bownds said, while the CDC works with students to help them find and apply to jobs.
"Because of the economic crisis, there are so many more people trying to figure out what their plan B is - and this is a good fit for most of them," Slattery-Bownds said.
The Government at Work project started with a day-and-a-half training session in August run by the Partnership for Public Service, McManus said. He said the training is geared at career services staff and other faculty who provide counseling to students, so they can help students navigate the application process for federal jobs.
"We don't want a school to wait for a student to come to them; we want the school to reach out to students," McManus said.
Since funding is limited, Slattery-Bownds said she has been taking advantage of the resources available to her from the Taubman Center and from other departments. "If a department is having a speaker, we'll try to advertise it," she said.
For example, she said, Alicia Robinson-Morgan '94, a staffer from the Department of Commerce, came to campus to speak about trade policy. While at Brown, she also held informational interviews about the department with students, Slattery-Bownds said.
The grant is part of a larger national initiative by the PPS called "Making the Difference," a program designed to find cost-effective and sustainable ways to promote public service on campus, according to the partnership's Web site. The PPS has developed the Call to Serve network of more than 600 colleges and universities that have made a commitment to promote federal service on their campuses.
Next year, the partnership plans to offer up to five additional grants to a new cohort of schools from the Call to Serve network, McManus said. The hope is that Brown and the other current grant institutions will be able to provide coaching for the new group of schools to help them set up an infrastructure for promoting public service.
"We're using this cohort of five schools to seed new ideas for the rest of the network," McManus said. He said the goal over time is to find the most effective strategies for getting students interested in public service and implement them across the nation.
Director of Career Development Kimberly Delgizzo wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that only two new federal employers were able to attend the Career Fairs this fall - the Social Security Administration and Volpe Transportation.
Delgizzo wrote in her e-mail that while student attendance at programs has been high and that the initiative has received positive feedback, it is too early to determine what the long-term effects of the project will be.
