Christopher has a long career devoted to helping college students find a career path in life. With a liberal arts degree as his foundation and post graduate degrees in education from University of Pittsburgh, Christopher spent time counseling at some of the county’s most storied colleges, from Cornell to Georgetown.
Transcript
>> My name is Christopher Shakeman [assumed spelling], and my career, over a long period of time, was in higher education. And that took me to a number of different institutions around the country. Obviously, it varies depending on the institution and the size of the enrollment, the size of your staff. When I was at Stanford, I was pretty much a manager, had a fairly large staff, and concerned myself with, "How are we reaching students? How are we being effective? How are we measuring ourselves?" And that is really that much one-to-one student contact, because I had people on my staff doing that. Relationships with faculty, trying to get them to understand what we're doing, and the importance of what we're doing. Relationships with parents; I had people say to me when I was at Stanford, "Well, you've got the easiest job in the world. I mean, these are super bright young people, and they're bound to be successful. And all you've got to do is get out of the way." And there is some truth to that. But while they're bright people, they are ambitious, energetic, aggressive; and their parents are also. So they're shelling out a fair amount of money for this four-year experience, and they want the payoff at the end, so I heard from parents on a regular basis.
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