Charles Street Chats: Q&A with Lakeisha Mathews
Lakeisha Mathews has a long resume as a career services professional. Not only is she director of The University of Baltimore’s Career and Internship Center, she’s also president of the National Career Development Association and owner of Right Resumes & Career Coaching. And like many UBalt students, Mathews is a first-generation college student who wasn’t initially sure what she wanted to do for a career. Her personal experiences are rooted in her impact at UBalt, from adding career-based lessons to the academic curriculum, to opening a Career Closet that welcomes donations to supply free professional wear for students.
BEHIND THE CHAT
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Q: You help so many students who are at the start of their career journey. What turned you toward your career path?
A: Believe it or not, what motivated me was that I could not find a career path. I had trouble. It was difficult for me. I was a student at the University of Maryland, College Park and like many students came in thinking I wanted to be a doctor. I had done very well in high school, and when you’re a high-achieving student sometimes that’s all people tell you, you can be a lawyer or a doctor. They don’t discuss any other options, and then got to college, of course, and really quickly realized that was not the option for me. It is funny, because right now I know wholeheartedly if I were to work in a hospital I would hate—like, I don’t want to work in a medical setting, I don't even like going to the dentist. It would not be for me. But it left me in this place where I had to figure out what I wanted to major in, and it was so anxiety producing. It was scary. It was hard. Nobody could really help me. College Park is a really big campus, and I know there were resources there, I just didn’t find them.
One staff member was a mentor to me, and I would hear about different majors and talk to her about them, and I finally settled on communication. It was really for me, the process of figuring that out, and then working on campus. I worked on campus and residence life and orientation, and there was just something about helping students acclimate to campus. I was giving them what I didn't get—being that resource, giving that information you need, pointing you in the right direction. I found my love in undergrad, which was helping college students. The thing was how to put it together. So first I did res life and college orientation, and in grad school, I did res life again, came out and did community college, like academic advising, and found my way to career services. And this is where I have built my career since 2007.
Q: You recently spoke on a podcast about the role of career service professionals in the student journey. What do you think is the most important thing that career professionals can do for college students?
A: I think that first we have to acknowledge that career professionals are part of student success. Because depending on what school you’re at, or who you talk to, sometimes we’re left out of the equation of student success. But in today’s environment, ultimately, students come to college because they expect to get a good job when they leave college, and I think that the most important thing that we can do is help them to understand that career development is a process.
In our culture in our country, we don’t talk to students about career development and success. What we do in K-12 is say, what do you want to be when you grow up? That’s all we ask folks, right? And most of us, if we think about that, it’s very rare that what we told people in K-12 is what the reality is in college. So most of the time when folks get to college, it’s anxiety inducing, it’s very stressful, because at that point either they have to figure out what they want to do, or they know what they want to do, but have no clue how to make it happen.
And they don’t understand that it’s a process. They wait until their last semester to then start to have to make decisions that are really hard to make under pressure, or they graduate and then realize, I should have had an internship or I need help with my resume. One of the best things that we can do, and what we try to communicate, is this is a process, and you have to engage in the process. No one can do it for you. It’s lifelong, you'll always be doing it, even in retirement people are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives. And it takes a little bit of work to do it, too.
Watch: Lakeisha shares her best career advice and its impact
Q: Now that you’re in your 10th year at UBalt, what makes you most proud about your time working with students here?
A: I would say there are two things. As a career practitioner, I will know the day I need to leave my job is when this no longer makes me happy. When a student comes back and they say I got the interview, I got the job, I landed it, there’s just a joy that that brings to me, because our role is kind of like a transition person in your life. We’re supposed to help you to get from point A to B, or wherever you want to be. So when you hear that person come back and say I did that, it happened, it still brings me joy. It brings me a great sense of joy.
The second thing I’m most proud of is that when I came here, career services was really in a transitory place. They were trying to build the center, and I look back now, and I go wow, how far we’ve come. When I did my dissertation in my doctoral work, it was around satisfaction with career services and I studied our students, and the satisfaction level with our career center is so high, it just makes me so proud. Because you go to some other campuses, and students will say, oh, they are very nice over there, but they didn’t help me. We don’t have that, even when we have to tell students we don’t write the resume for you. … I know when/if I leave the University of Baltimore, my work, with a team, has contributed to building a successful office on this campus. It has been a labor of love, it has not been easy. [laughs] No, it has not been easy. But I don’t know how many career centers can say over 80 percent of students who use their center are satisfied with their services. That’s huge.
Now, the other thing I’m super proud about at UBalt is every freshman takes a career assessment that's administered by my team in IDIS 101, and in WRIT 300, which is the junior-level writing course, there is an employment packet assignment that we created with the faculty, that is a resume and a cover letter. So every UBalt student, once they hit WRIT 300 will have to do that in the classroom, whether they come see us or not. The work that we do should be embedded in the academic experience.
What Charms Us
We end all of our Charles Street Chats with the same question: What do you love most about Baltimore? Here’s Lakeisha’s answer.
What I love most about Baltimore is the culture. I think that we’re definitely Charm City. I’ve been to lots of cities around the country, in the world, and I think that we can stand up to any city when it comes to our culture, our way of being and our energy that we have here in Charm City.