Center for Career and Professional Development Archives

Internship Paints a Picture of a Path for Community, Child Advocacy

Posted on September 15, 2022September 15, 2022

Community Building Internship 1 — Anna Canales ’23 helped plan and run the EASEL arts and science experiential learning summer program for grades 1–5 at Eastside Youth Strong

Book Cover for Community Building Internship recipient Anna Canales says "Anna wants to Be a Teacher" by Anna Canales — An art history major who wants to teach art before becoming a child advocacy lawyer, Anna Canales ’23 wrapped up her Community Building Internship with Eastside Youth Strong’s summer arts and sciences program by writing a children’s book about her experiences.

Portrait of Anna Canales '23 — Anna Canales ’23

For Anna Canales ’23, a desire to help in the community has often been constrained by the need to work in order to remain financially stable, while also taking classes full time.

This summer, a Community Building Internship (CBI) through the Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) made it possible for Canales to serve in her community and experience a potential future path. Each year, the CCE and the Center for Career and Professional Development offer K students the opportunity to apply for CBIs at a wide variety of local organizations. The positions usually last six to eight weeks, and interns are on the job for 30 to 40 hours a week while earning a stipend.

Growing up in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, near the border with Mexico, Canales saw many families separated due to immigration cases and other reasons. She herself spent time in foster care as a child and was adopted at age 13. Those experiences have shaped both her desire to volunteer and her plans for her future.

Canales has been heavily involved with the CCE, where Assistant Director Moises Hernandez ’17 has served as a mentor for her, and many of its partner organizations. She has worked with Kalamazoo dual-language elementary school El Sol, Latino community foundation El Concilio, and foster care organizations.

Majoring in art history, she plans to teach art for a few years before going to law school to become a child advocacy attorney.

For her CBI, Canales helped plan and run the EASEL arts and science experiential learning summer program for grades 1–5 at Eastside Youth Strong. The organization aims to help young people in the Eastside neighborhood in Kalamazoo graduate and develop social and emotional strength.

“When I read the mission statement of Eastside Youth Strong, I was really emotional about it,” Canales said. “I cried during my interview, and she told me, ‘It’s OK. It’s good that you’re passionate about children coming from low economic backgrounds and diverse backgrounds.’ Being with kids outside of the traditional school environment was important to me.”

Through the CBI, Canales was able to observe different teaching styles and also practice advocating for children.

“There were two different teachers in the program and they had such completely opposite teaching styles and ways of interacting with the kids,” Canales said. “I could pick and choose what I thought was working and what I thought wasn’t that great of a strategy for me personally. It was almost like shadowing in a classroom; it was a lot of input in how I would like to run my own classroom.”

In addition to helping with lesson planning, Canales was responsible for ensuring the students’ physical, social and emotional needs were being met.

“A lot of it was making sure everybody felt comfortable, everybody was respectful, everybody was having fun while learning,” Canales said. “While the teachers were teaching, my job was to make sure the kids felt like they were being heard, they were being seen. If they needed anything, I was the one to make those calls to parents, like, ‘Hey, does your kid need shoes? We can get them shoes.’ Or, ‘Your kid said they can’t eat XYZ, we’re going to work to get them a lunch provided that they can eat with their dietary or religious needs.’ Making sure the kids felt supported was my role.”

While Canales was initially intimidated by that role, by the end of the program she found herself feeling connected to the families and pleased that she made a difference. Many parents expressed appreciation for her efforts, and some asked her to babysit or tutor their children.

Watching kids who started the program shy and reserved blossom in confidence was Canales’ favorite part of the internship.

“It was so special seeing them grow and be more confident in themselves,” Canales said.

Canales learned a lot about supporting students’ social and emotional growth through the CBI.

“A lot of what I was learning was about the social emotional stages the kids are in, never getting upset or showing that you’re upset about something, no matter how stressful the kids’ behaviors could be,” she said. “I was always trying to find a solution and be the one in control of the tone, the mood, everything, and understand where these kids are coming from.”

Canales hopes to stay involved with Eastside Youth Strong in the future.

“I really appreciate that a lot of the people are women or people of color and that they do programs all year round,” she said. “You can really tell that they care about where these kids are coming from and where they’re going.”

In addition to the CCE, Canales has been heavily involved at K with the Pre-Law Society, Women of Color Alliance, Anime Club and K Desi, and this year she will serve as an interfaith leader. She has worked in the library, where Collection Services Librarian Leslie Burke and Digital Services Librarian Ethan Cutler particularly mentored her with helpful conversations about life after college. Professor of Art and Art History Christine Hahn and Assistant Professor of Japanese Brian White have also been mentors for Canales.

“I feel like so many people at K have impacted me,” Canales said.

She is grateful for the opportunity to pay that forward to the young students on the east side.

“As a full-time student who has to work, I don’t always have time for everything I want to do,” Canales said. “But I do my best to help when I can.”

Bell’s Brews Networking, Career Research for K Students

Posted on February 20, 2019March 22, 2022

Sixteen Kalamazoo College students took advantage of a winter break day to network with professionals — including several K graduates — in the beer-making facilities at Bell’s Brewery, named the top-ranked brewery in America in 2018 by the American Homebrewer’s Association.

Students look inside kettles at Bell’s Brewery tour — Kalamazoo College students who participated in K to Bell’s, the latest K-Trek offered through the Center for Career and Professional Development, peered inside a kettle during a Bell’s Brewery tour.

The trip was the latest K-Trek offering from the Center for Career and Professional Development (CCPD), which provides K students with in-person, immersive discussions with leaders in various industries, many of them K alumni.

CCPD Assistant Director Rachel Wood helped plan the event and attended, noting the students asked a panel of Bell’s Brewery representatives, including founder and Kalamazoo College alumnus Larry Bell ’80, engaging questions about the beer industry and the process of starting a business.

In their responses, panelists gave advice about what they look for in prospective employees, noting the importance of an applicant seeking a work-culture fit rather than just an appealing job description. For example, “at Bell’s, you kind of need to appreciate beer, but chances are you will be working in something other than brewing,” Wood said. Regardless of the role, “it’s important to find a place to work where you can show up and it’s not just work.”

Bell’s founder Larry Bell talks with students about his business and the beer industry during the latest K-Trek, K to Bell’s.

Aside from the founder, the Bell’s Brewery panelists included five K alumni from a variety of majors who graduated between 1990 and 2014. All of them noted how well K prepared them for the work force.

“The students hear similar advice from [CCPD] career coaches, but it’s always extremely helpful for them to hear it from people in the field,” Wood said.

Bell himself discussed having multiple lifelong interests, all of which were nurtured at K through the liberal arts and sciences, including theater.

Bell noted that “he played the character Oberon in a sixth-grade production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, and that inspired him to later name a beer Oberon,” Wood said. In Bell, “the students saw someone who is living a liberal arts life.”

Bell’s brewery tour — Kalamazoo College students participated in a Bell’s Brewery tour during the latest K-Trek, K to Bell’s, offered through the Center for Career and Professional Development.

After an hour-long lunch, the K students split into smaller groups where they embarked on brewery tours, allowing them to witness the full process of brewing beer.

“It was nice seeing the full process because anybody attending could’ve had any level of knowledge of beer making going in,” Wood said. “We sampled three different types of barley to see how it could impact flavor, and there were students taking video” to retain what they learned.

According to the Bell’s Brewery website, Bell founded the company on Sept. 19, 1985, when he sold his first commercial beer after brewing it in a 15-gallon soup pot. Bell’s has had several milestones since, including selling outside Michigan for the first time in 1990, opening Michigan’s first on-site brew pub in Kalamazoo in 1993, opening its Comstock brewery in 2003, and expanding the Eccentric Café in 2015. Today, Kalamazoo County is number one in the state of Michigan in the production of craft beer, and Bell’s is one of Michigan’s most famous brands.

While many K-treks venture out on multi-day experiences in cities such as San Francisco, New York City and Chicago, there are plenty of industries to explore in K’s backyard. Along with Bell’s, local K-Treks have included trips to Kellogg’s in Battle Creek, Stryker in Kalamazoo and Steelcase in Grand Rapids. Wood said other local K-Treks are being planned and students should stay tuned to find out where they will go. Learn more about K-Treks events such as K to Bell’s at our website.

Inaugural K-Talk Shows Power of Alumni Ties

Posted on October 20, 2017April 5, 2023

[Hear more from Matt Thieleman in a TEDx Talk from Sept. 8, 2018.]

It’s an experience many Kalamazoo College alumni can relate to: spending four years working and learning with amazing and inspiring classmates, then going your separate ways, never to have the same sort of connection again.

Karman Kent and Matt Thieleman talk to the K community at the first K-Talk — Friday, Oct. 20, was the first event in a planned K-Talk series that Joan Hawxhurst, director of the College’s Center for Career and Professional Development, said will make it possible for alumni such as Karman Kent (left) and Matt Thieleman, both ’07, to share their ideas and experiences with the K community.

But for Karman Kent and Matt Thieleman, both ’07, a convergence of opportunity and expertise launched a post-college professional collaboration aimed at bringing the beneficial effects of mindfulness to stressed-out college students – an experience the two spoke about before an audience of students and fellow alumni in Dewing Hall on Homecoming Friday.

It was the first in a planned K-Talk series that Joan Hawxhurst, director of the College’s Center for Career and Professional Development, said will make it possible for alumni to share their ideas and experiences with the K community.

The project that renewed the ties between the two former classmates began after Kent joined Morehead-Cain, a foundation that provides full-ride merit scholarships at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Now the foundation’s director of scholar selection, Kent found a community of high-achieving students, not unlike those at K, who were often severely stressed by the difficulties of meeting their own high expectations and those of others.

Thieleman, meanwhile, had launched a career in social media marketing, then discovered a passion for developing future leaders through training in mindfulness, the practice of focusing one’s attention on what is happening in the current moment. He launched a Nashville-based consultancy that, as he puts it, helps people recognize that actually “being present” in a situation is key to developing the ability to see the way forward in an increasingly noisy world.

Kent – seeking a way to get students to open up about their troubles – reached out to Thieleman, who brought his expertise to UNC for a seminar. He and Kent said they saw a surprising and “profound” transformation in the Morehead-Cain students who participated, with 95 percent recommending the program to others.

Thieleman continues to counsel students. And Kent said the foundation was so impressed with the results that it has hired a full-time adviser to coach its scholarship recipients in mindfulness techniques.

Hawxhurst said Kent and Thieleman’s experience points out the potential power of the K experience during and after college. Kent concurred.

“At Morehead-Cain … the alumni network is one of the biggest benefits to being in the program,” she said. “We have so many amazing alumni here at K. If we can have that kind of openness to working together, it can be transformative.”