ExperiencED

David Kil is an active technology entrepreneur. For a new company that uses causal AI and machine learning to help businesses connect their actions to outcomes to improve results. He was the chief data scientist at Civitas Learning from 2021 to 2023, where he developed college student success analytics to improved retention and graduation. He has participated in about a dozen companies in similar ways, since he started as the manager for Intelligent Systems at Rockwell Science Center. David got his BS degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign in Electronics Engineering and Chemistry. His MS degree in Electrical and Electronics engineering at NYU and an MBA degree and Management and Finance at Arizona State University. I met David when he worked at Civitas and several Provosts and I got a SUNY grant to tie the New York State Department of Labor salary database to the content of programs at a few SUNY universities, particularly in regard to how much that program utilized internships and other experiential workplace experiences.

As it says on LinkedIn, her “professional and personal goals are to always have a positive impact in the lives of others through my work.” In the corporate community, she is committed to listening carefully to the needs of clients, partners and colleagues. She strives to provide quality, innovative and cost-effective cyber security solutions that achieve collective goals with integrity. She believes the development and maintenance of positive, trusted and long-term relationships is paramount to any measurement of success. In all the communities she works with - corporate, educational and volunteer - success may be defined by the profitability of the company, the diversity of the workforce, student body and curriculum, and the engagement of membership. In the educational community, she is inspired by the students she teaches because of their tenacity and curiosity about cyber security. She aims to teach and mentor them with enthusiasm and encourage them to have the confidence to consider a career in cyber. In the volunteer community, She gives back to New York City - the city I grew up in and am proud to call home – by supporting the mission to exchange information and create public-private partnerships. Jennifer got her BA in English and Spanish at Columbia University and her Doctorate of Law from Cardozo School of Law with a focus on intellectual property. She is the founder and President of Women in Cyber Leadership Inc., works as a volunteer at InfraGuard, is the Global Head of Cyber Alliances, taught a cybercrimes course for iQ4, was the senior director for cybersecurity at Kroll, and had many other industry and volunteer experiences. She teaches now as a lecturer at Hunter College, CUNY, and has taught courses at the Guttman Community College at CUNY. She is an inspirational teacher who reaches students with practical demanding and supportive classroom instruction in a topic that could turn into their career.

Dr. Stephanie Doscher is the Director of the Office of Collaborative Online International Learning or COIL at Florida International University (FIU). She received her BA degree in History at Emory University, her Master’s degree in Education at Western Washington University, and her Doctorate of Education from FIU. COIL at FIU or anywhere it is practiced involves a partnership between two or more professors teaching courses in the same or different disciplines while located in different institutions and different countries. By being team-taught and project-based, the COIL structure creates a global learning experience for the students and the professors that does not require international travel. It does create an important opportunity for learning about global collaboration through relatively short-term deliverable projects and that provides important opportunities for student reflection and growth. Thus, COIL is a growing part of the increasing experiential education movement in higher education that also drives student interest in internships and other activities.

Dr. Norah McRae is the Associate Provost for cooperative and experiential education at the University of Waterloo, one of the largest co-op schools in the world. She is also head of the Secretariate of the World Association of Cooperative Education (WACE) for promoting work-integrated learning and the sustainable knowledge society. It is in both capacities that we interview her in this podcast. Dr. McRae’s professional career began at the University of Victoria in 1992, where she earned her PhD in 2014 after earning her Master’s degree 1987 in Business Administration at the University of Alberta. At Victoria, she rose to be the Executive Director of Cooperative Education and Career Services, and in 2018, she moved to Waterloo to take her current position as the Associate Provost. In 2023, she completed additional training from the Institute of Corporate Directors in Toronto. In this interview, Dr. McRae discusses her interest in transformational learning and how that relates to Work Integrated Learning (WIL) or as sometimes called Cooperative Education (Co-op). She discusses the move of the WACE secretariate from its founding location in the USA to its current location in Waterloo, Canada, the recent World Conference there in June of 2023, and WACE’s programs and role as the only international WIL or Co-op organization under the network-of-networks idea.

Nicole Mclean is the Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at InStage, a company based in Canada that uses conversational artificial Intelligence simulations (i.e. avatars), which among other things, allows college students to practice their interview talks for internship or cooperative education positions before doing them. Nicole’s career began at Scotia Bank where she saw the problems of preparing junior people for presentations and applied simulations there as the head of the Calgary Training Center. However, she was interviewed here as the simulations are very useful to safely and conveniently help students gain interview skills so they can land an experiential education activity such as an internship that could be key to their career launch. In this interview, Adrienne and Nicole discuss more of Nicole’s origin story and personal affiliation for practicing public speaking, and why such simulation practice is important. They consider the fact that some 74% of InStage users report an increase in confidence on their first interview, particularly when the students come from under-served backgrounds and seek to enter technical fields but lack the soft-skills needed to land the job.

Ricardo Torres has been with the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) for 27 years having earned a BS degree from Manhattan College and an MBA from Georgetown University. Over that time the NSC has become a trusted partner for 3,600 colleges and universities and 17,000 high schools, creating unique pathways that can track the journeys of learners throughout their educational careers. More recently, the NSC has become involved with the Learning and Employment Record (LER) that documents skills that could be useful to post-graduation employment or even further schooling. Here, the NFC works with the federal government, states, the National Governors Association, colleges and universities, and major corporations. This podcast reviews some of that work and the implications of an LER for universities, their students, and business. The idea of skills documentation, done right and ubiquitously, and done with modern technology has profound implications for all involved. As Rick says at one point in the interview, it takes the friction out of that interaction. And that builds a better outcome for all.

After graduating from RPI and starting to teach science in high school, John Cimino responded to another force within him that took him into a career in opera. At first dabbling but then introduced at the Metropolitan Opera and trained at the Manhattan School of Music and Julliard, he had a major break in winning a contest and performing with Pavarotti in the production of La Boheme at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. John went on to win some 20 national and international awards. But already he was thinking of how music could be used to inspire new perspectives. His first co-founding of a non-profit came in 1972 with Associated Solo Artists, then two decades later with Creative Leaps International, and finally much more recently in the Renaissance Center. John was mentored along the way by Vartan Gregorian who headed the Carnegie Corporation of New York at the end of his career. In this work, John likes to say that he wants to “set the heart and mind in curious, exploratory motion,” and that is the overlap with experiential education as examined generally in this podcast. Listen in or read the transcript to explore with us these concepts and parallels to getting people to be inspired.

Dr. Karsten Zegwaard his degrees at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, up through the PhD. He served as senior lecturer and director of cooperative education, both in engineering and in Science, he has been the director of work-integrated learning research office and the office of the vice chancellor. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Work-Integrated Learning (IJWIL), the major outlet for such publications worldwide. He also currently serves as Vice President for Work-integrated Learning in New Zealand, Vice Chair of the International Research Committee Oceana, is a board member of the World Association of Cooperative Education, and has won many awards for his research. He has a new book coming out this summer with co-authors Advances in Research Theory and Practice in Work-integrated Learning: Enhancing Employability for a Sustainable Future, as well as another works coming later.

Ken Smith founded JAG (Jobs for America’s Graduates) 40 years ago in Delaware to help struggling high school students get some work experience while they were in school. Since then, JAG has grown to serve 1.5 million students in 40 States with an overall graduation rate above 90%. That is particularly impressive since JAG tries to target the most vulnerable students who are the least likely to graduate. This podcast recounts that JAG story from its origins. It highlights some of the operational structure in working with the States and reviews its important accomplishments and why they occur with these students. Does this story sound familiar? If so maybe it is from knowing the motivating impact on students of internships and cooperative education in colleges and universities. JAG may be primarily in high school, but it's lessons are for higher education as well.

Dr. Alex Johnson is a Speech Language Pathologist and the Provost at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions. MGHIHP is an independent, but affiliated, higher education institution that offers degrees in nursing, speech pathology, Physical Therapy, and many more health professions. As such it has long embraced the blend of classroom-based teaching and experiential learning that characterizes most of medical field training. This conversation reviews that effort at integration for broad lessons learned for all of higher education. It begins with a discussion of Dr. Johnson’s own history as a student and early administration positions. It continues with a focus on experiences with simulations that work in the current virtual educational environment, resulting from the pandemic but that likely will continue as part of a growing trend. We note that Dr. Johnson was President of the large American Speech-Language Association and that he received its highest honors in 2013 for contribution to the field. His current research interests and publications range from medical speech-pathology to higher education itself and they include two co-edited textbooks.