UDSKRIFT 🔗
Welcome to career connections. Welcome to the Career Connections podcast.
I'm your host, Kevin Fullerton, the Director of Career Development at South Dakota State University.
This podcast is a space I'm going to use to explore career development topics.
Some of the topics discussed will be specific to South Dakota State University, but I will also have content that will be useful for off campus folks too. Whether you're current South Dakota State student, faculty or staff, alumni, parent of a college student, prospective student, or a career development professional, I think you will find these conversations useful.
The first portion of this episode will be information about my background. Then I will transition to information about my office. A simple yet impactful way for students to explore career paths is to learn from older professionals, and I intend to provide these kinds of insights on this podcast. If you are a higher ed professional, regardless of your title or function on campus, if you work with students, take time to share your background. Students need to hear our stories early and often.
In my early professional life, I was solely focused on building a career as a musician. I got into music seriously when I was in high school. I had some profound experiences performing music and those experiences locked in my passion drive to be a professional musician. First, high school jazz band. We performed a variety of kinds of arrangements of pieces that I enjoyed and the feeling on stage, getting that instant feedback from the crowd, along with the camaraderie that I felt for the jazz band, really sealed it in for me. Another experience was in the All-State orchestra. This performance was really the first time that I had experienced what it was like to be in an ensemble filled with people who had all auditioned to be there, won their spot to be there. It was so excited to be there in that, in that room with that group working to make the best music we could. As I learned about all the different ways one can have a career as a musician, I became more and more committed to the discipline, and by the time I graduated from high school, I was determined to become a professor of trombone at a university somewhere, somehow.
In college, I pursued that path. I attended Iowa State University for my bachelors. I was recruited for to earn my Masters in Performance from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Once I graduated from UNL, my girlfriend and I at the time, now my wife of 20 years, we moved to Kansas City where I tried to continue developing my music career. There I found a day job and that I started building the trombone studio in the evening and tried to find some gigs here and there.
What ended up happening, though, was I developed vocal dystonia in 2004, which, as I understood it then, is a task specific muscle disorder. This can happen with golfers or chefs or professional athletes, essentially, anyone focused on a high skill, repetitive task in a high stakes environment. For me, this developed in my embouchure- or my mouth- which prevented me from being able to produce a sound in my trombone. So I found myself at a crossroads in 2004. There was not very much research on this phenomenon. I had some consultations with some professors that I knew. Uh, we're dealing with dystonia on their own, but it was really a very isolating feeling. And much of my identity was wrapped up into being a musician. And now I didn't really know if I had that anymore. It's hard to teach if you can't demonstrate that. I couldn't perform, and it completely changed the way I relate to music. It had a profound effect on my approach to music and how I listen to music, whether I even want to be a part of music.
So this started a period of a lot of questions. I was 26 years old with a bachelor's and master's degree in music, and no clear idea of how to really apply that knowledge and skill anymore. But I decided to double down on my music background. I was granted an opportunity to teach music appreciation at Tulane Community College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Teaching at Killian Community College really sparked this interest in musicology. I rarely can just listen to music without wondering about the musicians influences, their biography, uh, the music's position within the genre, all sorts of stuff. I hadn't identified myself as a musicologist, though. Typically a musicologist specializes in research on historical time periods, such as Baroque or Renaissance music. I didn't really consider the possibility of being a musicologist who focused on 20th century American music and jazz. So I decided to go back to school and earn a master's degree in musicology at the University of South Dakota. There, I was able to teach different music courses and got into research. And this this work propelled me to Lawrence, Kansas, where it earned my PhD in musicology at the University of Kansas, which I completed in 2018.
When I was working on my PhD. I had a G.t.a or a graduate teaching assistantship for the first three years while I worked on my coursework. After the GTA expired, I found full time employment and a support role in the Experiential Education Department at the University of Kansas School of Pharmacy, and this work entailed coordinating the rotations that pharmacy students completed at various stages in the curriculum. To many people, it seemed really odd for someone with my background to work at a school of pharmacy, but I learned there were really many connections to experiential education and pharmacy curriculum and the music curriculum.
So my time at the School of Pharmacy allowed me to translate my music skills into a different realm and fostered a real appreciation for experiential education. Through this work, I developed a keen interest in career development, which guided me to South Dakota State University, where I am now serving as the Director of Career Development.
Focusing on creating environments where students can do the work of developing their own professional identity is gratifying and meaningful work for me, so I'm truly grateful for the opportunity to be in this role.
Currently in the Office of Career Development at South Dakota State is a centralized career office, meaning there is only one official career services location on campus. We are located in the Student Engagement Center in the University Student Union, and we offer services to students, alumni, employers, and faculty and staff. So for students, we offer individual career advising. This encompasses career and major exploration, resume preparation, cover letter and personal statement, coaching, interview prep as well as interview practice.
My career coaches are really great and meeting students where they are in their development and guiding students through their conversations that can go in many directions.
For employers, we offer ways for them to engage with our students. This is most visibly recognized as career fairs. We host between 9 to 10 career fairs during the academic year, some of which are for specific colleges and some are for the university as a whole. All students and alumni can attend the career fairs regardless of their degree program.
Keep an eye out for the upcoming episode devoted to the career fair, what it is, and how to prepare for one. In addition, for employers, we work with, uh, to help them with jobs in the online job board called handshake. We organize recruiting events and help bring employers to campus to meet with students at events, or perhaps an interview day.
For faculty and staff. We offer a menu of options. We can help faculty create career development assignments for their courses in class, presentations and workshops. We're working hard to develop a career everywhere mindset on campus, and I have implemented a Career Champions Workshop that provides information and resources to faculty and staff on career development topics, strategies to implement the information in the classes and advising sessions, and ideas on collaboration with my office. My office is striving to be a comprehensive career services office that can essentially help anyone who comes through our door.
For more information about our services and resources, please visit our website.
careers.sdstate.edu
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Career Connection. Going forward, you can expect to hear episodes focus on the other staff in my office, specific topics such as career fairs, and information about different degree programs. I am also going to provide content on different employment opportunities, and we will learn from other professionals from outside of South Dakota State University.