DEM Centers Belonging Through Student Employment at the UW Advising & Career Services Conference

On Wednesday, February 23rd, Ally Bartelme (RO), Nicole Kaforski (OAR), and Devin Deegan (OSFA) presented at the UW–Madison Advising & Career Services Conference. Their presentation, Leveraging Student Employment to Impact Sense of Belonging on Campus, explored how academic advisors and career services professionals can advocate for student experiences that promote a sense of belonging on campus. The session featured 2021 student employment data that shed light on the UW–Madison student employee experience, including that over 75% of student employees feel their campus job has helped them to feel a greater sense of belonging at UW–Madison. Participants also learned about how trends in higher education have shaped the student employment landscape. This included the 8 key characteristics of high-impact practices and how they can be interwoven into student employment experiences to create positive student impacts. With this, attendees learned about their role in supporting student employment as a high-impact practice, leveraging reflective conversations to help student employees to make connections to campus. Throughout the session, academic advisors and career services professionals had the opportunity to collaborate with one another and share strategies and resources for how they would help students to make these connections and better understand their sense of belonging on campus in the future. Attendees left the session with a toolkit of resources, adapted from DEM’s student employment best practices, applicable and adaptable for advising conversations to help promote a sense of belonging on campus. We encourage student supervisors in the DEM community to leverage the resources below and please reach out if you have any questions. Thank you for all you do to support our student employees! Presentation resources: