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As Queens College’s new executive director for Career Success, charged with guiding students through the often daunting process of finding fulfilling work after graduation, Melissa Faulkner brings firsthand experience that particularly suits her to her new role.
To be sure, her resume boasts considerable professional credentials. But it’s her own personal experience that she says has motivated her to help students find a path to a career that will not only make something tangible of their studies and personal experiences but will also bring them a sense of personal fulfillment.
Faulkner explains that, like many QC students, she was the first in her family to go to college and received no guidance at home as to what to expect from the higher education landscape, let alone how to navigate it to a career: “There were probably no expectations put on me: ‘She’ll graduate college and get a job and live a life similar to the lives we lived,’ which was a lot of struggle and not being fulfilled in the work that you do.”
Having earned a BA in anthropology at Seton Hall University, Faulkner says her family seemed truly mystified when she elected to continue on to graduate school to receive an MA from Seton Hall’s School of Diplomacy and International relations with concentrations in International Education and Human Rights.
Career Climb
“I think the reason I went into career education is I had a very bad experience,” she says. I’m a first-generation college student, so I wasn’t getting any guidance at home about how to enter the professional world and be prepared for it. So, I woke up senior year and thought, ‘I’ve heard this word internship. Maybe I should go to the career center and ask about internships.’”
When she told the receptionist she was an anthropology major she was told they had no internships for her. “So, I turned around and I left, and like most other humanities majors, I decided to go to grad school.”
Later, a graduate assistantship opened up in the career center, and as Faulkner explains, “Because of the way I had filled out my First Destination Survey at graduation I must have sounded so clueless that they reached out to me and had me meet with the director, herself.
“She was helping me put together my resume and at one point she asked me, ‘What do you see yourself doing? What does the work environment look like? I’d never thought about that, and I kind of looked around her office, and I said, ‘I think something like this.’”
“A graduate assistantship became available in her department; I interviewed, and I got the role. . . It was just happenstance. It was just the aligning of planets that had me fall into a career that I ended up loving because my passion is to help other students who have the cards stacked against them, and really, I believe in making experiential education opportunities more accessible to them because they were not accessible to me.
The Good Fight!
“So, I do think that I fight for the people who really just don’t know what they’re doing—because I had no idea what I was doing. I was lucky enough to have everything fall into place for me, and then I just followed my heart. I just really want to be able to put students on the right path, so they don’t waste time going into a major because a family member told them they’ll make a lot of money in that major, or they’ll always have a job in that major, but it truly doesn’t align with who they are as a person.”
That personal element truly matters to Faulkner. As with so many aspects of today’s college experience, Artificial Intelligence is increasingly becoming the elephant in the room for career guidance. Faulkner observes that with students increasingly turning to AI to help them do things like create a resume or write a cover letter, it still lacks the human element: “The fact of the matter is that AI doesn’t really know that student at all. So, I do think there are ethical ways to use AI, and there are ways that are flat out not reflective of the person and their experience.
“I think that students need to have conversations about what they’re capable of, how to articulate everything that they’ve learned in the classroom, all the skills that they’ve learned at part-time jobs or campus jobs, so that their documents when they’re applying for internships or full-time positions really reflect what they’re capable of.
“What I find is that that’s sort of what’s missing: that students, if you ask them what they did in college, they’d say ‘I’m a sociology major,’ but they don’t know how to articulate the skills that they learned and why they are ready for the professional world. And that’s where the one-on-one conversations, attending workshops or events, that’s where they become greatly beneficial to a student’s plans, long term.”
Faulkner comes to Queens College from New Jersey City University where she served as director of Career and Professional Development. She has previously been director, Center for Career Education at Bloomfield College. At Montclair State University she served as director of the Center of Career Services and Director, Cooperative Education and Internships, Center for Career Services. She has also been director, Career Development at Felician University; a career counselor and first-year advisor at Monmouth University; and director, Career Planning and Study Abroad at Cedar Crest College. Faulkner is also past president of the New Jersey Association of Colleges and Employers and co-founder and past president of the New Jersey Career Center Consortium.
Faulkner also volunteers as a career counselor at Unchained At Last, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting child marriage and forced marriage in the United States.
“It’s very rewarding work,” she says, “but I have to put on my thickest skin when I have these conversations with women because you can’t believe what some of them have been through. My inclination is to always fight for the underdog and really empower them, and that’s exactly why I do the work I do where I do it.”
Team QC
Faulkner says she’s very honored to take on this responsibility for Queens College: “I’m excited to work with the faculty, the teams, the administrators, the students, the alumni, everybody who has skin in the game to strengthen the career outcomes and, of course, to advance the social and economic mobility of the students.
“This isn’t work that I can do alone, so I’m very excited to expand collaboration across the entire institution. I’m also here to listen and to learn and then to partner with everybody to build a career ecosystem that serves every single student there. I think this is about transforming lives: being able to make sure that every graduate translates their education into meaningful, purpose-driven careers.”
Faulkner, who describes herself as “a devoted cat mom,” has a 19-year-old daughter who’s a sophomore who will be returning home from studying abroad in Ireland and who will no doubt be the recipient of plenty of career guidance at the kitchen table.
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