When Joseph J. Krutz began his freshman year at Le Moyne College, his mom persuaded him to sign up for something called the Manresa program. He didn’t know just what that was, but it allowed him to move in to his dorm a day early and earned him a stipend of 200 bucks, so he figured, why not?
Manresa, as it turned out, prompted him to shift his career goals and ended up being “one of the best things I did at Le Moyne,” the Amsterdam, N.Y., native said. He is among the first cohort at the Jesuit college in Syracuse to go through all four years of Manresa, which is named for the region of Spain where, in the 16th century, St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit order, underwent a metamorphosis that led to his religious calling. The program is designed to help students align their academic, personal, and career goals. And for Krutz, it did.
He began at Le Moyne thinking that he wanted to major in engineering, but through the small Manresa seminars that complemented his coursework, he realized that he was too extroverted for that to be a good fit. He switched his focus to business analytics and information systems and, after graduating in the spring, began a job as an operations analyst for BNY Mellon, a banking and financial-services company. That involves people-intensive project management and teamwork, he explained. He’s also planning to take the GMAT and go to business school.
Helping find the relevance of undergraduate study to a student’s career goals, temperament, and morality is win-win, colleges are finding. Some students look for that meaningful connection when applying, but even among those who don’t, data suggest that it improves retention and four-year completion. Jesuit colleges incorporate in that search for meaning spiritual, if often secularized, practices like the daily examen, or prayerful reflection.
The Manresa program, which divides participants into groups of 10 students led by faculty and staff mentors, is voluntary. Last fall, the most recent semester for which data are available, it enrolled roughly 19 percent of the 650 first-year students. The commitment is about 20 hours over six sessions a semester for each year a student participates.
The program has four stages. “Become You,” for freshmen, is a preliminary exploration of one’s talents and passions and what careers those might suit. Sophomores examine “Values in Action,” considering whether their core beliefs match their behavior.
Then things get “a little more tactical,” says Deborah Cady Melzer, Le Moyne’s vice president for student development, who helped create the program. Junior year’s “Think Forward” urges career networking, internships, job shadowing, study abroad, service learning, and student mentorships. And senior year’s “Meaningful Success” aids students in defining achievement in a way relevant to them and their communities and considering if their values line up with those of companies they are thinking of working for.
Kristine Carlsen came from a small town in Pennsylvania, and, she said, “I unexpectedly had a very difficult time adjusting to life in college.” Manresa “helped me get over the anxiety of meeting new people.”
“I definitely still possess some social shyness, awkwardness,” Carlsen said. “However, when I do now, I like to think back to Manresa — and my experience at Le Moyne as a whole — which helps remind me that I’ve experienced and overcome these feelings before.”
The 2019 graduate has a job as a software engineer in the electronic-warfare division of SRC, a nonprofit R&D corporation headquartered in Syracuse, but a senior-year Manresa seminar got her thinking about reclaiming an earlier dream of working in CGI effects for film.
Alex J. Cimino Jr., another 2019 graduate, represents the third generation of a family of emergency responders. He was among a small group that set up Le Moyne’s first state-certified emergency-medical service. A biology major from Syracuse, he realized — with help from Manresa alumni and community networking, as well as from career advising — that in the long run he wants to acquire the management skills to coordinate larger-scale disaster response. Toward that end, he’s working as an EMT in Syracuse but eyeing a master’s in emergency management to prepare him for a career at the Federal Emergency Management Agency or elsewhere in Homeland Security.
That’s the kind of thoughtful career planning that Steven G. Affeldt, an associate professor of philosophy and one of the faculty directors of Manresa, hopes for. When helping to design Manresa, he said, “like many in academe these days, I was struck by parents’ and students’ increasingly narrow professional approach to college.” The program is designed not only to help students figure out their first professional steps, he said, but future ones too. Students in college today are likely to go on to multiple careers, he said, and Manresa is “designed to help them think about themselves — who they are and what gives their lives meaning and purpose — in ways that allow them to fruitfully navigate these kinds of career transitions.”
Do What You Love
Like Affeldt, the Rev. Brian F. Linnane was struck in 2005 when he became president of Loyola University Maryland, in Baltimore, by how “transactional” students were in their approach to the curriculum. “They really weren’t finding happiness or joy in their academic work.”
He sought a way to help undergraduates, especially first-generation-college students and those from minority groups, “connect with faculty in the tenure track who are excited about their disciplines and could communicate that excitement.” He suggested two linked semester-long first-year seminars to help freshmen develop a better sense of self, as well as skills in college success. Faculty members were at first skeptical of what became the Messina program, named after the Sicilian city where St. Ignatius founded the first Jesuit college. Professors feared that the program lacked sufficient staffing, so Linnane authorized 16 new tenure-track positions to ease the burden.
The Messina seminars, required of all first-year students, coalesce around four themes: “The Visionary,” “Self and Others,” “Stories We Tell,” and “The Good Life.” Those in a seminar together often room near one another in the residence halls. The seminars last 50 minutes a week and are led by a trio — a professor, a staff member, and an older “evergreen” student mentor. Some of the content is loosely drawn from core courses the seminars are paired with. One of the nine “Visionary” course pairings, for instance, is “Introductory Psychology” and “Engineering, Design, and Creativity in the Built World.” Among the dozen “Stories We Tell” pairings are a science-oriented English class, “Understanding Literature: The Story of Science”; and a chemistry class, “The World as It Was, Is, and Could Be: Chemistry and Society.” But sometimes the seminars explore the practical, intellectual, and emotional transition to college in more straightforward ways.
While most Loyola classes have 25 to 30 students, Linnane said, the Messina seminars have 16 and require significant writing and speaking. “That’s part of the requirement,” he said. “There’s no place to hide.” That human scale is echoed in more-personal interactions than one might find in a larger lecture course. A professor for the Messina seminars, who is also the students’ adviser, might invite the class to dinner. “That is an important interaction,” said Linnane, “a human interaction with an intellectual in their home. These are real people with families.”
Triumph Akpabio, a junior from Lanham, Md., took Messina seminars in her freshman year, paired with English and photography courses. Her relationship with her Messina faculty adviser was key to her consideration of a major. She started out thinking she’d concentrate in computer science, possibly with a double major or a minor in English, but her adviser counseled her to take her time making that decision. After enjoying two business classes her sophomore year, she ended up in information systems, with a special interest in data analytics.
The “supportive environment” of Messina, she said, encouraged her to take a breath and consider her choices methodically, “and gave me a sense of peace and belonging.” As she became a student “evergreen” sophomore year, she got to give back and build her confidence, too, talking with Messina freshmen about time management.
Akpabio is a Pentecostal Christian, not Roman Catholic. Before Loyola emailed her during her senior year of high school, she hadn’t even heard of the Jesuit order, but she was looking for a faith-based college “with values I can relate to.”
Vocation in the sense of religious mission is key to the Jesuit mind-set, said Le Moyne’s Affeldt, but vocation in the more general, secular sense of aligning one’s values and practical goals is what these programs strive to instill in students of all faiths, or no religious faith at all. The colleges want their graduates to do what they love, do it well, and know why they’re doing it.
As Loyola’s Linnane puts it, “The world does not need another mediocre, unhappy accountant.”
