Samantha Budzyn, a junior at the University of Iowa, wants to work in community or behavioral health after she graduates, so landing a campus job at the wellness office seemed like an obvious career move. One month after she began the 20-hour-per-week job, her supervisor sat her down and asked her to reflect on how, exactly, her academic courses influenced her job, and vice versa. The questions were part of a systematic effort at Iowa to make campus work experiences more meaningful by getting students to link the often-mundane hours spent on the job with their broader academic and career goals. The program, called Iowa GROW (for Guided Reflection on Work), also reflects a growing awareness in academe that institutions need to better prepare students for life after college.
Iowa now requires it for all 2,000 students who work in the student-life division—including food-prep workers at the student union, referees for intramural flag football, and many others.
Ms. Budzyn’s supervisor, Tanya Villhauer, helped her see how the surveys that she distributes in classrooms, which ask about topics like alcohol consumption and contraception use, eventually become part of a larger data set used in the National College Health Assessment survey. Ms. Budzyn, a health-promotion major, has drawn on the data to write papers for one of her courses, “Physical Activity and Health.”
“The meeting with Tanya really bridged the gap between being a student at the university and being an employee,” Ms. Budzyn says. “I knew that working at Student Health was a great thing for my résumé, but I never really put the connection together.”
The seed for Iowa GROW was planted five years ago, when George D. Kuh, an expert on student success and the founder of the widely used National Survey of Student Engagement, gave a talk on campus.
College students spend relatively little time in class; many spend more time at work. Studies by Mr. Kuh, an emeritus professor of higher education at Indiana University, and others show that about two-thirds of all undergraduates work, and about a quarter of students work on campus.
Mr. Kuh urged Iowa administrators to think about how to squeeze more educational value out of the work experience. Students who reflect on the connections between their job and their classes are more likely to persevere through the early years of college, says Mr. Kuh, who now leads an institute focused on helping colleges use assessment data to improve undergraduate education.
“Too many students leave college early because they don’t see any benefit,” says Mr. Kuh. “Whether it’s ‘Introduction to Psychology’ or ‘The History of Western Civilization,’ they don’t see any relevance to current life. Most students find concrete experiences easier to understand and process, and work is a concrete experience.”
The Iowa program requires supervisors to meet with each student worker at least twice each semester. The conversations can be as short as six minutes, and can be open ended, but they must include four questions that connect learning and work, including: “What are you learning here that’s helping you in school?” and “What are you learning in class that you can apply here at work?”
The program draws on the latest thinking about how students learn, says Sarah Hansen, the university’s assistant vice president for student life. “This is a very basic ‘learning theory’ intervention,” she says. “It acts on the evidence that if we don’t use knowledge and connect it to other experiences, it doesn’t stick in our brains.”
A 2013 survey of nearly 500 Iowa students, including workers who had gone through the GROW program and a control group that had not, found that the GROW students were more likely to report that their jobs helped them reach goals outlined by the university for on-campus employment. Those goals include improving writing, speaking, and time-management skills and developing an ability to interact with people from different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.
The university started Iowa GROW in 2009 with a pilot project, focusing on jobs where supervisors were already having some dialogue with student workers about the intersections between academics and work. Jobs like food service, which Ms. Hansen says are “harder to connect” to coursework, were added in 2010. Tom Rocklin, the university’s vice president for student life, required all divisions to begin taking part during the 2012-13 academic year.
Full-time employees who oversee student workers aren’t always enthusiastic about the program. Some Iowa supervisors don’t have college degrees themselves, and may not feel comfortable or see much merit in trying to connect, say, a dishwashing job to academic coursework. Supervisors who oversee dozens of students, meanwhile, may chafe at the increased workload of holding meetings with them. The university now allows supervisors to conduct group meetings, with up to eight students per session.
“It’s like any innovation—people need to get used to it,” Mr. Rocklin says. “We’re certainly seeing that supervisors are buying in more.”
The program is attracting interest from other institutions: Ms. Hansen says she now fields four to five inquiries per week about Iowa GROW. Mr. Kuh regularly touts the program during visits to other colleges, and he and Ms. Hansen gave a presentation about it at this year’s meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
The university has trademarked Iowa GROW to “protect the fidelity” of the program, Ms. Hansen says, but Iowa happily shares information at no cost with other universities who want to start their own GROW programs.
Schreiner University, in Kerrville, Tex., is adopting GROW this fall as a way to reinvigorate its work-study program, which employs about 300 students.
Ohio State University has just started a new program designed to improve the on-campus work experience in its Office of Student Life, which employs more than 5,000 students. Jen Pelletier, who is overseeing the new effort, decided to incorporate GROW after seeing the presentation at the AACU meeting.
“When I hear a student say, ‘My job is just answering phones and transferring calls,’ I say, sure, but if you think about things in a more transferable mind-set, the job is to provide an excellent communications experience for a diverse staff of students and professionals,” Ms. Pelletier says. “GROW helps raise students’ awareness about ways to articulate those transferable skills that they’re gaining.”
At Iowa, some supervisors are still figuring out how to draw students into the conversation. Carson Dinger, a residence-hall coordinator who oversees 14 assistants, says his student workers often struggle to identify classroom experiences that could help them in the workplace. He tries to prod them with examples.
“If you’re doing a group project for a class, and one student doesn’t do any work and the rest of the group has to carry that student, what does that tell you about working in a team environment?” he says. “A similar situation at work is when one of your co-workers is sick and you could fill in, but you choose not to. How does that impact the team?”
While Katie Bottorff, a senior at Iowa, finds the GROW framework repetitive—"the same questions, over and over,” she bemoans—she says the visits with her supervisor have been highly productive.
Ms. Bottorff works as a gym attendant, selling memberships and checking in students. She hopes one day to work full time in student affairs, and will be applying for master’s-degree programs next spring. Her boss, Justin Holman, has helped her see that her time spent at the check-in desk is more meaningful than she first believed.
“I work one-on-one with the students who come in every day,” Ms. Bottorff says. “It’s basically just practice for what I may one day be doing on a larger scale.”
