<rleton College’s Strategic Planning Foundation meets every ten years to discuss the school’s future, and that ten-year mark has arrived once again.
The process is composed of 13 working groups looking at different facets of Carleton’s operations.
David Diamond ’80, who heads the Career Preparation working group, has been busy at work leading discussions on ways to enhance the College’s support for students’ post-graduation plans.
“To define our assignment as ‘careers’ is way too limiting,” Diamond said. “One of the things we treasure most about Carleton is that it’s not so career-oriented … we need to help students figure out what they want to do, without being proscriptive about what they should do.”
The Career Preparation group is also working with the search committee to find the next Career Center director. Whatever the committee decides to change, “the director is charged with making these changes happen,” Diamond said.
The group is not focused solely on the career center, also examining every facet of students’ experiences at Carleton.
“There are five hundred students [in a class] and five hundred different paths,” Diamond said. “And these paths tend to meander.”
Because there is no single outcome that all Carleton students are expected to attain, there is no clear way to increase Carleton’s ability to prepare its students for life after college.
Dave is optimistic about his group’s ability to make some improvements.
“We got a lot done in January and we’re reasonably confident that we’ll be able to hit our timing,” he said, but declined to provide details of what the group was proposing, saying “it’s a little too early to report on conclusions… [we want] a large vision, not a lot of small details. We want that vision to be encompassing and thorough.”
According to Diamond, who has extensive experience with strategic planning in the business world – many companies see strategic planning as relatively unimportant, but “[Carleton President] Steve Poskanzer is taking it very seriously, and doing it very well,” he said.
Although preparations have been underway for eleven months, the real process of strategic planning – creating the road map that the College will follow for the next decade – did not begin until mid-fall.
At the end of April, each working group will each submit documents suggesting improvements Carleton should make over the next ten years.
“One problem with strategic planning is that you tend to spend too much time having long conversations about things you knew that you agreed upon anyway,” Diamond said.