Becky Vianden Introduction

Hello everyone!

I am excited to be a NACE Blogger! This is my first experience at blogging, and I'm sure it will be fun. Hopefully it will be fun (and of course educational) for those of you reading as well. :)


Currently, I am at the University of Arkansas Career Development Center, serving as Associate Director for Program Development. I'm fairly new in this position - just started in December 2007. My previous experience in Career Services has been as Associate Director of Informatics Career Services at Indiana University as well as some time with eCampusRecruiter as a Software Consultant.


There are several reasons why I was interested in becoming a blogger for the NACE conference, but one of the reasons stems from our attempt at using a blog here at the UA Career Development Center. This semester, we started a blog for our Sophomores, called the "Sophomore Scoop" to provide a place for sophomores to "discuss" career development "stuff" for students at that level (choice of major, internships, campus involvement, etc). We have a real Sophomore student as the blogger, presenting topics for discussion based on her experiences. We envisioned a blog where most of the student learning was coming from the comments that various students would make to the blog - kind of like discussion among the blogger and all those making comments to the blog. Being a blogger for NACE will, I hope, be a learning experience for me not only about NACE related information, but also about the process of blogging. I hope to learn some tips that we can apply to our own CDC blog about how to get those blog "conversations" going. (Any advice welcome!)


This will be my third national NACE Conference. One of my favorite aspects of attending the NACE conference is having the chance to learn about new ideas that are out there. If you're like me, I always feel renewed and refreshed after attending a conference because I see so many great ideas out there that are being done in other centers that I'm inspired to try some of those ideas as well. For example, in our center, we'd like to start a blog in the Fall where we follow a few seniors as they make their way through the job search. And wouldn't you know it, there is a session to be presented at the conference that details this very topic. I'm excited to see how this campus went about doing this, what their outcomes were, and if they'd do anything differently.


And of course, there's nothing better than meeting up with old friends and making new ones at the conference. See you in New Orleans!