One of the many topics of conversation at ECE External Advisory Board (EAB) meetings is the difficulty in recruiting students to a field as broad and diverse as ECE. A separate, but related, discussion is always how best to help current ECE students to better understand career options after graduation.

ECE EAB member Dr. Rahul Razdan is the founder and CEO of NextGenEdu, an education research and technology company focused on career discovery for students and building products to help facilitate this process. They’ve created a product called Scholarly, a platform that enables students to discover and learn about careers through video interviews and network with industry experts. The crux of the product is to build an engaging career exploration flow based on the concepts of contextualization, humanization, and pathways. Contextualization is provided by showing the economic map of the job market based on BLS and Wall Street Analysts data. Pathways consist of degree, concentration, and course options. Finally, humanization consists of curated videos of alumni showing various pathways in the job market.

ECE Florida has volunteered to serve as beta testers for the product and members of the EAB, led by ECE alumna Christina Lopez (Florida Power and Light) and Sarah Knight (Talem IP Law, LLP), have been invited to participate and share their career journeys to the platform. If beta testing is successful, ECE could use Scholarly as a tool for our outreach, career planning, and even development efforts.

The system works best with a broad and deep set of alumni. The team invites all interested alumni to share their own career journeys and to share their wisdom with those who are trying to learn. Interested? Please contact Rodger Polanco at rodger@nextgenedu.net.