CHAMP started its largest year yet this spring with a new stipend for students and talks of expansion.
CHAMP is the College of Human Development, Culture, and Media Honors & Alumni Mentor Program, a unique partnership between CHDCM and the Career Center. It is designed to pair top-performing students with alumni mentors from leading companies across various industries. Throughout the spring semester, students have the opportunity to meet regularly with an alumni mentor to discuss industry insights, professional development, and any questions they may have about their future career path.
Jeronimo Valcarcel, director of student success at CHDCM, discussed the jump in participants for this year’s program.
“The largest CHAMP class before, to my knowledge, has been about 20, 25 maybe? And we received 41 applications,” Valcarcel said.
Not only does CHAMP have more participants, but the program also has an ever-growing, consistent alumni group from which to draw mentors, Valcarcel said.
Bryan Crable, Ph.D., founding dean of CHDCM, went into further detail about how the program selects its mentors to ensure students have good experiences.
“We tend to choose folks who have been out for a while,” Dean Crable said. “Someone who’s established in their field, so it’s really an opportunity to connect with someone who can give you very direct advice.”
But where do these mentors and alumni come from, and how can CHDCM and the Career Center consistently keep up their successful recruitment? The answer lies with the program’s co-founder Paul Ward, SHU alumnus and current president of Grom Social Enterprises, Inc., according to his LinkedIn.
Ward, who spent most of his career as an executive vice president at Nickelodeon, started CHAMP to give students in CHDCM a competitive edge through connections and real-world experience in the fields mentees are interested in, Valcarcel said.
Alyssa Martinez-Tovar, a senior visual and sound media major with a concentration in sports media, is a former CHAMP participant. She explained how her relationship with her mentor differed from a regular internship and reflected Ward’s vision for this mentorship.
“CHAMP offered me kind of a mentor who was in that real world,” Martinez-Tovar said. “And even though Amanda [her mentor] isn’t, so to say my exact major…I feel like CHAMP offered someone to actually go to who has an everyday job and who’s still in [the industry].”
Martinez-Tovar added that CHAMP offered her a mentor who could help her with any real-world questions while also giving her an example of someone having a position Martinez-Tovar would like to see herself have in the future.
“CHAMP gives you that mentorship in the sense of like, ‘Hey, here’s a real person that you can talk to,’ even though it’s a little awkward at first,” Martinez-Tovar said.
Eugenio Granato, a junior visual and sound media major with a concentration in film, explained how the pairing between mentor and mentee works.
“The Career Center, they match you with the best person that matches your major,” Granato said. “They’re not going to put a business student with, like, a nurse…they’re going to send you someone that’s more geared towards your industry so you get more out of it.”
Farnsworth Hendrickson Jr., a senior visual and sound media major with a concentration in film, had a complicated experience with CHAMP last semester. Unlike many of his peers, he said he was never allowed to meet with his mentor in person.
“I wish I learned a little bit more from him and I wish I was able to meet with him in person in New York City so I [could] get a better understanding,” Hendrickson said.
Not only was he unable to meet with his mentor in person, but Hendrickson said he worried their concentrations weren’t necessarily aligned.
“My main focus within media is film,” Hendrickson said. “[My mentor’s] was TV. Which kind of relates towards film, but unfortunately it wasn’t really my desire.”
Despite this experience, Hendrickson said he is still embarking upon his second semester with the program, wanting the same connection but more in-person experiences.
Given the high rate of students’ appreciation of CHAMP, Dean Crable seeks to expand the program to education majors and graduate students, though nothing is confirmed yet.
“Our current plan is to sort of build out from our communication base and extend to educational studies students,” Dean Crable said. “My ultimate vision would be to extend it across the entire [college], which would mean graduate students as well as undergraduate students.”
However, expanding doesn’t stop at including more majors. Dean Crable said he is looking to expand CHAMP beyond N.J. and N.Y. in the future.
“Might we even create something like possibilities for a small number of students to go out to a place like L.A.,” Dean Crable said. “Or somewhere else that isn’t driveable or trainable, but could give you a nice leg up into specific kinds of careers.”
SHU is working overtime beyond these proposed expansions to support their students in CHDCM. In partnership with the Career Center, CHAMP is offering a highly-coveted $2,500 stipend to four CHAMP participants who secure unpaid internships this spring semester.
“You’re participating in CHAMP, you’re showing a lot of potential, here’s a stipend to help you out with some of the costs for that internship,” Valcarcel said. “College is not cheap at all and life is not cheap.”
This stipend isn’t the only new resource being introduced by the Career Center. New VMock technology is now available for every SHU student.
VMock is a new artificial intelligence-based technology that helps students build and create resumes. The director of the Career Center, Jorge E. Rivera, explained how this technology works.
“So if you upload a resume…once it’s uploaded as a PDF file, the system will then review the resume,” Rivera said. “It may take 10 minutes, and then once the AI reviews it, it will provide the student with a score.”
VMock can also refine resumes to be ideal fits for specific jobs.
“You could upload the job description and the system will then compare your resume with that job description so that it can give you the best chances of aligning what you’ve done to the job description that you’ve just uploaded,” Rivera said.
This new technology does have a limit, though, as students are only allowed 10 uploads a year, Rivera said. Despite this limitation, VMock technology allows advice from the Career Center to be uniform and allows the center to reach more students than ever before.
“We wanted to make sure that students were all getting the same information and hopefully through VMock, that’s what they’re going to get,” Rivera said.
From CHAMP to new technology, CHDCM and the Career Center consistently look for new ways to expand.
Martinez-Tovar said she will soon embark on her next journey but remains positive for what is yet to come, thanks to the CHAMP program.
“I’m graduating next semester, so yeah, it’s always a scary thing,” Martinez-Tovar said. “But like I said, CHAMP has really helped me out in the settling of, ‘It’s okay, it’s going to be okay.’”
Kaitlyn Campeau is a writer for The Setonian’s News section. She can be reached at kaitlyn.campeau@student.shu.edu.
