New campaign introduces students to public service

Colleges and career centers that want to provide their students with more information about job and internship opportunities in government face challenges, representatives from some of the schools in the Partnership for Public Service's Call to Serve program said at a conference last week. But both the schools and the Partnership are optimistic about the program's potential and growth.

The conference helped five Call to Serve schools that recently received $3,000 grants from the Partnership strategize about how to launch Making the Difference, an education campaign about public service. The grantees include the State University of New York at Albany; Brown University; California State University, Sacramento; Washington University in St. Louis; and Western Michigan University.

"Making the Difference will make sure students are aware of these opportunities and will help connect students to young feds already in service so they can get the real scoop on government service," said Max Stier, president and chief executive officer of the Partnership for Public Service in Washington.

During brainstorming sessions, participants said they needed to deal with negative perceptions of government by students and their parents. Those impressions sometimes are reinforced by the complexities of the federal hiring process, which hobbles students who have to make quick decisions about summer internships or full-time jobs.

The schools' representatives also said they felt they needed to make public service stand out from other opportunities, in part by making clear the variety of jobs available in government, connections between students' academic interests and agency work, and financial benefits like loan repayment programs.

In addition, the schools noted that they had many opportunities to reach out to students through existing programs such as career days, handbooks, e-mails and faculty advisers, and could incorporate information about federal employment in training programs, classes and admissions information.

Tim McManus, the Partnership's vice president for education and outreach, said conference participants reached the conclusion that "they really need to be strategic and prioritize where they put their efforts.

"It's easy for colleges and universities to look at the number of activities first and then look at the impact, rather than stepping back and saying, 'let's focus on three activities or three types of efforts that would get some bang for the buck,' " McManus said.

Brad Golson, associate manager for education and outreach, said he felt the conference built a sense of unity as well as a sense of the scale of the project.

"We walked away with a team," Golson said. "We walked away feeling we are in this together; this is a community we're building. Rome wasn't built in a day, and it wasn't built by one person."

McManus said that sense of community would be particularly helpful as the Call to Serve grantee schools go through the next steps in the campaign, including revising outreach plans, working with Partnership staffers and launching programming tailored to each campus. Ultimately, he said, he hoped that the collaboration between the schools would become self-sustaining.

"Our goal is to continue to build that Call to Serve network so it's not schools calling us, it's schools calling each other," Golson said.