Courtesy of Bates Center for Entrepreneurship and Leadership
Following a $5.6 million donation from Lewis & Clark alum Heidi Hu ’85, the Career Center will expand its career development programs next fall with the launch of the Career Accelerator, described on their website as a “game changing program designed to combine the power of a liberal arts education with technical, job-ready skills.”
Hu had also made financial contributions to help renovate the Fowler Student Center, containing the Hu Media Lounge, which was named after her to honor her donation.
The new program was made in collaboration with the Bates Center for Entrepreneurship and Leadership.
It will offer two paid internship classes for juniors and seniors in the Fall 2025 semester, as well as two more in Spring 2026. The program will require students to have a pre- or corequisite one-credit skills class through the Bates Center.
Senior Associate Director of the Career Center Nina Olken explained that the purpose of the Career Accelerator program is to provide hands-on opportunities in order to better prepare students for entering the workforce after college.
“We know that a really important part of what students come to college for is to learn the skills that they need to go out and be productive people in the world of work. And we also know that sometimes our students maybe aren’t as able to seek out hands-on, experiential learning opportunities like internships … And so what this initiative is doing is it’s giving us the funding and the resources that we need to expand sort of what we do to allow more students to take advantage of those types of opportunities and then become better prepared for the workforce,” Olken said.
Olken, who has worked for LC for 14 years, has witnessed numerous changes to the Career Center throughout time. Yet, she remains excited about the Career Center’s latest update.
“When I first started, we were joined with essentially what is the Community Engagement Office (now known as the Center for Social Change and Community Involvement). And so we were doing both, sort of community engagement, service learning work as well as career development work,” Olken said. “And then over the years, we sort of disbanded into two separate centers so that we could really focus on those concentrations. And then over the past, I would say, seven to ten years, we’ve sort of stayed pretty stagnant in terms of our resources and our people, and now we’re really excited to be getting this influx that we’ll be able to do a lot with.”
Olken described the Career Accelerator’s approach to fuse the benefits of liberal arts education with real-world and job-ready skills.
“Liberal arts education provides you with that foundation, those concrete, sort of fundamental skills, like critical thinking, problem solving, all of that kind of stuff,” Olken said. “But you also need to learn how to apply it in the real world. And that really comes through (with) that experiential piece, where you’re in the world of work, you’re at an internship, you’re doing a project, a case study, a research experience, something like that, where you get to see how to implement those skills pragmatically in real life.”
Brian Detweiler-Bedell, a professor of psychology and the executive director of the Bates Center, explained the importance of career-readiness.
“We want students and their parents to care about getting internship experiences and career-related skills while they’re here, so that upon graduation, it’s more likely that you’ll have early successes, whether it’s careers or going on to graduate schools,” Detweiler-Bedell said.
According to Detweiler-Bedell, the Career Center has been underfunded for the past ten years. Hu’s donation will expand both the Career and Bates Centers’ work to help students thrive after graduation.
“The way that it works when you’re working with donors is often you have these needs,” he said. “You have a whole lot of needs at Lewis & Clark, but you wait until one of our needs resonates with a potential donor, like Heidi and her husband, Dan. And I think what the donors recognized was that the Career Center’s doing some great stuff. The Bates Center’s doing some great stuff. Wouldn’t it be great if the two partners collaborated in a way and built a new, broader system of career development and internship experiences at Lewis & Clark?”
The college will offer 30 spots total between two different internship courses next fall. Every one of the internships will be paid.
According to Chrys Hutchings, the managing director of the Bates Center, the internships include a variety of fields for students to choose from.
“Ten years after graduation, 80% of students work in a field outside their major, and so we want to give students a buffet of experiences so they can choose that strength there,” she said.
In addition, Hutchings explained that the Bates Center has reformed the prerequisites for these internship classes to encourage more students to participate, as well as waiving the requirement that students must be Entrepreneurial Leadership and Innovation minors to enroll.
“It’s for all students,” Hutchings said. “So we’ve taken out the barrier that they have to be a minor to get into the internship class. The only thing you have to do to get into the internship class is to be a junior or senior and have taken one of the skills classes.”
Both the Career and Bates Centers are excited about the Career Accelerator program’s debut next fall. Yet, the number of students willing to participate in the program has yet to be determined. Despite some level of uncertainty, they look to a bright future ahead of them with the Career Accelerator program.
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