The most expensive college degree is the one that is never used, and much of the college-debt problem traces back to unfinished degrees. Both are symptoms of a career-discovery system that is inadequate for the task. Students spend twelve years largely segregated from industry, and local support functions have limited engagement with it, so career choices are often driven by the few professions visible in popular media. With the internet, it is possible to build an active, structured environment that helps students explore careers in depth and humanizes the process. Beyond function, SAMWISE aims to transmit wisdom from professionals to students. This paper describes a work-in-progress system addressing these issues.
GANDALF: A Real-World Solution to the "Soft Skills" Problem for Engineering Careers
The skills required to succeed in the workforce differ from those learned in academia. Academia emphasizes individual learning; industry emphasizes teams executing a shared mission. Industry asks for graduates with "soft skills," but the deeper need is people who can function within an enterprise. Academia is ill-positioned to teach this, given its relative isolation, credibility gap, and reliance on lecture formats over interactive role-play. This paper describes the GANDALF project, which combines internet technology and industry consortiums to onboard students and young employees into the world of work.
