With fewer than three weeks of formal instruction remaining, some graduating students are greedily counting down the days to commencement.
Others are less than excited.
The difference between the euphoric graduates and the fearful ones likely has to do with their job opportunities after they turn the tassel. With “after college” formally and quickly approaching, the pressure is on to find meaningful employment fast.
One critical resource that can aid our search is UCLA’s BruinView, an online job-posting database offered by the Career Center that allows students to look for both national and local jobs and internship opportunities.
This board is grateful that UCLA offers such a service for its students and is acutely aware that Career Center administrators cannot fully control the number or quality of opportunities that become available. But we find BruinView to be insufficient for the purposes of grads-to-be. Gaining quality, long-term employment is perhaps the single most important reason we go to college. Having an employment resource for students that is fully functional, robust and effective is an absolute necessity.
The site lists jobs posted in 2007 and jobs with application due dates as late as 2014. Many positions are outdated or of such a low quality that they have not been filled in years. This makes students looking for meaningful opportunities feel as though they are wasting their time. There must be more rigorous filtering to streamline our job search.
It is clear also that UCLA’s individual departments are not working with the Career Center to share the opportunities they distribute through their listserv. This sort of territorialism and selfishness is opposite of the sort of collective spirit we need to help every student be successful.
These problems rest in the laps of Simplicity, the contractor hired to manage the site, and the Career Center administration and departmental administrations collectively. Subsequently, department heads must do their part to aid the Career Center by adding their own resources to BruinView rather than hoarding them.
Certainly, responsibility lies with students as well. Many highly specialized jobs require great individual initiative to obtain. Students ought to not rely solely on the university to place them in jobs; however, UCLA can and should make the resources that currently exist more efficient.
This board recognizes how fortunate students are to have BruinView, and we also understand that workloads have increased for everyone because of budget cuts. However, we collectively find the user experience on BruinView to be largely unsatisfactory at the time when we most need resources like this.