Beginning next year, UCLA students can have their community
service and leadership accomplishments recorded and validated in a
service transcript, for use when applying for jobs or to
professional and graduate schools.
“UCLA is built on three things: service, academics and
research,” said Farheen Malik, Community Service commissioner
for the Undergraduate Students Association Council. “Our
students are really involved outside their academics and research,
and they have no way of showing it.”
The service record pilot program, which will be administered
through MyUCLA, will only be open to a small number of campus
organizations: the Community Service Commission, the Community
Programming Office, Circle K, the Student Welfare Commission, the
Student Initiated Outreach Committee, Bruin Belles and Unicamp.
If the 2005-2006 pilot program is successful and well-received,
it will be expanded to other student groups in the future.
The service record could be utilized by students in many
different ways and would be helpful to students applying to
graduate or professional schools or for jobs, according to the
proposal.
This type of portfolio management should help students turn
their experience into marketable employment skills, said Kathy
Sims, director of the UCLA Career Center.
Students can enter projects they have been involved with, tasks
accomplished, hours served, awards received and leadership
positions held into their record.
There are also a variety of verification options, depending on
students’ needs. If students plan to submit their service
transcript with a resume, they can choose whatever level of
verification they feel sufficiently legitimizes their record.
While the group or project verifies the individual
accomplishments of students, the Center for Student Programming
confirms that the group is in good standing with the university and
its stated purpose.
“We’re the second layer of verification, since we
couldn’t possibly know firsthand every one of the
students,” said Joan Brown, associate director of the center.
“We know many of them, but there are many we don’t know
who do great things.”
Sims said the career center already has a resume feature that
allows students to track their experiences online, including
community service.
Employers with job or internship opportunities can access this
information through the career center to fill their openings. When
the career center was consulted about the service record, employers
they contacted said they would prefer not to look into a second
resource.
“Employers want a one-stop shop at UCLA; they don’t
want to go to a number of different sources to recruit at
UCLA,” Sims said. She advised that any student who uses the
service record to be sure to transfer the information into a career
center BruinView resume as well.
The current proposal from the Community Service Commission is
the first student-initiated effort to bring a service transcript to
UCLA.
“(The administration) is open to the idea, because
it’s basically enhancing the school,” Malik said. The
service record would not only be useful as a tool to students, but
also to the administration, as it could be used to develop
statistics regarding the volume of community service that students
participate in, Malik said.
But hang-ups on the logistical details, such as which student
groups will be involved and how service hours will be verified,
have delayed the approval process.