UND’s Academic And Career Exploration Has Career Guidance

(Photo by Walter Criswell/UND Today)

(By Walter Criswell. UND Today) – Most students have had a moment—mid-semester, mid-study session, mid-panic attack—where they look up from a problem set or blank Word document and think: “Why am I doing this, and where is it taking me?”

Kyle Braun gets it. That question, he says, is at the heart of the work happening inside UND’s Academic & Career Exploration (ACE) program, a growing service for students and alumni navigating majors, careers and the sometimes-messy spaces in between.

“It’s a very human thing,” Braun said. “It’s the question of, who am I and where am I going?”

Braun is UND’s Academic & Career Exploration coordinator. ACE is about 4½ years old; it was created after University leaders noticed a pattern: students were changing majors, but there wasn’t an easy way to understand what happened next—where they landed, whether they stayed and what kind of support helped them finish.