Sessions

In this session, we will share our five-year quest to launch a comprehensive personal and professional development program called READY. This session will be of interest to institutions that may want to consider how to start their own programs, to learn from challenges, and to maximize success.

While general education programs often make claims around relevance in their missions, students consistently report the opposite. This presentation focuses on the transformation of general education at St. Ambrose University, which—with support from a NetVUE Program Development Grant—sought to move relevance from the margins to the center of student experience during an institutional merger of St. Ambrose and Mount Mercy University.

This session features two institution-wide, four-year vocational development initiatives—Berry College’s The Berry Journey and Salve Regina University’s Salve Compass—rooted in each campus’s mission and designed to help students cultivate purposeful goals, planning mindsets, and a sense of calling for their lives and work. Through scaffolded curricular and co-curricular experiences, and by intentionally integrating vocational exploration […]

This session introduces two distinct models for embedding required, internship-based experiential learning grounded in student needs and vocational exploration into all majors at a small liberal arts college. Drawing on current programs at Warren Wilson College and Trinity Christian College, presenters will examine how required internships—implemented through differing levels of scaffolding and institutional structure—can connect academic learning to career development, calling, and life beyond college.

As students discern callings and consider future possibilities, it is essential that they interrogate the narratives that they have inherited concerning work and purpose. This presentation invites participants to explore both of these aspects of their vocational inheritance and to consider how examining these stories can create generative spaces for new stories and possible futures for our students and our colleges and universities.

Driven by our mission to prepare students for purposeful lives and meaningful service, Campbell University has recently taken intentional steps to integrate the language of calling and vocation across academic disciplines and student-facing departments. This session will outline our campus-wide self-assessment process, as well as the creation of professional learning communities and workshops that sustain this work.

In this session, a business school dean, a director of a “Business for Humanity” program, and a director of a leadership and service institute share strategies for integrating business students into vocational programming and inspiring them to connect careers with callings.

Georgetown College’s NetVUE Grant for Reframing the Institutional Saga focused on three pivotal events: the college’s separation from its founding denomination in 2005, faculty action to prompt a change of presidential administration in 2012, and the removal of all institutional debt ($28.5 million) in 2024. The development of this narrative brought together trustees, faculty members, staff, and the college’s graduates in a process of institutional self-examination.

Writing is a powerful tool for vocational discernment. In this session, presenters will share how a program at Saint Louis University supports students in discovering their calling longitudinally through a series of core classes, culminating in a retreat as they prepare to apply to professional schools.

Educators from two small Catholic universities will present two models for faculty development and vocational education. The presenters will share their “lessons learned” and resources to help participants develop mission-informed projects at their institutions.