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Career
Center’s ‘SPA Team’ fosters marathon mentality
Marathon
runners and political campaign volunteers understand better
than most that success results not from a scrambled, last-minute
dash, but from a long, well-planned course. Perhaps that’s
why Travis Sheffler, left, and Chris Hughes, right, known
in the Career Center as the “SPA Team,” are so well
suited to helping School of Public Affairs (SPA) students
understand that career paths need an early start.
“We
all encourage students to get in here as early as possible,”
explains SPA career adviser Travis Sheffler, an avid
marathon runner in his spare time. “It’s not just
about coming in with your résumé when you’re
a senior. It’s about finding out how your interests,
values, and skills match up with careers and then planning
accordingly.”
While
Sheffler’s respect for pacing no doubt stems from having
completed five half marathons and two full marathons, his
commitment to the value of long-term career planning is also
rooted in professional experience. As a business major in
college, Sheffler made the common mistake of waiting until
his senior year to think seriously about his career. As a
result, while he landed a good job as an analyst and editor
for a Dow Jones news wire, he felt unfulfilled.
“I
knew that financial analysis wasn’t where I wanted to
be,” he recalls, “so I began to explore a lot of
other career avenues, looking into everything from entertainment
jobs to the hospitality industry.” Casting a wide net
of informational interviews, Sheffler built for himself the
kind of networking and self-discovery process he now helps
his advisees assemble. The process not only led him to a career
in advising, which eventually brought him to AU last summer,
but it also reaffirmed his faith in the very process he now
urges students to explore early on. “I went through the
process myself,” he explains, “but a lot later than
I should have.”
Like
Sheffler, political junky and SPA internship advisor Chris
Hughes speaks from experience when he tells students they
can get a head start on their careers with the right internship.
His own political engagement, which has led him to volunteer
on political campaigns for candidates ranging from Bill Clinton
to Representative Mike Doyle, D-Pa., sprouted from an internship
with Senator Arlen Specter, R-Pa., that he landed while a
junior at Penn State.
“It
was a great experience,” Hughes recalls. “I actually
got to meet Tom Ridge before he was a household name. I was
only a junior and I was facilitating a meeting between the
senator and state law enforcement officials. This is what
I try to tell students who sell themselves short. There’s
a lot of experience you can get before leaving school.”
Despite
his passion for politics, Hughes’s love for working with
students led him to choose a counseling career over one in
government. However, after several years of academic counseling
in various institutions, Hughes joined AU this summer in a
move he sees as “a way to marry these two passions.”
Known
in his office as the “human Google” for his encyclopedic
knowledge of political trivia, Hughes was actually first bitten
by the politics bug much earlier than his internship with
Senator Specter. In the late 70s, when President Jimmy Carter
was campaigning for a Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate,
a then seven-year-old Hughes had the chance to shake the president’s
hand. “That was it for me,” he recalls. “That
was the moment where I really got into this stuff.”
Committed
as they may be to long-term career planning, even Sheffler
and Hughes would probably admit that beginning your life’s
work that early is a bit extreme. —MG
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