I’m Margaret McLaughlin, one of the career counselors in the Cooperative Education Career Development Center. Welcome to Bergen Community College!

On a college campus, the Career Center is the place where students go when they try to connect the work that they’re doing academically with their career goals and the kind of career that they’re looking for once they graduate.

At Bergen, we have a number of programs that are run through our Cooperative Education and Career Development Center. We have a cooperative education program for students that want to go out and gain work experience and earn academic credit at the same time to gain practical experience in the field they’re studying, whether it be broadcasting, art, criminal justice, or a variety of other areas.

We also have a Service Learning Program for students who want to do volunteer experiences involved in community service while they’re students at the college. And we do Career Counseling programs for students who are trying to make decisions about the kind of work they want as they enter adulthood.

We have a resource library here. We have job listings for students. Some of these job listings are full-time jobs for students who might want to look for something upon graduation. We also have part-time listings for students who want to work while they are getting their education here at the college.

The Career Center is also a place where you can get some help with your resume. We run workshops on job interviewing, resume writing, and job search skills. And you can schedule individual appointments if you’re interested to meet with a counselor to help you make decisions about, perhaps, what your college major would be when you move on to a four-year school, or just making decisions about what you’d like to do when you leave Bergen.

So, I hope you’ll visit us at the Career Center when you come over to the college.

Here’s our Resource Library. Usually, you find students working in here, either looking at job listings or researching careers. Here’s our bank of computers. One of our students is working at this time. You can write a resume, search for jobs on the Internet, or use our interactive software program, Sigi-plus. Sigi-plus is our system of interactive guidance and information. Students answer questions about their own preferences and interests and values, and according to the way you’re answering those questions, it matches you to certain careers. When you see a career you’re interested in, maybe you’ll search for more information, and it gives you information about your educational background required, possible earnings, and that sort of information.

Here are the offices where our counselors work. There’s one of our counselors, Professor Short, hard at work in his office.

Can I wave to the camera?

Yes, you can wave to the camera.

We have a great helpful staff. Everybody’s here working hard all the time to schedule appointments.

One of the things that might be of interest to students would be to stop by this wall of information that we’ve put outside the Career Center. One of the counselors in the office has gathered information on just about every program that we offer here, particularly the career prep programs. Each of these information sheets gives you a brief description of what the major’s like and what the career field would be like once you leave the college. It gives you some career titles and some of the skills you might need to work in that field and possible information about earnings and that sort of thing. It’s everything from accounting, art, biology, medical office assistant, networking administration, nursing, criminal justice, psychology, radiography, engineering tech, travel and tourism, horticulture, hotel-restaurant, and world languages is the last one, but there’s lots in between.