Bernie's Blog Week 2: Fordham Futures: Aware Prepare Present

     Fordham Futures is an introspective, non-linear, career therapy approach focused on career awareness, career preparation, and career presentation that sits at the crossroads of academic learning and professional life, and is centered in and around the convergence of ideas and practices from a wide range of social and physical sciences. Fordham Futures looks to create an atmosphere and environment where individuals listen to themselves, sense the treasures within themselves, empower their imaginations, and inspire their call to action.
      Fordham Futures effectively utilizes a liberal arts perspective to Awareness, Preparation, and Presentation that expands horizons, enhances focus, and assesses alternatives through the perceptive prism of student intelligences, aptitudes, talents, values, interests, and skills and abilities. Unlike most career services centers, all members of our Career Services team are required to counsel students, even the members of our Employer Relations staff, we do this in an effort to stay in touch with the 'career voices' of our students as we prepare them to tell their stories. Additionally, all counselors are trained in a career therapy approach that uses the ancient liberal arts of listening, thinking, speaking, writing, reading, reflecting, measuring, calculating, estimating, and dreaming as tools of inquiry in facilitating these healing conversations. We understand that this list of liberal arts is limited, and not exhaustive, consequently, counselors are encouraged to use their creativity in expanding their career counseling conversations.
      Fordham Futures, from a career education approach, rests on five critical fundamental learning objectives:

1. Students will be empowered and instructed on how to enhance their experiential descriptions necessary for effective career diagnosis, richer understandings, and expanded conversations.
2. Students will be exposed to an environment of exploration grounded in self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-understanding that encourages creativity, empowerment, and action.
3. Students will participate in an approach that begins with, and is centered around, an awareness, appreciation, and understanding of a 'core experience' that provides individuals with a continuous developmental context that enables them to blend their academics with the intricate realities of a highly competitive world of work.
4. Students will recognize that in a concept, idea, knowledge economy; where employers are seeking creative, analytic, strategic, flexible, 'big picture' thinkers, individuals need to balance their careers through a life-long pursuit for cognitive, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
5. Students will leave behind the 20th century career counseling models that are centered and realized through retrospection and projection, while, at the same time, moving to a 21st century career therapy model vested in introspection, self-awareness, and connectivity.

      On March 2, 2011, Steve Jobs introduced Apple's iPad to the world: "Technology alone is not enough. It is technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing". In the iPad, Apple created a product that is more intuitive than a PC because it lives at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.
      Career futurist and technology writer, Daniel Pink, like Jobs, understands the power, the promise, and the future of the list bernal arts. Pink realizes that we are moving and merging an economy and a society built on the logical, non-linear, digital realities of an Information Age blessed with the inventive and empathic capabilities to detect ideas, concepts, patterns, and opportunities in a concept, idea, knowledge economy. Pink dramatically states: "The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind - creators and empathizers, pattern recognizes, and meaning makers. These people - artists,inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, counselors, big picture thinkers - will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys."