Bernie's Blog Week 6: Fordham Futures: Celebrating Your 'Core Experience'

     My life's work has been to assist Fordham students in developing, identifying, clarifying, synergizing, and presenting the wisdom and practice of the ancient liberal arts. The best careers are those that emerge from the depths of your experience and individuality, careers that reflect your strongest drives and aspirations. Careers that give you permission to be who you are, where you are going, and how do you get there.
      You are participating in one of the most sacred stages of your lifelong journey. This is a time of great emotion for you. You need to embrace your fear, your anger, your sorrow, and your joy as you capture the power of your moment in time. You need to create a new career vision as you seek unique healing connections that reflect the interrelated and interdependent nature of the quantum world in which you live. As you think about your work and your careers in a twenty-first century way, your work related thoughts are your self-related thoughts.
      In the 21st century quantum world of work where the transformation of information and 'big data' into knowledge, and eventually wisdom serve as challenges to you to become aware, appreciative, and accepting your unique experience. Career Services looks to sit at the intersection of academic learning and professional life, where every student's education is anchored in a 'core curriculum' that inspires and celebrates the liberal arts of listening, thinking, speaking, writing, reading, reflecting, measuring, calculating, estimating, and dreaming.
      Below you will find a series of twelve questions about your academic undergraduate experience, these questions are designed for you to ask yourself first, and others later, as you participate in an ongoing conversation about the power and promise of your liberal arts education:

Twelve Curious Questions

1. How do 'core courses' introduce students to a kind of thinking that inspires critical analysis, cognitive curiosity, and eloquent presentation? 
2. How does student participation in a core curriculum assist them in the construction of an academic framework that helps them develop intellectual passions, questions, and ideas and interests that will last them a lifetime?
3. How does the core curriculum nurture a love of learning that can better prepare students for the uncertainties and ambiguities of a 21st century quantum economy?
4. How does Fordham's core curriculum generate a spirit of inquiry that leads to questions about various ways of thinking and knowing demanded by diverse subjects and disciplines?
5. How does the core curriculum foster educational experiences that lead to questions concerning meaning and values, and the nature and purpose of human action which includes an openness to questions of faith and the transcendent?
6. How does the core experience evolve into a quest for wisdom through the practice of the liberal arts of listening, thinking, speaking, writing, reading, reflecting, measuring, calculating, estimating, and dreaming?
7. How does the undergraduate experience bring together life inside and outside the classroom, merging the academic arenas of higher education with the transformative realities of an ever-changing world of work?
8. Within a Jesuit University, where education is equal parts theory and practice, as well as, action and reflection, how can students successfully balance their careers through a lifelong pursuit for spiritual, cognitive, emotional, and physical well-being?
9. How prepared are Fordham students to determine their professional paths, have they developed the qualitative and quantitative skills needed to make informed career decisions?
10. How prepared are Fordham students to face the revolutionary reinvention of the world of work, where globalization, intergenerational demographics, and technological innovation serve as constant catalysts?
11. How effectively do Fordham students realize the benefits of being located in the world's capital of business and finance, communications and the arts, science, scholarship and medicine, law, and international politics?
12. How recognizable are Fordham students as individuals of competence, conscience, and commitment that live integrated, purposeful lives that bring together education and experience, and faith and reason?