Author: Mollie Ames

For generations of college students, having a campus job typically meant swiping meal cards, shelving library books, and staffing residence halls in shifts squeezed between classes and into the evenings.

Madison LoMedico’s campus job looked different. Three mornings a week, the SUNY Oneonta student went to an elementary school, where she worked with young students in one of the district’s highest-poverty schools. Some days she led reading groups or helped students catch up in math. Other days she floated around the classroom, helping children stay focused while teachers taught lessons. Sometimes she worked with the school counselor in small friendship groups for students struggling socially.

“It was one thing to learn all this stuff in school,” said LoMedico, who just graduated with a major in human development and family studies and a minor in educational psychology. “But it was an entirely other thing to actually be in the field.” 

Unlike many students pursuing education or social-service careers, LoMedico wasn’t volunteering or completing an unpaid internship. She was getting paid. LoMedico was part of the inaugural cohort of the Empire State Service Corps (E.S.S.C.), a growing SUNY initiative that pays students to perform community-based public service work connected to some of New York’s most pressing social needs: food insecurity, K-12 tutoring, peer mental health support, sustainability projects, and veterans outreach. In exchange for 300 hours of service during the academic year, students earn wages, professional experience, and, many say, gain a stronger sense of purpose in their larger civic environment. 

For LoMedico, the appeal was immediate. “I did want to get a job at school, but I was always stressed about how I was going to balance it all,” she said. “If I could really connect it to what I want to do one day, build my resume, build my skills — that’s something that I’d be really interested in, rather than just working in a store or something.” 

When the program launched in 2024, SUNY leaders hoped students would respond enthusiastically. Even they were surprised by how quickly demand exploded: More than 2,000 students applied for the first 500 positions. 

The model is deceptively simple but unusually ambitious: Instead of asking students to volunteer for free or cobble together unpaid internships, the program compensates them for meaningful service work tied to both workforce development and civic engagement. More than 40 percent of SUNY students are Pell-eligible, according to program leaders, meaning many come from lower-income households and need paid employment while attending school. 

“I did want to get a job at school, but I was always stressed about how I was going to balance it all.”

In practice, that means a student interested in counseling might work in peer mental health outreach. A future educator can tutor elementary school children. Students concerned about food insecurity can support campus food pantries or SNAP outreach efforts. Others help high school students complete their FAFSA applications or participate in environmental sustainability projects. 

“What we wanted to do was create these paid, meaningful opportunities that address community needs and also help support students in their career path,” said Jamie Frank, SUNY’s senior associate vice chancellor for policy implementation and access initiatives. 

Back in 2023, in SUNY Chancellor John King’s first State of the University Address, he introduced the goal that every SUNY undergraduate would have the opportunity for a high-quality internship or research experience before they graduate. Knowing there would be equity issues among students who cannot afford to work for free, he developed the concept behind the E.S.S.C. and received enthusiastic support from Governor Kathy Hochul. Just three years later, E.S.S.C. appears poised for a major expansion. Pending final state budget approval, SUNY officials expect the program to double in size for the 2026-2027 academic year, growing from approximately 500 students to more than 1,000 paid service positions statewide. 

The increase comes at a moment when educators, psychologists, and civic leaders are more vocally advocating for national or state-based service programs for young adults. Conversations about civic disengagement, loneliness, political polarization, and workforce preparedness have revived interest in structured public service opportunities as a way to strengthen both communities and democratic culture.

Across political and educational circles, there has been renewed conversation about whether structured public service should play a larger role in young adulthood. Advocates argue that civic participation can strengthen empathy, social trust, and democratic engagement while helping young people develop maturity and purpose with job experience.

E.S.S.C. offers a distinctly contemporary version of that idea: not compulsory national service, but a paid, practical, career-connected model that treats civic contribution as both economically necessary and personally transformative.

Chancellor King has repeatedly framed the program not simply as student employment but as a broader civic investment. “The Empire State Service Corps program empowers our students to take on civics and service opportunities that benefit all New Yorkers,” he said. “Communities throughout the state are enriched, and SUNY students receive real-world experience as they work to improve lives through this program.”

That dual emphasis — practical career preparation alongside civic purpose — may explain why E.S.S.C. has drawn attention from other states and higher education systems looking to replicate a version of the model. Program leaders say colleges around the country have already begun contacting SUNY for guidance about how to build similar initiatives. 

Part of the appeal is that the program addresses several problems at once. For students, it creates paid experiential learning. In this sense, it reflects a broader shift in how colleges are thinking about applied learning. Traditional internships often favor students who can afford to work for free. E.S.S.C. attempts to democratize access to career-connected experiences by embedding compensation directly into the structure.

For communities, it delivers labor and support to chronically under-resourced sectors like education, food assistance, and mental health. For universities, it strengthens retention and student engagement. And for the state, it builds a pipeline of graduates with direct experience in public-facing professions.

“What we wanted to do was create these paid, meaningful opportunities that address community needs and also help support students in their career path.”

At SUNY Canton, Associate Director of Career Services Katie Kennedy has watched the impact unfold at ground level since the program’s early rollout. Her campus started with just three students in the first year and expanded to nine in the second, with more expected next year. “We try to keep our students on campus to support places like our food pantry and our different programs that require student success mentoring and support,” Kennedy said. 

Students at SUNY Canton have served in food insecurity programs (SNAP/basic needs), peer mental health outreach, FAFSA completion assistance, sustainability initiatives, and student success coaching cohorts. One student helped coordinate wellness programming focused on nutrition, fitness, mindfulness, and journaling. Another worked with Renewal House, a community organization supporting survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. Kennedy said the student ultimately received an Excellence in Service Above and Beyond award after exceeding her required hours because she became so invested in the work. 

“She really came to be connected with this site, and it really meant a lot to her,” Kennedy said. “As a major in forensic criminology, this is helping her achieve her career goals and develop the durable, transferable skills she needs to be successful when she graduates.” 

That idea of durable skills surfaces frequently in conversations about E.S.S.C. Students are not only gaining technical experience in fields they may eventually enter professionally; they are learning communication, teamwork, resilience, problem solving, and relationship building. 

That distinction matters deeply to students like Madison LoMedico. Before joining E.S.S.C., she assumed she wanted to become a classroom teacher. Through two years of direct school-based work, however, she discovered something more nuanced about herself. She loved working with children but preferred relationship-centered youth services over managing an academic classroom full-time. Now she hopes to pursue broader youth-service work through agencies and community organizations. This summer, she will continue through the Empire State Summer Service Corps at the Northern Westchester Y.M.C.A. 

The ability to experiment professionally while earning income is one reason students describe the experience less as volunteering and more as an integrated educational pathway.

“The program let me kind of put my feet in the water a bit, see what I wanted to do,” LoMedico said. “It was my favorite part of college, honestly. I’m so thankful for the program.” 

Across SUNY’s 64 campuses, students work in a strikingly wide range of service categories. SUNY officials said the categories themselves evolved directly from community demand. The first year focused heavily on K-12 tutoring, food insecurity, sustainability, and mental health support. But after requests from local organizations and school districts, the program expanded to include early childhood education and veterans outreach. 

Future plans include specialized literacy training grounded in the science of reading, as well as citizen preparedness and disaster response training that could help mobilize students during emergencies. 

LoMedico is aware of the dual purpose — paycheck and civic service — when speaking with her fellow students working in the program. “They feel like they’re making a difference,” she said. The structure also intentionally fosters a cross-campus civic identity — of belonging in something larger than themselves. Students participate in statewide summits, monthly meetings, and cohort gatherings where they exchange experiences across disciplines and regions. 

LoMedico remembers meeting peers from other SUNY schools and discovering how differently each service placement operated. “Even though it’s this one big umbrella term, we were all doing such different things,” she said. 

That collective identity matters to program leaders, who emphasize that E.S.S.C. is designed not as isolated volunteer projects but as a coordinated civic corps. E.S.S.C. operates in partnership with AmeriCorps, allowing eligible students to receive education awards they can apply toward tuition, supplies, or student loans after completing their service. But SUNY intentionally structured the program to remain more inclusive than federal AmeriCorps eligibility requirements alone, ensuring undocumented and international students attending SUNY can still participate. 

That emphasis on accessibility has become especially important amid broader national uncertainty around public service funding. Program leaders note that E.S.S.C.’s mixed funding model — combining state support with AmeriCorps partnerships — insulated it somewhat from federal disruptions that affected other service organizations. 

Senior Associate Vice Chancellor Frank, herself a former AmeriCorps participant, said those experiences can permanently shape students’ trajectories. “We always talk about students getting the service bug,” she said. “It never really goes away.” 

Meanwhile, public enthusiasm for the program appears to be growing. SUNY officials reported that legislators regularly attend service events, especially around food insecurity initiatives. One statewide “Day of Hunger Action” mobilized E.S.S.C. students to participate in campus food pantry work and SNAP outreach. During the program’s first year, students collectively logged more than 102,000 service hours and served over 74,000 New Yorkers. 

For students, though, the impact often feels more personal than statistics suggest. LoMedico, working in the Oneonta elementary school, worked to build comfort and acceptance with a shy second-grade girl who needed support services. At first, the child barely spoke to her. LoMedico tried gentle conversation while helping with classwork, reading groups, and one-on-one academic support. Slowly, over weeks and months, the girl began opening up. In LoMedico’s second year in the school, even though she was no longer assigned to the same classroom, the young girl still ran up to hug her in the hallway, eager to share stories about her day.

“That really stuck with me,” LoMedico said. “Seeing how students progress and how just being that one person in someone’s life can really help them — not even just academically but socially.” 

Multiply that impact by 500 employed students, she said, each of these past two years, and it’s encouraging to imagine the impact of E.S.S.C. across multiple categories of public engagement and personal fulfillment.  

In an era increasingly defined by anxiety about disconnection, programs like E.S.S.C. are betting that purpose and engagement can still be taught — not through lectures but through participation. And that when given the chance to contribute meaningfully — and be paid fairly for it — many students will prove to be more service-minded than adults might assume.

When many people imagine old-school college career services, they see a basement office, tucked away in some undesirable part of campus. The staff there are well-meaning but not particularly helpful. Mostly, they push resume guidebooks across their desks, offering shallow words of encouragement: “Good luck, and we hope you find your future.”

Joseph Catrino, who runs career services at Dartmouth College, knows this vision is becoming quickly outdated. As students and their families invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition, they’re expecting more in dividends than best wishes for a good first job. They want, and need, to know they’re charting a path to a better life; and for that, cover letter advice and interview prep just won’t cut it, anymore.

Increasingly, career centers across the country are retooling their approach to support with the use of a more comprehensive framework, called Life Design. The (somewhat self-explanatory) idea is to help students think broadly about their interests, values, and motivations in order to plot the kind of future that feels meaningful to them. The strategy often involves trying on different types of work as one step in the larger journey towards fulfillment.

Few schools have committed as wholly to the Life Design model as Dartmouth. In less than two years, its career center has become almost unrecognizable — and not just because it opened a new location on the main quad. The operation changed names from the Center for Professional Development to the Center for Career Design (C.C.D.). In February 2025, Catrino, an experienced leader at the intersection of Life Design and career services, came on to spearhead the rehaul. He inherited start-up funding, along with a $15 million anonymous donation to finance unpaid or underpaid internships. Soon he’d helped raise enough funds to match that contribution, while doubling his staff.

The development of the C.C.D. isn’t just serving students in becoming the people they want to be; it’s serving Dartmouth in becoming the school it hopes to be viewed as. After President Sian Beilock took office in 2023, she laid out several priorities, among them increasing the lifelong value of a Dartmouth education and improving student mental health and wellbeing. As these are prime concerns for colleges nationwide, they might look to Dartmouth to see how Life Design manages to move the needle forward on both accounts.

Designing Your Life 

The story of Life Design goes back to 2007, when two Stanford professors with roots in Silicon Valley, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, discovered they were interested in tackling the same problem with the same solution. They both wanted to teach their students, restless and confused about the prospect of post-grad life, to apply the tenets of design thinking to mapping their futures. The course that emerged, Designing Your Life, became one of the university’s most popular; then came a book by the same name and, eventually, a movement.

It was 2017 by the time Catrino caught the Life Design bug. He was working at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., when the opportunity arose to attend a workshop led by Burnett and Evans, who were trying to disseminate their practices in new corners of higher ed. Appointed Trinity’s director of career development shortly afterward, Catrino was quick to infuse what he’d learned from the Stanford gurus into his new work. A few years later, he’d completely remodeled the career center into the Career and Life Design Center.

Catrino’s efforts at Trinity put him at the forefront of a new brand of college career services centered around Life Design. The first school to blaze this trail was John Hopkins, Catrino said, adding that he estimates around a dozen others have followed suit since then. Many more have incorporated some element of Life Design into the student experience, but not necessarily through the career center and rarely as its “main event.”

In February 2025, Dartmouth hired Catrino with the explicit request that he revamp career services the way he had at Trinity. Once again, he said, the systems he found when he arrived followed a largely “transactional” approach — give resume advice, help with internships (ideally), ask the proverbial question: “What do you want to do for a living?” At Dartmouth, the job was made more challenging by a dearth of resources: There were the same number of staff as at Trinity, despite serving twice the number of students. 

Catrino hit the ground running. He ensured all the Dartmouth staff received training in both Life Design and motivational coaching. That pesky, proverbial question was replaced with more constructive alternatives: “What are your interests? What motivates you? What gets you excited? What challenges you? What don’t you like to do?” Some of the most important discoveries, Catrino emphasized, come from knowing what students don’t want.

Catrino likes to describe his approach as “transformational,” guiding students to new or heightened self-understanding.

If these Life Design prompts seem better suited to therapy than career counseling, that’s precisely the point. Catrino likes to describe his approach as “transformational,” guiding students to new or heightened self-understanding. There’s not much of a difference, he added, between designing a career and designing a life. “I’d like to give you the skills for life — to navigate whatever it is, whether it’s your love life, whether it’s your job, whether it’s what hobbies you get involved with,” he said. “That’s really what we’re doing.” 

Permission to Explore

As important as the guidance of a career coach is, Life Design doesn’t start and end in conversation. The meat of the work is often experiential, as students go out and try on different jobs for size. Iterating, exploring, and maybe even failing are practically requirements.

At Dartmouth, though, exploration hasn’t historically been the dominant career culture. The culture has been definitively corporate, even to the extent that deviating can feel like forsaking a chance at true success. 

“What happens is there are students who don’t know who they are, but then they see this path of finance. It’s lucrative. ‘The companies are coming to campus to find me.’ And it seems to be easy, and they just fall into it,” Catrino said. Some end up enjoying the work. Others find themselves back in Catrino’s office a few years later, realizing they took a very wrong turn. For the latter, Catrino added, a little Life Design — some more informed decision-making — might have saved them a lot of disgruntlement.

In the spirit of Life Design, the C.C.D. is committed to shifting student perceptions of the jobs available to them and lifting up a wider variety of options. While tracks in consulting and finance may be both popular and particularly visible, Dartmouth students have been charting other paths for centuries. 

Several programs geared at promoting exploration and accessibility for other fields are now underway. Career Communities, like special interest groups, have been dedicated to different professional areas (e..g, Arts & Creative, Good & Green, Law & Policy). Each is led by a career coach and allows students to connect with like-minded peers and learn about relevant opportunities. A related initiative, called Career Treks, helps expose students to industries in the flesh. Recently, students with creative instincts traveled to New York during Fashion Week to learn about the business of fashion. Another more exploratory group toured Boston to meet with a range of local employers there.

Perhaps the C.C.D.’s most notable accomplishment to date has been the $30 million it raised to finance unpaid or underpaid internships for students hoping to try out less bankable fields. This year, the fund could allow up to 250 to 275 students to take on opportunities that might otherwise have been out of reach. As part of the deal, the recipients meet with career coaches after their experience, as well as write a final report on it, to encourage reflection in a Life Design context.

For Taha Tariq, a sophomore at Dartmouth, the internship fund led to an unlikely job in Egypt and spurred an ongoing relationship with Catrino and his staff. In the fall, Taha had personally managed to secure a unique opportunity to work for the Cairo branch of a nonprofit called Ashoka, which supports social entrepreneurship around the world. How he would afford flights, housing, and food while there presented another question entirely.

With support from the C.C.D., Taha’s plans fell into place. The three months he spent in Cairo ended up being some of the best of his life, he said. Even though the job itself wasn’t perfect, it taught him about himself. He tracked which elements he found most rewarding — working with beneficiaries in the field, interviewing social entrepreneurs — and the least — sitting at a desk, doing office grunt work. 

Interning for a non-profit showed Taha he could be happy and comfortable with a lower salary that afforded him work-life balance. He said he worries in a more corporate job he might “just forget to live.” At the same time, his apparent preference for a routine that involves varied projects, interviews, and site visits made him wonder if consulting work in the Arab world might suit him. Sometimes pragmatism should outweigh idealism, he added. 

In some ways, Taha now has more questions than answers. But the C.C.D. has equipped him with the structure to navigate that uncertainty. So really, not knowing doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, he said.

Engaging Alumni 

One tool in Catrino’s arsenal that became quickly apparent upon his arrival at Dartmouth is the elite school’s robust alumni network. This closer-than-most group of grads lead inspiring and varied careers. They also exhibit a distinct willingness — in fact, desire — to engage with current Dartmouth students and career services.

Alumni involvement is a critical piece of the larger project Catrino has set out to build. For one, he has set the precedent that the Life Design and other services he and his staff offer will be available to grads at any stage. Before his tenure, only alumni three to five years out could call back for help. But if the Life Design ethos stipulates the process never truly ends, it definitely doesn’t end a handful of years after graduation. Parents return to work after raising their kids. Layoffs throw a wrench in best-laid plans. A new dream spurs a return to academia after decades away.  

One particular career challenge as sure to pull in alumni as current students stems from the nature of today’s quickly changing workforce. “You have to learn how to be nimble. You have to be able to understand your skills. You have to understand who you are to be versatile across all this disruption that’s going to be happening,” Catrino said. Life Design, among other tools, may help workers expect the unexpected.

In addition to serving alumni, the C.C.D. envisions wielding their networks and connections for current students. So far, Catrino said, the grads have been more than obliging. “I have alums that are constantly calling and messaging, asking how they can help. Can they be a mentor? ‘Here’s a project-based internship that we’d like to offer.’” So far, 127 alumni and parents have contributed $61 million of the center’s $94 million fundraising goal. 

The ideal outcome is not necessarily — or only — that alumni boasting the most triumphant corporate careers lead the charge to give back. Enlisting the partnership of grads from a variety of different fields is a key piece of the C.C.D.’s mission to expose students to many paths. Especially for industries whose hiring pipelines are more obscure, personal knowledge and connections can make all the difference for those still looking to get a foot in the door. 

On a recent Thursday evening in Manhattan, hundreds of Dartmouth alumni of all ages came together to hear from their president, Sian Beilock. A few dozen from the younger subset, one to ten years out, arrived early. They weren’t just there to sip the peach bellinis passed by servers in white coats and catch up with old friends. They gathered in that mahogany-paneled, chandeliered library up the stairs from the main event space to hear a pitch from Catrino. He told them about the C.C.D.’s new inclusive approach to career services. He told them about his motto for working with grads like them: “Give support, get support.” 

In the audience was Caitlyn King, a member of the class of 2024. The former art history major now works in New York for an art advisor but has plans to start a master’s program at Oxford in the fall. She said her experience job hunting while at Dartmouth, prior to Catrino’s arrival, involved more guidance from professors in her department than the career center. But with continuing questions about what might come after her next academic endeavor, and again after that, she found Catrino’s offer tempting. In fact, she said, she might just talk to him about opportunities to engage that night.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.