Presenter: Deepak Sharma
About: As Berkeley has many unique campus departments there is often a desire to collaborate across departments, and for colleagues to grow and learn in new areas. Our day-to-day often times makes this difficult and even with existing campus fellowships for staff, there continues to be a need to provide opportunities like this. Through the Dean of Students Externship Program, this need is being addressed.
What began as a job shadowing experience has evolved to a project based approach, stimulating autonomy and creativity for externs and sponsors. This opens new ideas and opportunities for colleagues to support each other in professional development, while also developing new approaches to serving students and addressing departmental needs. Sponsors propose a short-term project ranging from 1 week to 3 months, and externs share their development goals. As coordinators for this program, we match the sponsors’ projects with an extern’s developmental goals. In addition, the coordinators will conduct outreach to potential externs or sponsors in order to insure that a match is well suited.
As the 4th iteration of this program gets under way, this program has created nearly 20 matches between sponsors and externs resulting in new knowledge gained as well as new insights from colleagues. This program provides an innovative path to professional development that incorporates experiential learning and promotes community building across departments.
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