The Сareer Education department is hosting “Adulting 102,” a second part of the “Adulting” seminar series. More than 90 students attended the first session in the Quigley Auditorium on Thursday, Jan. 26, to improve their Curriculum Vitaes and have a free lunch.

Fostering analytical communication in applying for the internship or job is one of the reasons why career education created gatherings for Gators to come together and share their thoughts with experts.

Autumn Parker, ’16, associate director of alumni and employer engagement, said that career education should coexist with the studying process. The Adulting 102 seminars are a part of the undergraduate living and learning environment.

“I think this is a great stepping-stone, building-block opportunity to make career education a campus-wide priority, and helping students to realize we’re not this scary entity, or they have to come and know everything,” Parker said.

“We think we are partners. We genuinely care about just seeing you thrive as people, the professional component of your life.”

Gators expressed high interest in the career-readiness seminar. Preliminarily, 45 students registered for the event.

“We said if half of them show up, that’s a win,” Jim Fitch, associate director of career exploration, said at the seminar. “There are 89 students there.”

To make the information clear, Career Education speakers started engaging the audience with questions to show the topic’s relation to real life. This time, they added a new feature to the program — small skits — which portrayed reals behavior of students when applying for a job.

Fitch and Parker played roles of a student and a potential employer. While creating a scenario, they thought about interactions that students have both on campus and at job fairs with resumes and cover letters.

“We wanted to humanize this process,” Parker said.

They modeled the typical student’s behavior while applying and then contrasted that with something that would be better.

“There are many job fairs that each of us have been to where we’ve watched the students do what I did with Autumn — they just stretched out their resumes,” Fitch said after their performance.

Attending Adulting 102 this semester could potentially bring $1,000 to a student.

“For all of the students who attend four sessions, their names will be put into a drawing (for $1,000),” Fitch said.

Parker explained why so much effort was dedicated to the creation of the skits and the seminar.

“We often so talk about career development and career readiness like it’s a separate experience from the undergraduate living and learning environment,” Parker said. “Nearly 90 Gators showed up. That was a testament saying that they want to be involved in this process.”

Fitch mentioned that for the next sessions, they will try to recruit students to be in the skits. Parker is also convinced that a display by peers will be more relatable and accessible for gators.

“We would love to have students act in the skits rather than us,” Fitch said.

Despite having work experience previously, Tergel Buyanbat, ’24, decided to come to Adulting 102 and did not regret it. She called the skit “funny and attention-grabbing,” as well as informative.

However, both Parker and Fitch agreed that going to the rest of the workshops is not enough even though students find them useful.

“I think that the workshops themselves are like teasers,” Fitch said. “So the workshop today, hopefully, gave students enough information to get started with a resume and cover letter. It’s not exhaustive, but at least gives them something to think about.”

As an initiator of Adulting 102, Third- and Fourth-Year Class Dean Jonathon May advised continuing to attend the rest of the series since “it’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

The next three sessions will be dedicated to job interviewing techniques, the salaries and adjustment to a career post graduation — all these things are going to be critical to everyone’s success.

“The question is how the students will make a transition of gained information to a workplace,” Fitch said.