The Center for Career and Professional Development, located on the first floor of the Lawrence Lee Pelletier Library, entered the academic year with an assemblage of new faces on its staff, but the same goal: connecting Allegheny College students with opportunities to advance in their professional lives.
Erin O’Day Frye, the new executive director of the CCPD, has been at Allegheny since 2009 in positions ranging from civic engagement to dean for student success. Now, she is eager to work with students to find jobs and research opportunities that fit their interests.
“Over my professional career, I’ve hired, mentored and coached more than 200 individuals,” O’Day Frye said. “One of the things I do really well is mentor and coach young folks around their strengths and passions and help them find great opportunities or coach them into opportunities that would be good fits for them. I saw this as an opportunity to continue some of the work that I’ve been doing with students in a little bit of a different way.”
She applied for the position last year after seeing the potential the CCPD can offer to students. She is confident that the center will continue improving its outreach to alumni and employers under her leadership and the work of the staff.
“This center is poised to be the best in class among higher ed centers for career and professional development,” O’Day Frye said. “We have all the right software systems that big institutions have. We have a really good number of staff, we have funding, we have a lot of endowed funding to help support students to do really cool things.”
Director of Employer and Corporate Relations Lucia Conti, ’00, is new to the CCPD but not to Allegheny.
“Coming back to campus feels like coming home a little bit,” Conti said. “It’s so comfortable.”
Her career after graduating from Allegheny has taken her from media relations to healthcare management and back to her alma mater, ready to connect businesses to the wide variety of talents Allegheny students can offer.
“It’s exciting to be meeting these business leaders who want our students — they want to be working with our students,” Conti said. “They’ve either worked with some in the past and have seen how good they are, or they’re just like, ‘Hey, you know you guys say how wonderful these students are. Send them my way.’”
She credits her Allegheny education for preparing her to be flexible and finding passion in work, no matter the job. Conti wants to pay this forward and help students prepare for their job search with the knowledge that skills learned here can apply to any career.
“We all want to start our careers where we want to be, right? Where we’re like, ‘Oh, this is what I dreamed of being for my whole life.’ I wanted to be on ‘Good Morning America’ when I was six years old,” Conti said. “It’s okay that you may think you’re going one direction. It’s ok to make that shift. You could still hold on to dreams and all those other things too and work toward them.”
Liza Schaef, associate director of the CCPD, is a returning staff member. She began working at Allegheny in January after serving as the director of a career center at Thiel College in Greenville. Schaef looks forward to elevating the CCPD team with her prior experience.
“I am really proud to be a part of a full, comprehensive team,” Schaef said. “Each one of us is going to have responsibilities that are going to work to support students and alumni in unique ways, but in a team format to really put students first and to provide more opportunities for students now and in the near future.”
She hopes students know that the CCPD is a free and available resource for anyone, from those who know what they want their career to look like to those who are starting from square one. Schaef also emphasized that the CCPD welcomes student organizations, athletic teams and fraternities and sororities to partner with the CCPD staff and that she is enthusiastic about future programming the center will host.
“As we are reimagining ourselves with new staff members and the new services that we can bring to students,” Schaef said, “I think my message would be we’re looking to partner with students, faculty and other on-campus partners.”
