Sent 12/15/23
Dear Alumni and Friends,
In May of 2024, the Edwin T. Burton Economics Career Office (ECO) will have participated in the career planning and education of 10 graduating classes! What began as a pilot project a decade ago has now flourished into a full-service career services office providing direct advising, professional development workshops, networking, and electronic resources for economics majors. Jennifer Jones was hired in 2013 to spearhead this effort after funding was provided by many enthusiastic and committed donors through the leadership of Professors Ken Elzinga and Charlie Holt.
Jennifer Jones continues to masterfully direct the activities of the ECO to equip majors with tools and resources to successfully reach the next steps in their career planning. Jennifer partners with faculty, alumni, students, employers, and other career offices on the Grounds toward this goal.
To help Jennifer with the daunting task of working with hundreds of Econ majors, the ECO hires several student staff each year, who are instrumental in delivering our programs. The ECO offers real work experience and network-building for student staff. In addition, our elected student board provides a feedback loop to our majors and prospective majors and manages the planning and implementation of the annual Economics Undergraduate Career Forum. This year we welcomed 8 new members. Click here to meet the board.
The ECO offers work experience for undergraduates in roles such as data analyst, market researcher, marketing coordinator, and event coordinator. More than 40 students have worked for the ECO and developed technical and transferable skills to launch them into the labor market. In reflecting on their ECO experiences some students expressed that work supporting other students' career development was their most meaningful experience at UVA. To hear about the impact of the ECO from alumni and students, click here to watch the video.
As 2023 draws to a close, we wish to share with you our accomplishments and initiatives over the last 12 months and hope you will consider supporting the ECO for the next year. We thank you for your contributions to make our programs successful.
First, the ECO continues to organize the annual Undergraduate Economics Career Forum, (2023 alumni pictured above) which our ECO Student Advisory Board planned and welcomed 9 UVA alumni back to Grounds for 36 hours of programming! We hosted 7 events with more than 100 student participants and 10 faculty participants. Relatedly, we continue to organize the Major to Major Career Coaching Fair, through which we pair upper-level students returning from summer internships with lower-level students to share opportunities and take advantage of our students’ very recent internship experiences. Strategies and advice were shared among more than 300 participants! Finally, we organized How I Got This Job and How I Got into Graduate School Programs, with recent graduates providing tactical career advice to students exposing them to various industries, job functions, and graduate programs. All these activities prepare students for the job market and help them develop networks that will support them well beyond their time on the Grounds.
Second, in March 2023, we became founding members of Women in Economics across the Nation, a consortium of universities brought together by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s annual women’s symposium attendees. As founding members, we are shaping programs both at UVA and in local communities to expose girls and women to career opportunities aligned with an economics degree and to demonstrate the flexibility and compensation possibilities the degree may yield. In October we co-hosted a virtual panel of 30 alumni from universities across the nation. In November we continued the conversation here on Grounds with six professionals who spoke on their career trajectories and challenges and opportunities for women in the labor market.
Third, the ECO provided individual advising for more than 200 students and served more than 700 students through our workshops and other programs. We listened to students in Econ 3010, the gateway class before declaring the major, and established Friday drop-in career advising opportunities for prospective majors. More than 50 alumni donated their time and expertise to our students through professional development programs like conducting resume reviews, sitting on panels, hosting information sessions representing their employers, and providing their resumes and cover letters as samples.
To finish with the words of our beloved Professor Ken Elzinga: “If you have contributed to the Economics Career Office in the past, thank you. It’s been a game-changer for our department. If you are thinking about contributing to the Economics Career Office, I’m not sure where there’s a bigger rate of return on a gift to the Econ department than a gift to the Economics Career Office.”
Warm regards and best wishes this holiday season,
Professor Federico Ciliberto, Chair
Department of Economics