Prep for Success Program Wins AAUA Blackburn Award

Colleges today face the growing expectation that they will prepare students for their careers. To meet this challenge head-on, Adelphi’s Center for Career and Professional Development created the Prep for Success Program. This year, the innovative program has been recognized with a John L. Blackburn Exemplary Models Award from the American Association of University Administrators (AAUA). The award recognizes examples of solutions to common problems in higher education.

Launched in September 2015, Prep for Success is a comprehensive program that provides Adelphi students with basic job-search skills and valuable work experience through paid internships with leading organizations. The program is designed to help any student begin preparing for a career almost upon arrival on campus. It stresses that successfully starting a career depends on more than just earning a college degree; it requires planning, the development of new skills and relevant experience.

With an increasingly diverse student body that includes a significant number of first-generation college students, Adelphi offers career guidance that is appropriate and helpful for students of any background, age, culture or ability.

Prep for Success reflects Adelphi’s emphasis on experiential learning. It is also an expression of the University’s core values of diversity and inclusion, community engagement, and ethical leadership.

Pathways to success

Main segments of the program, which is wholly voluntary, help students focus on their future and prepare for it through a structured, progressive plan composed of three pathways and two innovative internship programs: a leadership certificate, online career coaching, and Jaggar Community Fellows and Panthers with a Purpose internship programs.

“Adelphi University’s Center for Career and Professional Development is honored to receive national recognition for its creative programming designed to prepare students for rewarding and enriching careers dedicated to purpose, service and entrepreneurship,” said Thomas J. Ward, Jr. ’93, executive director of Adelphi’s Center for Career and Professional Development. “Selection for the distinguished Blackburn Award serves as a testament to the Center’s relentless dedication to student success, outstanding career outcomes, strategic community partnerships and innovative workforce development strategies.”

Recent Prep for Success students have worked as interns at companies and organizations including IBM, CNBC, PwC, Northwell Health, Merrill Lynch, Saturday Night Live, the National Urban League and the Suffolk County Legislature. Others have parlayed their experience into admission to graduate programs at schools such as Columbia University and New York University. Program graduates are now becoming student ambassadors and inspiring peer mentors within their communities, serving as role models and speaking at career networking events.

This program, created to enhance and transform career paths for all students, is showing remarkable and measurable results and fostering brighter futures for Adelphi students.

Learn more about the Prep for Success program.