Direction for life

Whether students choose to job shadow or serve, Senior Experience helps to light their future path.

In their senior year, students develop a proposal for a weeklong independent service/job-shadowing project at the end of semester one. The project is a component of the senior-level Bible class called Kingdom Living. Students are required to keep a journal during their experience. following the service experience/job shadowing, seniors spend two days in a retreat setting to reconnect, fellowship, and reflect on their service/job shadowing experiences.

See below for a list of Senior Experience placements

Where seniors spent their Senior Experience Week

Click on highlighted students to see their page

Additional Senior Experience Journal Excerpts

Dan Loveless

I had the privilege of shadowing my uncle and his co-worker at Nuveen, a financial asset management company in Princeton, NJ. Part of marketing is public relations, and I got a glimpse of this as I observed Mr. David drafting tweets that would eventually be posted under my uncle’s Twitter handle. He had a spreadsheet which organized the written content, a picture if one was to be used, and the total number of characters. Later, he showed me a web site he was working on. The last part of the day included listening in on a conference call between Mr. Davis and seven others in the marketing department to brainstorm ideas for an attention-grabbing headline for an article about Nuveen. I am now sold on marketing as my major. I loved everything that I observed.

Brian Anderson

Today I met with Joseph Yu, a recent college graduate who was working at PJM Interconnection. He recently graduated from Penn State and had been working at PJM for about a year. His team is focused on making sure applications and other programs the company uses are safe. They try to find the SPOF (single point of failure) in these applications so they can fix them to protect the company. He took me to a meeting where they discussed changes that need to be made to the server or the network that may affect certain applications. Afterwards, he showed me a research paper he was working on for the team, on a concept called blockchain, which is basically a different way of storing important information so that it can’t be hacked. It was interesting to see how he can directly affect the company even though he doesn’t have a really high position.