The Aspire Program
Designed exclusively for Carthage students, The Aspire Program merges traditional career development with entrepreneurship, leadership, and creativity.
Key elements of the program:
- Specialized coaching — You’ll be assigned a career specialist with industry knowledge specific to your major.
- Guidance and support — You’ll get help finding jobs, internships, research opportunities, and other hands-on learning experiences.
- Mentoring — Get paired with a Carthage graduate who’s walked in your shoes.
- Automatic enrollment — All Carthage students go through the program. No extra cost or signup required!
Learn more about Aspire
Video transcript
The Aspire program is part of the Aspire center. And the Aspire Center is our four-year career professional development program here at Carthage College. The Aspire program is really different unique from other colleges and universities' career programs because instead of with the typical experiences of senior year trying to go get a job or an experience after college, we want students to build their experiences starting from day one.
So whether that means going and finding an alumni panel that they're going to learn from an alumni about the career industry that they're excited about, or if it means getting an internship or research experience that's going to build their portfolio, we want the students to develop and learn who they are so they can really leave Carthage with a very good sense of purpose and understanding before they actually leave the college.
Every student that comes to Carthage has their own individual Career Specialist. This is a person who specializes in the industry field that they're going into. For example, we have a Career Specialist for our arts, communication, and culture students. This is a person who's been working as a Graphic Designer for the past 20 years, and she's responsible for helping those students get opportunities and experiences along the way.
I landed my first internship as a freshman at Deloitte, which is number one of the big four accounting firms in the world. Through the Aspire program, I was able to develop skills that helped me in interviews as well as networking with other professionals.
