The staff at the Center for Academic and Professional Performance are there to be your safety net. They help you get ready for school, independent life, and the world of careers. CAPP is a place for students to go if they need help with homework for tutoring, advising exploratory students, as well as career coaching and many more.

The Center for Academic and Professional Performance is hands-on, and they really want to help with the adjustment to being away from home and having to work and go to school. They want to help students adjust and make it easier to handle things that may cause a slight panic if a student isn’t used to it.

“We are having students take a strengths assessment that has a number of questions, over a hundred, and you rate them on a scale of are you more likely to do this or to do that,” Carrie Pierson, the Senior Director of CAPP, said. “Then it comes up with your top five strengths and then we have all sorts of materials that talk about how you use those strengths to be successful.”

Those who take this assessment have their top-five strengths they know so they can use them to help each other during projects. They can use those strengths to help with the academic piece and how to use them in the student’s first potential professional position.

This is something anyone who goes into CAPP can take. There are also programs for upper or lower-classmen.

“We have a new program this year that’s called Junior Jump which is for the rising sophomore-junior group and because it’s new, some seniors might have the opportunity to do it to,” Pierson said. “This is talking about internships, career competencies, how to be successful in the workplace. They also focus on what in their academic plan may need to be addressed including getting them back to that academic advisor to explain if they have a question about this requirement to graduate.”

Junior Jump is all about making sure students find that internship so they can graduate with the strongest foot forward as possible. It’s also so they’ll be able to graduate in the first place.

Millikin already has a 99.2% employment rate after graduation, but CAPP knows that only applies to the students that actually graduate. Those who don’t graduate often find that it was because they fell off-track during their Junior and Senior year when it came to looking for a career. CAPP made Junior Jump to reach back out to upperclassmen.

The CAPP help with resume’s, cover letters, and mock interviews all happen to help with the job set up.

“We help students who maybe don’t right away connect with employment”

The CAPP office deals with both the career fairs and the graduate fairs. They track the graduate’s employment after graduation to see whether they are going to graduate school or getting a professional job.

“We help students who maybe don’t right away connect with employment if their resume is on file, and we communicate with them. If they aren’t in a current position and say ADM reaches out to us and they have an accounting position open. We know this student is an accounting major and they don’t have a job yet, so we might give ADM that name to help that student connect and get employed,” Pierson said.

To get advice or help from someone in CAPP, students don’t have to go to the third floor of the University Commons. If they are living on campus, all they must do is talk to their Residence Assistant (the life person) in the dorms and Academic Residential Peer Mentor (Academic people). Those two group of people also work together very closely because they affect each other.

“Many students come from an environment where mom, dad, guardian, their support system has been helping them along the way,” Pierson said. CAPP meets the students more than 50% of the way to show them their value and worth because they have great Value and Worth even though they may not see it initially. CAPP will be the safety net for students to help them and show them that they can be more successful than they may have initially realized.

Take thirty seconds of bravery and ask a question that some may think is unimportant because more than likely it’s a question that hasn’t been asked. It may help you with adjusting and getting on the correct path.