Q&A with Kuhlin Hub Executive Director Steve Russell

Contributing to an effective Life Design ecosystem at BGSU

Steve Russell has come to BGSU as the inaugural assistant vice president and executive director of the Michael and Sara Kuhlin Hub for Career Design and Connections. Russell brings a decade of experience helping students establish crucial career connections and is set to "open new doors" for students through meaningful career exploration.

The Kuhlin Hub, located on the second floor of the Bowen-Thompson Student Union, aims to facilitate key introductions between students and industry professionals that lead to mentorship, co-ops, internships and fulfilling career opportunities. A transformative gift from Mike Kuhlin ‘68 made the new Kuhlin Hub possible in support of the University’s continuing efforts to redefine student success. 

We asked Russell how the Kuhlin Hub will work with the Geoffrey H. Radbill Center for College and Life Design, faculty, staff and off-campus partners to help students create their ideal college experience while opening new doors to career opportunities that align with their interests and goals.

How does the Kuhlin Hub raise the bar for career services at BGSU?

The Kuhlin Hub is now one unit that encompasses three key components, two of which have been helping students connect with employers for years – the Career Center and Student Employment Services. A third group has been added that focuses on outreach directly to employers. Those folks are, day in and day out, identifying new companies, organizations and nonprofits, and cultivating existing partners. We want to bring them in as fully engaged partners within this Falcon network that we can tap into more thoroughly and meaningfully when a student is looking to connect with the right individuals to assist in exploring career opportunities. The goal is to steward those relationships to allow for more robust, personal connections for our students.

What we’re really focused on right now is this idea of a concierge approach. The goal is for students to feel like they have somebody that can be a key point of contact to help them test out career alternatives they've been considering within the Life Design framework. 

How does the Kuhlin Hub support new Life Design efforts at BGSU?

Students are encouraged to explore various hypotheses regarding their interests, preferences and career goals: "I'm interested in working in a certain field. I'm interested in working in a certain location. I think I want this type of workload or work life balance." The responsibility of the Kuhlin Hub is to offer students a very personalized way to test out those hypotheses.

A student engaging with a Life Design coach at the Radbill Center is really working to develop those hypotheses, and then they're coming over to the Kuhlin Hub to test them. It’s an iterative process. If I test out a hypothesis and it's positive, I succeed and I can test it further with assistance from the Kuhlin Hub. When we try more and more ways to test it out, if I test it and it fails, I need to go back to that Life Design coach and rethink my hypothesis while exploring alternatives.

How will the Kuhlin Hub encourage mentorship?

While testing one’s career hypotheses, you identify a field of interest, but how do you find the right mentor to explore real-world work in that field? Who do you ask for that mentorship and that help? A key priority in the Kuhlin Hub is to facilitate those personalized connections so our students don’t end up floundering out there on LinkedIn or Googling something just hoping to find somebody. 

I think another important point is that people often have the idea that a mentor will meet with them once a week for a year, with all sorts of things to cover. That sounds intense and can be off putting. Instead, what if the mentor just jumped on a call with a student for 20 minutes and that got the student light years ahead of where they would have been without the conversation? We want to encourage a wide range of mentoring scenarios to benefit BGSU students.

What can faculty and staff do to support students with Career Design and Connections?

In my mind, it comes down to a referral. There are key phrases that faculty and staff might pick up from students, which would indicate they might have a hypothesis: "I'm interested in working in public accounting. I'm interested in being a mechanical engineer, etc."

That's probably what brought them to one of our programs in the first place. That's amazing, but have you met with a Career Design coach in that space? Those referrals are going to help create an effective Life Design ecosystem at BGSU.

I think a big part are the connections around those referrals, and then the hope is that there's a lot of trust in the long term from faculty and staff. When a student is referred to the Kuhlin Hub, we want to be known for making a positive difference by facilitating a personalized connection with an experienced, knowledgeable industry professional. I think those personalized connections that help our students test their career hypotheses are going to distinguish us from other career centers across the nation.

How is the Kuhlin Hub an integral part of the University’s strategic plan?

This has become an easy one for us to talk about because I think it's a bold stance that the University has taken around redefining student success. Pick anything we've talked about and it's not that these are entirely new practices. The key innovation is that an interconnected ecosystem has been created within the Life Design framework that comprehends and organizes how best to tap into an individual student’s college experience. 

Getting back to the concierge model, when a student doesn't know what to do or where to go, we want them to connect with our Life Design coaches. Honestly, universities are big, complex places, and creating the Kuhlin Hub and Radbill Center establishes an important “go to” point to cut through that complexity.

I think this is going to be a strong differentiator for BGSU. It comes at a great time as higher ed is under fire with an eye on return on investment. When people are wondering why invest this money and this tuition, I think our Life Design ecosystem and our success in helping BGSU students find productive, rewarding, fulfilling work is a powerful response to those existential concerns.