September 2, 2022

Welcome back, Bennington students! While many of you were off campus, busy accumulating incredible new experiences this summer, I arrived at Bennington to serve as your Associate Dean of Career Development and Field Work Term. With such talented, dedicated, wildly creative, and passionate students, staff, faculty, and alumni, I feel at once privileged and inspired to be in your company.

What’s my story? 

After years of applying my liberal arts skills in the commercial world as a brand strategist and head of customer insights for global companies, I found that what I loved most was helping my entry-level employees navigate their careers and uncover their strengths. I launched a career coaching practice in 2014 for liberal arts students, with a focus on students in the visual and performing arts. For the past six years, I have advised thousands of students and cultivated hundreds of employer partners at Colby College as Director of Employer Partnerships and Emerging Pathways. While there, I built robust entrepreneurship programs to help all students develop the skills to be successful solopreneurs, intrapreneurs, and creators of social and business ventures while also engaging with the central Maine community.

This has all been a great warmup for my role at Bennington College, one of the most innovative and progressive liberal arts institutions in the world!

What can you expect this school year? 

This summer, our Office has been applying design thinking approaches to solve challenges that affect your experience of Field Work Term and Career Development. We want to ensure that you are able to take full advantage of the rich learning that FWT experiences provide as well as help you set yourself up for post-graduate success.

We plan to:

• Eliminate as much friction as possible from the process of finding, registering, reflecting upon and being assessed for your FWT experience—for both you and our Office—so that we can spend more of our time together giving you the support you need. 
• Enhance your social capital through more engagement with industry experts (alumni, employers, faculty, staff and other partners) 
• Expand your knowledge and sophistication about the world of work and clarify the value you bring by introducing new experiences (e.g., employer-sponsored “quick fire” design challenges, hackathons, data fests, FWT Fairs); programs and skills workshops. 
• Showcase your talents to folks who want to hire you by inviting more employers to campus to engage with you through all of our employer and alumni engagement programs
• Make working with us surprisingly fun!

We are excited to get to know you better and support you in realizing your dreams and schemes. We’ll be out and about and more visible on campus than ever in hopes of meeting you where you are, literally and figuratively.

All the best,

Lisa Noble
(she/her/hers)