The '68 Center for Career Exploration Is Strongest on Money

12 min read

What Williams Means by the '68 Center for Career Exploration

Search for a center for career exploration and you will find dozens. Miami University runs a Center for Career Exploration and Success. Brown has one too, and we wrote about how Brown's version runs for its students. Most colleges have some version under another name. The '68 Center is the version at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Its users are current students and alumni, and parents and admitted students read its pages to learn what help exists.

Day to day, the center does three jobs. It advises students one on one. It links them to employers and graduates through two online tools, Handshake and EphLink. And it gives out money, mostly for summer internships that would otherwise pay little or nothing.

Of the three, the money is the part a Williams student cannot easily find anywhere else. A professor, a parent, or a friend a year ahead can give you advice. None of them is likely to hand you $5,000 so you can spend a summer at a nonprofit that pays nothing.

Why Williams's Career Center Is Called the '68 Center

The name comes from the Class of 1968. For its 50th reunion in 2018, the class made a gift to the college aimed at career exploration, and the office that used to be called Career Services was renamed the '68 Center for Career Exploration in its honor (Williams Magazine tells the story). The apostrophe stands in for "19," the same way Williams graduates write '68 or '25 after their names. The class's name also sits on a grant, the Class of 1968 Career Explorer's Grant.

The new name came with a new approach. The old office was known mostly for résumé checks and senior-year recruiting. The renamed center wanted students thinking about work from their first year, through industry groups, alumni contact, and funded summers. That shift explains why so much of what follows is built around early, repeated use.

What the '68 Center Offers for Career Exploration

Set the mission language aside and a career exploration center like this one offers a short menu. Here is what Williams students can use, and what each piece is good for.

Career Communities: Advising by Industry, Not Major

Most college career offices assign an adviser by class year or by major. Williams sorts advising by industry instead. The center's official site lists career communities covering arts and entertainment, business, education, environment and sustainability, health, law and government, science, engineering and math, and technology.

The logic holds up. A history major headed for consulting needs the same advice as an economics major headed there, and very different advice from a history major headed for a museum. Grouping by industry puts you with an adviser who knows how hiring works in the field you want, including which firms recruit in the fall, which ones hire in spring, and which expect a referral before they read an application.

The catch is that you have to pick. A sophomore who likes three things and is sure of none is asked to choose a door before knowing which room they want. Advisers will meet undecided students, and many students sign up for more than one community. Still, the structure assumes a direction, and the students who get the most from it tend to have one.

Handshake and EphLink: The Center's Core Tools

Handshake is the job board. Employers post internships and full-time roles there, the center lists its events there, and most appointments are booked through it. Many students log in once in first year and forget about it until junior fall. Set up your profile early and follow the career communities that interest you, and the postings you see will start to sort themselves around those choices.

EphLink is the alumni side. It is the college's online mentoring and networking platform, where graduates opt in to hear from students and fellow alumni. Williams says about 6,500 alumni have signed up to take part. That is the EphLink Williams alumni network in plain terms: a searchable list of graduates who have already agreed to a conversation.

Use it for short, specific asks. "Could I have twenty minutes to hear how you got from a chemistry degree into patent law?" tends to get a reply. "Can you help me find a job?" often does not. One good EphLink call can tell you more about a field's daily work than a month of reading about it.

The '68 Center for Career Exploration also teaches a Winter Study course, CCE 42: Exploring Careers. It covers self-assessment, researching career options, résumés, cover letters, interviews and networking, with alumni panels and practice interviews, and it suits first-years and sophomores. It is worth a look if you learn better in a class than in drop-in meetings.

How the Center Funds Career Exploration: ASIP and the Career Access Fund

This is where Williams pulls ahead of many schools its size. The '68 Center runs two main pots of money, and they do different jobs. ASIP pays you to take a summer internship. The Career Access Fund covers smaller, one-off costs during the school year.

Both exist because unpaid and low-paid internships shut out students who need a summer wage. National data shows the stakes. In a NACE survey of the class of 2015, 72.2% of students with paid internships at for-profit companies received a job offer, against 43.9% of those whose internships were unpaid. A grant that makes a low-paid summer affordable changes who gets the experience that leads to offers.

How Much an ASIP Grant Actually Pays

ASIP stands for the Alumni Sponsored Internship Program, and alumni and parents fund it. For years it paid a flat $5,000 per student, and the internship had to run eight weeks full time. In 2024 the center changed the rules. According to the Williams Record's report on the ASIP changes, grants now run on a sliding scale from $2,000 to $5,500, set by the internship's length, location, format, and the student's financial need. The minimum is four weeks and 140 hours of work.

The change spread roughly the same budget across more students. The program had already grown fast: 69 students received ASIP grants in 2012, and 203 did in summer 2023. Don Kjelleren, the center's executive director, told the paper the aim was to move away from "a one-size-fits-all funding model."

So the Williams College ASIP grant amount depends on your situation. A full summer at a nonprofit in an expensive city, for a student on aid, sits near the top of the range. A four-week remote project sits near the bottom. Applications open well before summer, usually in the winter, so start looking for a host organization in the fall if you will need the grant.

Who Qualifies for the Career Access Fund

The Career Access Fund is narrower. Per the center's Career Access Fund page, it is open only to enrolled Williams students who receive financial aid from the college. For the 2026 to 2027 academic year, eligible students can receive up to $750, $625, or $450, depending on the tier Financial Aid assigns. That is up from a $400 cap in 2021, the year the fund paused for a semester while the center hired a new administrator.

The fund covers the small costs that keep aided students out of opportunities:

• Graduate school application fees and test prep
• Professional development courses
• Conference attendance
• Travel, meals, and lodging for interviews or eligible events
• Professional clothes for an upcoming interview

Applications are reviewed once a week, on Wednesday afternoons. You can ask for money for a purchase expected in the next 60 days, or get reimbursed for one made in the last 60 days. If a train ticket to a final-round interview is the only thing stopping you from saying yes, this fund is the first place to look.

How to Book the '68 Career Center, Step by Step

The official pages tell you what exists. They say much less about what to do, so here is a sequence that gets the most out of the center.

Booking a First Appointment at the '68 Center for Career Exploration

1. Sign in to Handshake using your Williams account and fill in your profile: class year, major or likely major, and the career communities you want to follow.
2. Open the appointments section and pick an adviser in the community closest to your interest. If you are still unsure, choose a general or exploration slot.
3. Pick a reason for the visit. Exploring options, a résumé review, an internship search, and weighing an offer each lead to a different meeting.
4. Send your résumé a day or two ahead, even a rough one. The adviser can then spend the meeting on your plan instead of reading.
5. Note two or three questions the meeting should settle.

Those five steps cover the booking. If the online booking gives you trouble, email the center directly rather than waiting. Early fall and the weeks before ASIP deadlines fill up first, so book two weeks ahead in those stretches.

What a Career Advising Meeting Actually Covers

A first advising meeting at most colleges runs 30 to 45 minutes. The adviser will ask what brought you in, what you have done so far, and what you think you want. From there it tends to go one of three ways:

• You have a target field. You leave with a plan: employers to watch, alumni to contact on EphLink, and deadlines.
• You have a draft. You get line edits on a résumé, a cover letter, or a grant essay.
• You have neither. You talk through classes, jobs, and activities you liked, and you leave with homework, often an assessment or a few alumni calls.

All three are useful, but they are not equal in speed. A student who arrives with a few named fields leaves with people to call, while a student who arrives with nothing leaves with a task and a second appointment. Plan on a series of short meetings across the year. A single long session in March of senior year is the hardest way to use the place.

Before Your First Visit, Learn What You Do Well

Career communities sort by industry, so a student's first choice is an industry. Most students make that choice on reputation, on what their friends are doing, or on one good class. Few have looked closely at what they do well, or at what kind of workday they could stand for years.

That matters because the community you pick shapes everything after it: the adviser, the alumni you meet, the postings Handshake shows you. Pick the wrong one and you can spend a year getting good advice about the wrong field.

The fix is cheap, and you can do it before your first meeting. Spend an hour on three questions. Which tasks do people come to you for? Which assignments did you finish early because you wanted to? Which did you put off even when they were easy? Write the answers down and bring them. A longer version of this exercise lives in our career exploration worksheet.

Why Interest Inventories Leave You Underprepared

Many career offices start students on an interest inventory. One common free option is O*NET's Interest Profiler: 30 or 60 questions that sort your interests across six types, from Realistic to Conventional. It takes 10 to 20 minutes and gives you a useful first map.

What an interest inventory measures is whether a kind of work appeals to you. It does not test whether you would do well at it, or whether its daily pace would grind you down. Someone can be drawn to law because they love a good argument, then find the job is mostly months of careful reading alone. You can be sure of a field and still be wrong about the job.

A capability-focused assessment comes at the question from the other side. Its questions make you rank two real options you both like, such as leading a debate or editing the final draft, and the order you pick shows which kind of work you reach for first. That gives an adviser something solid to work with. One option built for this step is the Pigment career test, which looks at how you think, decide, communicate, and work with others. It returns a report that names your top strengths, describes your working style, and lists suggested roles that fit them, for $79.99. If you would rather compare tools first, see our college career test rankings, free ones included.

Either way, take the results into your first '68 Center meeting. You skip the "so, what are you into?" stage and go straight to choosing a community.

A Verdict on the '68 Center as a Career Resource

For most Williams students, yes. The funding alone justifies an hour each semester, and the alumni access is hard to match at a college this small. The value drops off for one type of student, though, and it helps to know in advance whether that is you.

Where the '68 Center Delivers, and Where It Comes Up Thin

Where it delivers:

• Money. ASIP turned unpaid summers into paid ones for 203 students in 2023, and the Career Access Fund covers interview costs for students on aid.
• Alumni. About 6,500 graduates have opted in to EphLink, which is a large network for a small college.
• Field knowledge. Industry-based advisers know recruiting calendars and norms that a generalist would not.

Where it comes up thin:

• Undecided students. The community model assumes a direction. Without one, the first meetings go to figuring that out.
• Scattered information. Services, funding rules, and alumni tools live on several different Williams websites that do not always link to each other.
• Little student voice. Most public writing about the center quotes its staff. There is not much from students on how advising went for them, so ask upperclassmen directly.

Put together, the '68 Center for Career Exploration is a strong resource for a student who knows roughly where they are headed, and a slower one for a student who does not. Career exploration tends to move through four stages, from wide looking to a narrow test of one or two paths. The center is built for the later stages. Do the early work on your own, and it will repay you.

Quick Answers About the '68 Center and Its Funding

Fast Facts for Students, Admits, and Parents