Katelyn Wilburn, Campus Carrier staff writer

Lifeworks will be undergo changes for the summer to ensure that students gain consistent and meaningful experience during this time period. Some reasons behind these changes are maintaining the college’s necessary needs and accommodating the different summer activities that will be in the mix, such as construction and the summer camps Berry will be hosting.

As students look for work, three main categories of jobs will be available to them: critical campus operations, essential college programming and current strategic priorities and initiatives for the college. More specifics and examples of jobs can be found on Berry College’s Center for Personal and Professional Development (CPPD) and LifeWorks Website. 

“There’s just a lot of important sort of campus operations that never stop, so we still need students to help with all of that work,” Marc Hunsaker, Dean of Personal and Professional Development, said. Some examples of this operation would be landscaping, building attendants and more. 

With job hours allowed having been cut down, there have been questions on if students will get the amount of hours needed to get free boarding to stay on campus. To be approved for summer on-campus housing, students must work full time, or 30 to 40 hours per week and summer block.

“This will be something that we are prioritizing for them,” Hunsaker said. “We’re cultivating more and more opportunities and having supervisors to post those on Handshake.”

Although some jobs won’t be required all semester, there are plenty of opportunities on Berry’s main job search website, Handshake, where students could get multiple jobs throughout the summer and stay above their needed average hours.  

“You apply for a job the same way,” Phillip Edge, Director of LifeWorks, said. “Going on [Handshake] regularly and looking because there are more and more jobs that are continuing to be added on a daily.”

As explained on Berry College’s LifeWorks and CPPD Website, students will be asked to vacate their living spaces and/or move on these dates: May 16, June 20, and July 25. Students who will remain on campus after Block B for their work will be relocated beginning on Saturday, July 26. Although these summer changes are new, there have been many changes in the past year that have heavily impacted the Berry Lifeworks community.

“We’ve started to embed a lot of career development opportunities for students in the LifeWorks program,” Hope Willoughby, associate director of career education and development, said. “The reason why we’re doing that is that it allows students to have more opportunities to really build what we can career-readiness competencies, particularly the competency of self and career development.” 

The work that Berry has prioritized last year is meaningful work that will contribute to life after college. This is the initiative that the CPPD and LifeWorks are maintaining through these changes, even with other priorities on campus such as construction and camps. 

One of Berry’s top priorities is to ensure that there will be clean living spaces for not only summer students, but the students who come in for the fall semester. 

“What we’ve done in the past is either we just let you continue to live in your fall assignment, if it’s within summer housing, or we place you into your fall assignment,” Lindsey Taylor, Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of Students, said. “You need to be mindful, you may have to relocate. So, if you need to downsize over the summer so that you can be nimble when moving, you start to do so.”

Ultimately, the changes to the LifeWorks program this summer is to better the development of students in the workforce before they enter it post-college.

“We want this to be an experience in which they are being developed, they are learning, they are growing,” Edge said. “That’s part of their entire college experience, right? And summer is no different from that.”

Jobs have been posted onto Handshake every single day by supervisors, as their hours available for the summer have just been approved. Students should look at this website in order to apply for summer jobs.