Mentorship that guides the future

At the Futures Center, a hub within The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, students have access to innovative learning and career services that set them up for successful academic journeys and careers. The center offers resources ranging from pre-professional programming to internship and study abroad support, guiding students on where to go next with their degrees. 

“What makes the Futures Center unique is that we are really trying to help amplify experiential learning opportunities and embed 'career' in the classroom. It's looking at how students can maximize their time at Arizona State University,” said Mary Nadarski, the senior director of the Futures Center. “At the Futures Center, we work directly for The College and its units to help connect students to different events in their fields and raise awareness on what is going on with career or experiential learning as a whole.”

The Futures Center, housed in Armstrong Hall on ASU's Tempe campus, is home to a variety of programs built to equip students with the proper tools to navigate future careers and interests. The hub provides pre-health and prelaw advising, success roadmaps, a resource library, events and information on obtaining real-world experience.

In honor of Mentorship Month, learn more about how The College can help prepare and support students in their academic pathways.

Founded in 2018, the Futures Center has built out a variety of tools for students to utilize as they explore what career paths they want to pursue. Its founding came from knowing that students don’t just come for an academic education, but also to find a career they are passionate about post graduation.

The center has partnered with ASU’s Career Services to integrate career-focused curriculum into students’ courses, customizing it with the liberal arts and sciences in mind.

“We come in with the understanding of what is specifically needed for a student who's studying in the humanities versus a student that's studying in the natural sciences and how that looks different from students who are studying in other colleges at ASU in terms of support that they would need for career or information that we would want to help the units provide to those students,” said Nadarski.

One of the resources the Futures Center has worked on this past year is a career roadmap for students and alumni looking for career guidance. With the help of Elizabeth Tirkas, the director of career integration, the roadmap serves as an analogy for how students might navigate not only their time at ASU, but long after as well.

“If you've ever been on a road trip before, you know that you're going to run into construction; you might have to change something or you run into a budget issue, and that really mirrors the student experience. You might have to pick up a job, a financial issue changes your trajectory or you take a class that you didn't expect and now you're on a totally different pathway,” said Nadarski.

The roadmap has allowed the Futures Center team to focus on internships, research and speaking with faculty members in order to piece together related information on the roadmap to help them visualize their next steps in digestible ways.

“We felt that the roadmap really lent itself to changing direction and helping students understand that it's not a singular path, but you can make all of these decisions and still get to that same destination,” Nadarski said.

The center also offers an extensive library of career resources –– from alumni discussing their academic and career journeys on the "Learning From Experience" podcast to handouts on career outcomes that provide common degree applications in a variety of fields. The library helps serve as a one-stop shop for all of The College’s career-related resources.

To further help students prepare for life after college, the Futures Center also provides an in-depth list of real-world experience opportunities to help boost resumes and build on personal success — including information on internships, study abroad trips by academic unit and hands-on training through research.

Along with continuing to do events geared toward different career options, Nadarski says the center is shifting more focus toward improving opportunities for high-impact experiences, such as study abroad trips, and amplifying them. She hopes that in doing so, it will inform experiential learning and career courses that can be built out in the future.

“We're also really focused on digging into some of the data of where students go directly out of undergrad because we know a lot of students have questions. We've worked on that in a wide variety of places, such as the first-destination survey, which is what students will fill out right around graduation to tell us where they're going,” said Nadarski.

From those survey results, more than 95% of the respondents reported either being employed or enrolled in a graduate program after graduation. Many of them represented a wide range of industries both in the Phoenix metro-area and nationally with companies such as HonorHealth, American Express, LabCorp and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.

Pre-professional advising at The College has helped more students get accepted to medical school and law school than any other college at ASU, and that’s because of their commitment to making that path less tricky to navigate.

Over the past three application cycles, students from The College have made up the majority of ASU’s medical and law school applicants and enrollees. They accounted for 77% of medical school applicants, and of the 334 students who ultimately enrolled, 276 came from The College. In law school, The College represented 66% of applicants, with 721 of the 1,073 enrolled students coming from The College.

Kayla Johnson is the program manager of pre-professional advising within the Futures Center. Thanks to her help, pre-professional advising — which includes pre-health and prelaw — provides students with invaluable career readiness skills and the confidence to take on medical and law school applications.

“What makes our pre-professional advising unique is that we focus significantly on the student's unique journey. We also get to know the students through the experiences they are involved in and help them showcase that on applications, both in health care and prelaw,” said Johnson.

Students can access a wide range of pre-professional advising services and workshops, including Pre-Health 101, which supports students as they explore health care career paths. Pre-health advising also oversees the university-wide Pre-Health Internship Program, which offers high-quality experiential opportunities designed to strengthen students’ applications.

In addition to workshops and internships, the Futures Center hosts large-scale events that connect students with schools, alumni and peers. This includes Night with ASU Law, held this past September, which featured admissions discussions, student organization tabling and opportunities to meet ASU Law alumni. This spring, the center plans to host a pre-health expo that will allow students to explore a variety of medical career interests.

To ensure students have ongoing access to guidance beyond events and advising appointments, pre-professional programs have also expanded their digital resources. Along with newsletters — ASU Caduceus News and The Gavel — the team launched dedicated Canvas pages this past fall to serve as centralized hubs for pre-health and prelaw advising.

“The Canvas pages go into how you might find research, who you should contact to shadow and where you would find their information,” Johnson said. “It’s really in-depth information, and we're really proud of that.”

Together, these programs reflect the Futures Center’s commitment to meeting students where they are and helping them move forward with confidence. By combining personalized advising, experiential learning and accessible resources, the center continues to support students as they turn academic interests into meaningful futures.