Photo courtesy of Nappy
By Fiona Sheridan
TAMPA, Fla. — Most Spartans begin their University of Tampa journey in Becoming a Spartan — a course intended to familiarize them with resources accessible to them in their first year and beyond. This is a single-credit course and is mandatory for all incoming students. Afterwards, Spartans move on to Career Readiness and Digital Literacy courses.
While required to graduate, these classes are both zero-credit hours. This has led many students to question the necessity of these courses and express frustration at the zero-credit status.
Career Readiness is exclusively online and prioritizes students’ ability to “determine their career goals, identify strategies for developing and articulating their Spartan Ready Competencies and develop a professional portfolio.” It consists primarily of digital coursework and discussion posts. But due to its simple nature, some struggle to find its point.
Carter Shamis, a sophomore who is currently taking UTampa 201 Career Readiness, said, “I think it’s pretty easy as far as the time commitment, but I don’t think that I’m getting a whole lot out of it because of how easy it is.”
Career Readiness is mandatory, but it doesn’t fulfill any degree requirements. The nature of this zero-credit course is divisive, as students express irritation at these competing factors. “It should either be turned into a credit class or made not mandatory,” said Shamis.
Caden Smith, a senior who also took Career Readiness, expresses similar frustrations with the necessity of the course. “I feel like it should have been at least one credit if it was just more of an engaging course,” said Smith. Additionally, the simplicity of the coursework aggravated her. “It being online and us not doing anything — to be honest, AI could have done the things that they were asking us to do, which I don’t feel as though was helpful.”
As the director of Spartan Studies, Jeffrey Grim helped formulate the course with intentions to boost understanding of careers as well as what is needed to build a career for undergraduates.
“We know that that particular career readiness, that job piece, is increasingly important for our current families as well as our prospective families,” said Grim.
However, some question if these intentions were actually fulfilled in the course. “That class was completely online, and it wasn’t like you had to do discussion posts every week or telling you to just write your resume,” said Smith. At times, the online interactions could even be isolating:
“You’re not meeting these people or talking to them in the class,” said Smith. “I didn’t feel as though I was getting real feedback on what I was doing in terms of my LinkedIn page or writing my resume.”
This lack of connection could affect the work of students and hinder further learning.
The intentions of Career Readiness are apparent just from the name. It aims to engage and facilitate career planning and boost early investment in the skills needed to have a career.
“When they get to their courses in their major, or they get that internship in the major, they have a solid foundation to start from relative to their resume or career readiness or workplace etiquette,” said Grim. These goals still do not deter objections to the class’ structure.
While Career Readiness intends to be a beginning point for preparing for a future career, it’s not intended to be fully comprehensive enough to cover all elements.
“We don’t want students to think this is the one time they should ever think about career readiness or think about career services. It’s really the starting point and trying to get them introduced early,” said Grim. Despite this, many still question the actual usefulness of the course and debate the sensibility of it being zero-credit hours.