On Thursday, September 11, Career Services will officially launch Eagle Flight Plan, an incentive based program that rewards students for completing professional development milestones.
“The Eagle Flight Plan is a gamified career development platform developed by myself and the computer science seniors last semester,” Charlotte Hamil, director of Career Services said. “It takes all of the tasks that you should try to learn and do while you’re here at university and it breaks it up over four years instead of waiting until junior and senior year.”
Chair of the Computer Science Department David North elaborated on the function of the system:
“The tasks will be things like going to the career fair or writing a resume or going to a mock interview or getting a mentor: lots of things that are about career preparation,” North said. “As they complete those tasks, they get points and they can redeem those points for things at Career Services. They also can get badges for completing certain combinations of things.”
Hamil hopes Eagle Flight Plan will encourage students to build career skills sooner, increasing their hirability upon graduating.
“Research is telling us that early engagement with career services is more beneficial,” Hamil said. “It produces better outcomes upon graduation. If you think about it, you’re building your network sooner, you’re learning all these skills so you can really practice and use them while you’re a college student.”
According to Hamil, this new Career Services system is one of a kind.
“No other university has something like this,” Hamil said. “Schools and universities have checklists or they’ll give guides of ‘here’s what you should do freshman year, here’s what you should do sophomore year,’ but no one has an actual system that helps you track it and makes it engaging.”
Hamil said she conceived the idea for a rewards based Career Services system during her initial interviews for her current position at Oklahoma Christian.
“During my interview for this job, I was asked how I was going to make sure the students complete all of the things I think they should do for professional development. That’s when the idea was born,” Hamil said. “As that was gaining momentum, we had an alum in the software world who heard about it and wanted to meet. So we met with him, and Professor David North was brought in. He suggested we need an app.”
Last year’s senior computer science students developed the Eagle Flight Plan for their Software Engineering Capstone project. North explained nine separate teams interviewed Hamil, built their own versions of the software, and presented them to her several times for feedback.
“At the end of the semester, they did their final presentations and we selected the one that we thought was best,” North said. “Another team of students worked on it over the summer, and now we’re ready to make it live for the whole campus.”
The eight students responsible for contributions to the development of the current version are listed below:
- Jonathan Booker
- Kyle Denney
- George Hartman
- Jonah Veit
- Jenna Stilling
- Bill Le
- Arian Tatum
- Madelyn McDonald
Though it is currently available as a web application for computers, Hamil has plans to also offer it as a mobile app in the future:
“Right now, it’s only on your laptop,” Hamil said, “but we’re hoping that the mobile portion will be available some time in the future. It’s been a year-long process of getting it ready, and we didn’t want to say anything about it until we knew everything worked and was good. Now’s the time.”
Hamil encourages students to attend the launch party, where they will have an opportunity to use the new software in an environment where they can receive help.
“We’re going to have kind of a kickoff launch event where you need to bring your laptop,” Hamil said, “and we will have students and I will be there and my staff will be there to help you log in and make sure you understand how it works.”
Students can participate in the Eagle Flight Plan launch party in the Branch from 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. on September 11.
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