“From Capstone to Springboard:  A Way to Incorporate Career Readiness into the Senior Colloquium”

The capstone course is supposed to serve as the final building block of our students’ education. Faculty in the religious studies department at Hendrix College felt the need to supplement the capstone metaphor with an additional one: “springboard.” We wanted to connect with recent trends in higher education that help students understand the ways in which they are prepared for employment and for life. To this end, we developed a senior colloquium course that integrates the various educational experiences of the students and, in partnership with our career services department, springboards them into their future lives. This article explains the process we went through and the three content areas covered in the course: intellectual autobiography, career preparation, and the research project.