Where personal discovery, connections and support lead to rewarding outcomes
At the DePaul University Career Center, we believe the path to your successful future starts with you. By helping you understand and shape your passions, interests and skills, we connect you with majors, internships, jobs and opportunities so that you can take on Chicago—and the world—with vigor, knowledge and preparation.
Our Vision
The DePaul Career Center inspires excitement about the future and empowers DePaul students to own and shape their personal and professional journeys.
Our Mission
The DePaul Career Center helps students build confidence, explore possibilities, and develop a powerful personal brand. We leverage our relationships with employers, alumni, faculty and staff to facilitate meaningful experiences, mentoring connections and partnerships that position students for success in their careers and their communities.
What We Believe
In the DePaul Career Center:
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We believe in DePaul students and alumni and in their potential to have successful, fulfilling careers.
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We believe
a DePaul education provides students with the knowledge, skills and experiences to succeed in a continually changing workplace.
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We believe
success is individually defined, and exploring purpose plays a role in determining what success looks like.
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We believe
there are many career options that align with a student’s interests, skills, personality and values; major does not have to equal career.
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We believe
career exploration can be inspiring and fun and that it’s never too early to begin exploring.
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We believe
there is no “right” place to start; we help students at every stage of their journey.
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We believe
preparing career-ready students requires an integrated effort with faculty, staff and other campus partners.
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We believe
our employers are essential partners who provide meaningful experiences, industry knowledge that can inform curriculum, and vital connections to the communities in which our students and alumni live and work.
Our Commitment to Diversity, Inclusion and Equity
Diversity is embedded in our Vincentian Mission. This is how we live it today.
The DePaul University Career Center upholds and advances the university’s commitment to
diversity as a core value, and strives to create and model an environment that fosters respect, inclusion and equity. We actively work to address and eliminate racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hatred in our environment.
We are committed to developing and delivering inclusive programs and services and advocating for a more inclusive and equitable approach to career readiness and professionalism. We hold ourselves accountable for being an antiracist and inclusive community through educating ourselves, engaging in self-reflection about our own social identities and positionality, examining our own biases, and taking action when injustices arise.
As a team dedicated to empowering students and alumni to achieve career success and improve their social mobility, we are committed to advancing racial equity by:
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Enriching our community by including and amplifying underrepresented and marginalized student and staff voices
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Educating ourselves and our employer partners on racial equity and inclusion topics
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Creating programs, resources, and services that support and are responsive to our diverse community
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Respecting the uniqueness of each individual’s ideas and experiences
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Helping students and alumni build confidence to thrive in a global, multicultural workplace and make an impact in their careers and communities
Strategic Plan 2020
In 2017-18, the DePaul University Career Center embarked on a change process to envision and develop the next generation of career services at DePaul. We examined environmental and industry trends that impact how we deliver career services to ensure we could meet the needs of our students, employers, alumni, and the university community.
Our examination culminated with the release of the Career Center's 2020 strategic plan and coincided with the start of the university-wide strategic planning process, as the DePaul community worked together to envision the university's future. The Career Center's
Strategic Plan 2020 creates the foundation for our ability to deliver on
Grounded in Mission: The Plan for DePaul 2024.
The plan includes five high-level priorities and provides the visionary framework to guide us as we transform DePaul University's career exploration landscape:
- Integrating career into the campus ecosystem
- Developing a holistic model for delivering quality career education and experiences
- Collecting rich, relevant data that help inform strategy and create compelling stories to demonstrate impact
- Defining and building career readiness
- Engaging employers and alumni to provide meaningful experiences, mentoring connections and industry knowledge
Download the Plan
Annual Report
We are proud to report on the progress we've made on our strategic plan, and excited to highlight some of the key initiatives and stories from each year. Thank you to all of the university partners who continually collaborate with us and contribute to making career an integral part of the university landscape.
2019-2020 Annual Report
2018-2019 Annual Report