K-Connected or K- Disconnected

Coming to college and becoming a college student is an excitement and an important preparation for future career for each person. As Kalamazoo College college student, we are becoming more independent, more mature, more responsible and we trying to answer the infamous question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Our parents and our professor will say: “ Do your homework, get your action together, enjoy your college life and use K-Connect to search for opportunity”. We, Olivia Koch and Lan Nguyen, as two college freshmen, are trying to grow up in our new world in Kalamazoo College by finding jobs on campus by using K-Connect. However, the- two-month waiting for a response for our campus jobs really make us doubt about the usefulness of K-Connect. That lead us conduct the survey “K-Connected or K-Disconnected” to find out whether K-Connect is that useful. We send the survey 217 students from 11 classes selected randomly. We have forty- seven responses back, the response rate is 21.66%. 48.94% students we survey have profile on K-Connect, 51.06% students do not have profile on K-Connect. 44.68% of students are having jobs, 55.32% of students are not having jobs, this means almost half of students in our survey are having jobs. Surprisingly, only 7.69% of students use K-Connect to have jobs, and 92.31% of students do not use K-Connect. This means the majority of students do not use K-Connect to have jobs. K-Connect is introduced as a tool to link students with jobs and opportunities but the average time students use to visit K-Connect is 0.9. This number is amazingly slow so it means Kalamazoo College students do not use and do not visit K-Connect at all. No students in our survey are satisfied with K-Connect and none of them find K-Connect useful. This will be an unfair part for Kalamazoo College students because they are still paying the money for K-Connect to work but truthfully, it just does not work at all. Besides, jobs on campus will help students gain experience towards their jobs in the future. 32.56% of students find it is important that their jobs on campus are relevant to what they are studying. With really small numbers of students find K-Connect useful, it means a very small number of students have their jobs relevant to what they are studying.

Through this survey, we discover that K-Connect is K-Disconnected because it cannot link the students with the opportunities they want or they deserve. In this competitive world, academic is not enough, maturity and experience will help students get closer to what each student want. K-Connect is the supposed place to provide students with opportunities they are still lack of because students need those opportunities for further steps in real life. We hope this survey will help K-Connect change the way it is working right now to become more useful.