The Plattsburgh State Career Development Center has provided students with a tool to explore diversity within their desired fields. The tool is a website called CDC resources for diversity created by CDC where students can search for jobs under specific topics like African American or LGBT.
The Career Development Center held the Diversity Carnival to promote the website to students and faculty. The carnival had three games, which were matching cards, popping balloons and spinning-wheel trivia. All the games contained categories that were used as gateways to open a conversation about the website.
Peer Career Assistant Cheyene Richards said the website was a side project of CDC. They presented the website at two conferences: one state career development conference at Lake Placid in June and another at a SUNY Applied Learning Conference near Albany in November. The SUNY Applied Learning Conference helped get a link to the website displayed on the PSUC website.
“We know how hard it is for students to dive straight into the workplace because they don’t know if they will be accepted or not,” Richards said. “We want people to know that there are [jobs] in the world that would accept them.”
The website contains categories such as women, veterans, Latinx and others.
A student can select a category and see available jobs, professional organizations and publications within said category. In addition, students can see federal laws set in different states surrounding their desired categories.
The laws listed on the site have links from federal government websites, so whoever uses the site can see for themselves. The site goes even deeper into federal laws by informing its users of questions an employer cannot legally ask a potential employee during a job interview.
“There are certain questions that are illegal to ask,” PSUC information systems/business and global supply chain management double major Abhey Sharma said. “but some [people from different ethnic backgrounds] don’t know about them.”
Some of the illegal questions include “Are you planning to have a family?” and “Do you have children or child-care responsibilities?”
The site also contains posts, blogs from peer career assistants, videos and TED talks pertaining to the different categories.
Sharma played a major role in the creation of the website. He created the categories and said he had “a whole list of categories in progress.”
Sharma is an international student from India. He created categories such as east and south asian because they hit close to home.
“It was personal to me because I belong to the [south asian] category,” Sherma said.
His goal is to create a library of diversity resources for PSUC students to use. He thinks the site does a good job of promoting different groups from other backgrounds.
PSUC junior Travis Peterson is fond of the site’s ability to inform users of various federal laws.
“You shouldn’t have to answer questions you are not obligated to answer,” Peterson said. “There’s a new drug test law in New York that everyone doesn’t know about, so it’s a useful resource.”
The website can be accessed from the PSUC website or at cdcresourcesfordiversity.wordpress.com.
