Today@Dal

From the Tuesday, September 9 edition of the Chronicle Herald:

As students graduate from post-secondary school into a hyper-competitive job market, many now have another tool to help them stand out from the crowd.

Universities across Nova Scotia have adopted the idea of co-curricular records, a system of tracking student participation in campus or community volunteer activities.

Chris Glover, the associate director of the Career and Leadership Development Centre at Dalhousie University, said co-curricular records aren’t new — some schools have had them for about 10 years — but they are increasingly being used by students, employers and graduate schools.

“They’re looking for that competitive edge, the uniqueness. How do I pull that candidate out of this pool? What makes them stand apart from others? And in many cases, it’s the things they’re doing outside of the classroom,” Glover said. “If you have two students with the same academic credentials in a candidate pool, how do you draw them out? And often it’s looking at volunteer work. It’s the extra work that they’re doing that makes them stand apart.”

Read the rest of this story online.