Farouk Dey will assume the post of associate vice provost and executive director of Career Development Services in April 2013. He will replace outgoing director Lance Choy, who has held the position since 1999.
Dey comes to Stanford from Carnegie Mellon, where he served as the director of the Career and Professional Development Center. He previously worked in the University of Florida’s Career Resource Center.
“It sounds like this is a great time of transition for career services at Stanford University, and to have the opportunity to come and build and innovative, cutting-edge and futuristic career services model at a premier institution like Stanford is a dream come true,” Dey said.
Civil and Environmental Engineering graduate student Subhan Ali Ph.D. ’14 served as a student representative on the eight-member search committee. Ali, who also serves on the Stanford Alumni Association’s Board of Directors, said the committee was looking for somebody who could steer the Career Development Center (CDC) into its next phase.
“We were looking for somebody to really look at all these changes that are going on and just do it in an amazing way – the way we’re used to doing things at Stanford,” Ali said.
The search committee, led by University Registrar Tom Black, interviewed two finalists on campus over the course of two days. Vice Provost for Student Affairs Greg Boardman announced the appointment on Jan. 15.
Dey, who earned his doctoral degree in higher education administration from the University of Florida, said that he often used Stanford’s career services office as a benchmark for the success of his own programs.
Among Dey’s goals as he takes over direction of the CDC are the integration of technology into career services, the engagement of alumni and the development of new mentoring models.
He believes social media can increase accessibility to career services and might prompt students to think about their career development earlier in the process.
“The integration of technology is something I have worked a lot on throughout my career and have really generated a lot of success,” Dey said. “I would imagine a population like the Stanford student population would be very receptive to that, and probably even hungry for it.”
Dey said that he would like to provide more services to alumni to promote alumni participation in educating students, providing more internships, externships and job shadowing or mentoring opportunities to students with the ultimate goal of getting alumni to offer students jobs. He also hopes to restructure the mentoring programs at Stanford to create the opportunity for every student to have a mentor.
“The place a career development center can play is in engaging students from day one, from the day they enroll in the University, in the process of thinking about…who they are as persons and who they are as professionals.”