On Tuesday, Nov. 4, the Gordon Career Center (GCC) received the 2025 Handshake Career Spark Award, awarded annually by the career platform to the top two percent of career centers in the country.
“Wesleyan University stands out on Handshake for actively engaging first-year and sophomore students while leveraging collections to showcase targeted opportunities, supporting early exploration and empowering students to connect with meaningful career paths from the start,” Handshake’s announcement of the award read.
Handshake is a career network that includes more than 20 million students and alumni from four-year and community colleges, connecting emerging professionals to one million employers.
GCC student workers said that Handshake is a crucial tool for students looking for internships, campus jobs, and postgraduate employment.
“Handshake shows you what’s out there,” Peer Career Advisor George Yardley ’26 said. “Even if you’re not ready to apply for jobs, browsing helps you understand what kinds of opportunities exist for your skills and interests.”
“It’s both a search tool and an exploration tool,” Peer Career Advisor Mischka Tiangco ’27 said. “You can filter opportunities by your interests or just scroll and get ideas. It helps you discover options you might never have known existed.”
Every year, the Handshake Career Spark Awards (CSA) honor the top 40 institutions in the country, out of over 1500 educational establishments that use it.
All career centers are evaluated in three categories: student engagement, employer engagement and curation, and reporting, analytics, and First Destination Survey (FDS) data. There are 40 winning career centers in total and ten winners per school type (4-year public, 4-year private, minority-serving institution, community college).
“Handshake’s recognition that we are among the top ten four-year, private universities in the nation is particularly meaningful because it’s based on data, not opinion,” Gordon Career Center Executive Director Sharon Belden Castonguay said. “It reinforces what we already know: that our advising, programming, and alumni and employer relationships are best in class, not only within our peer group, but across the country.”
The GCC attributes the achievement to a variety of factors such as implementing new features like “Collections” and “People” on its website and integrating them in their day-to-day work.
“Beyond the technology, what really made a difference was how quickly our team integrated these tools into everyday advising and communication,” GCC Director of Operations Rachel Munafo said. “We’ve built a workflow that turns data into action, whether that’s tailoring outreach to a specific major or highlighting hidden opportunities students might otherwise miss.”
Handshake measures student engagement by student profile completion on the platform, data surrounding event and appointment check-in, email open rate, and mobile app downloads and usage, ensuring students have access to resources to build meaningful networks and further careers.
According to Munafo, the GCC heavily analyzes students’ experience based on feedback from its professional advising team, peer career advisors, and student staff.
“We’re often the first people students meet when they come to the Career Center,” Peer Career Advisor Zoey Possick ’28 said. “For many first-years, it’s less intimidating to talk with another student first. We make career exploration feel like a conversation, not an expectation to have it all figured out.”
The award also evaluates efficiency of the employer approval process and engagement with curated collections by looking at the percentage of students who submit applications and those who apply to a job within a career center collection. They also assess events and fairs in the collection and average employer approval response time so as to evaluate students’ ability to access different employers through the guidance and expertise of the career center.
“We were one of the first schools to implement Handshake’s new ‘Collections’ function, allowing our career advising and employer relations teams to curate the events, jobs, and internships most relevant to specific populations,” Castonguay said. “These also feed into the industry pages of our website, so the entire campus community can look at the Film and Television page, for example, and see upcoming sessions with UTA and the Walt Disney Company.”
By utilizing reporting, analytics, and FDS, the award also measures how effectively career centers use pre-built and custom reports to track student activities and outcomes. Through saved report usage, scheduled report usage, and FDS response rates, Handshake can determine the office’s impact.
The GCC aims to keep its momentum by building on the success of one of its most popular programs, WesLink, and launching a new initiative, Wesleyan Career Month.
“Held during Winter Break, WesLink matches students with alumni for focused career conversations,” Castonguay said. “In January 2026, we are launching Wesleyan Career Month, which includes WesLink and our always-popular Research-a-Palooza, but also introduces Wesleyan Summer Spotlights, a series of panels showcasing students’ 2025 summer internships; a theater trek to New York; and a series of both virtual and in-person programs to support international students.”
According to Castonguay, the GCC continues to establish and sustain relationships with current and former students in hopes of translating their Wesleyan education into a lifetime of meaningful work, describing their work as not just transactional but transformational. She looks forward to helping more students engage with the GCC regardless of their background and career interest.
“This award suggests that we outpace most institutions in this level of engagement, though we are well aware of the work it will take to continue this positive momentum,” Castonguay said.
“The Career Center’s role on campus just keeps growing,” Peer Career Advisor Olivia Rosas ’26 said. “Every year, more students use its resources and realize how much support is available. This award feels like a testament to how far the GCC has come and how deeply it invests in helping students succeed.”
The GCC looks forward to driving careers from a liberal arts education.
“Career development isn’t separate from the liberal arts; it’s one expression of it,” Munafo said. “Helping students connect curiosity, critical thinking, and purpose to the world of work is at the heart of what we do.”
Raiza Goel can be reached at rgoel@wesleyan.edu.
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