Jumping the Connection Gap - Helping Students Build a Bridge between Major and Career

Oct 15, 2026

The text examines how students on a college campus face a “connection gap” between their identity as students and their future identity as successfully employed professionals. It describes isolation reproduced within communities and the anxiety this creates for both traditional and non-traditional students. To address the gap, the author develops a course that prompts direct engagement with local businesses while retaining an instruction, application, and reflection model, detailing early design choices and pilot structure.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages19

Reading Time48 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction: The connection gap and the isolation problem

From campus communities to workplace readiness

Anxiety for traditional and non-traditional students

Course development and course design

Pilot course: Romancing the Marketplace

Service-learning alternatives and the chosen praxis

Jumping the Connection Gap: Helping Students Build a Bridge between Major and Career Brandy Schillace Winona State University As expressed by Linda Adler-Kassner, Robert Crooks, and Ann Watters in the introduction to Writing the Community,“external barriers tend to get reproduced internally” on a college campus. Though opportunities to join in community events increases, so does the diversification—and ultimately, the division—of those communities into smaller and smaller sub-groups.“Plugged-in” and dangling white cords (the ever-present information umbilical), students are often in groups, but just as often, they do not interact. In my specific role as a professor of English literature, I find that this isolato image often makes up the core of my students’ perception of the “great writer.” Of course, in reality, even canonized giants—from the romantic poets to the tortured (and at times torturing) post-modernists—were surrounded by complex networks of peers and patrons. The “artist” must ultimately answer the needs of audience and purpose—just as any technical writer. But though we live in a diverse and literate society, surrounded (it seems) by a constant buzz of messages, the isolationist perspective remains cogent. The problems of this perspective are various, but one that affects a majority of my students—traditional and non-traditional alike—is this: how do I translate these (supposedly) isolationist skills of reading and writing into viable work-place skills? Or, to put it more generally, what am I supposed to do with this English Major? Isolationism among adolescents, the lack of understanding of the world outside themselves, has been called the connection gap. Explored fairly extensively by scholars of psychology and anthropology, the term is used to describe the cocoon-like structure of modern living, the fact that we are “losing touch” with other human beings. But works like Laura Pappano’s The Connection Gap: Why Americans Feel so Alone, or Anneli Rugus’ Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto deal mainly with social isolation, the gaps between individuals. For my students, the connection gap is between their identity as college students and their future identity as successfully employed persons, working at jobs they enjoy and which are relevant to the skills they have learned. They often have difficulty perceiving the business community as their community; they feel as though their skill set leaves them unprepared to make contact with that world. This produces anxiety in my youngest students, those who have had little job experience and who are incredibly nervous about speaking to those in “real world” jobs. However, another kind of anxiety presents itself to my non-traditional students, those who have returned to school after working in other careers often feel tremendous pressure to “make something” of this degree, to find gainful employment that validates their return to school and their choice of the English major, respectively. Thus, I have had the young advisees in my office, emotionally explaining the pressure put on them by parents who worry there won’t be jobs for them postgraduation, and the elder student, too, asking for help in forging a career: “Should I teach? Is that all there is?” With our greater networking capabilities, it should be easy to expand students’ horizonsand foster mutually beneficial relationships that would serve them not only in their present community, but in their futures as professionals. Increasingly, however, the only places student may go for answers are (often over-burdened) career centers or technical writing classrooms—not necessarily English courses per se, but those that are designed to teach students the practical value of communication. To provide a better platform for students and to support the efforts of my own university’s career services, I spent three semesters (spring and fall 2011, spring 2012) developing a praxis. The first iteration of this was a pil

FAQs

What is meant by the “connection gap” in this text?

It describes the cocoon-like social isolation that leaves students unable to connect their college identity with their future professional identity and workplace community.

Why do students struggle to use their English major for workplace skills?

They often cannot see the business community as their community and feel unprepared to make contact with that world, which creates anxiety.

How does the author try to close the connection gap for students?

By designing a praxis-based course where students contact local businesses and develop their identities as career-persons, supported by continuous reflection and class presentation.

Oct 15, 2026

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