How CPS Helped Raissa Talehata Turn a Concern About Food Waste into a Full-Time Career as a UX Climate Designer
Raissa Talehata, who just graduated from CPS with a Master of Professional Studies in Digital Media in 2022, remembers giving a presentation to her classmates in Australia during her junior year of high school about food waste in Solo, Java, Indonesia. She did not know then how researching food waste problems would become a permanent fixture in her own life. The damaging 2015 wildfires in Australia and her shock and dismay at the huge portions served at Boston restaurants were things that deeply motivated her interest in food waste. These experiences, coupled with her education, eventually led her to develop an app prototype that enabled consumers to manage their food inventory and reduce waste.
Raissa initially attended the University of Melbourne, Australia, for a bachelor of commerce degree in accounting and finance. She then received her first master’s degree at the Hult International School of Business in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“I chose Northeastern University because of its great reputation in preparing students to face and tackle the real-world issues; it is not just knowledge, but the informed application of this knowledge to real-world situations.”
Intersectionality of Business, Communications, Design, and Global Social Issues
For today’s consumers, Raissa realized she needed to expand her skill set beyond business and finance and focus on emerging technologies, user experiences, and interactive design. She found what she needed in the College of Professional Studies graduate digital media program. She said that, “My faculty mentors Cynthia Barron, Tania Schlatter, Carl Zangerl, and Edward Powers, made huge impacts.”
In 2020, Raissa was planning on doing a co-op in the summer, however, that experiential learning experience had to be postponed because of the pandemic. Instead, she learned of other experiential learning opportunities: one being the creation of a virtual public relations (PR) agency called Husky Communications overseen by faculty member Ed Powers. That summer, Raissa and other students developed a digital product and website for the virtual PR firm. Their work included interviewing stakeholders, developing a brand, conducting user research, creating digital content, and designing solutions. She also worked on website designs for Inspire & Influence, a blog for Northeastern’s communication, digital media, and human resources professionals; and for NU Media, an innovative platform to showcase student stories, innovations, discoveries, and achievements with internal and external audiences.
Benefits of Experiential Learning
Experiential learning gave Raissa immediate work skills and the confidence to define and identify business problems, develop creative solutions, and solve complex challenges. These projects helped her land her current job as a UX Designer at a local design firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“Being a part of the Husky team was a stepping stone for me, as it not only sharpened my technical skills but also developed my soft-skills that could be easily transferable to all different types of businesses – it gave me the competitive edge,” said Raissa.
She also won two awards during her graduate studies: the Northeastern Outstanding Graduate Student Award in Experiential Learning and the CPS Experiential Learning XN Excellence Award.
Raissa has many titles in her current work. She is a web developer, a user experience (UX) designer, and a climate designer, the last is defined as a person who devotes her creative talents to working on the climate crisis.
“My goal is to raise awareness about how seriously we need to take actions as individuals, as well as collectively to deal with global warming. That also means that I am dedicating the next few years of my career to be a UX Designer for organizations that support climate actions.”
Welcoming Change: AQA and the CPS Evolution
When a college embraces the work needed to deliver learning opportunities that build a global network of lifelong learners, profound things happen. Leaders at the forefront of this work are causing a paradigm shift for the entire Higher Education community.
CPS embraces the unbundled approach to higher education, where traditional degree programs are broken down into smaller, more focused learning experiences offering learners greater flexibility and more numerous pathways toward achieving goals. As higher education struggles to pivot toward new course delivery and credentialing paradigms, CPS learners have quickly become the new majority; embracing them means embracing the future of higher education.
While other higher education institutions choose to ignore this reality or choose to view mixing-and-matching as a lack of degree commitment or academic ambivalence, CPS is charging ahead with innovative approaches to deliver opportunities that work for learners, meeting them where they are.
Allison Ruda, Associate Dean for Curriculum Strategy and Product Innovation, and the Academic Quality and Assessment team she leads are the Change Agents helping CPS faculty adapt to the ‘new learning economy.’ The academic quality initiative they are leading is helping the college own its forward-thinking, agile, and systematized mindset that embraces innovative teaching. The approach supports the college’s overarching mission of establishing a global network of lifelong learners.
To bring this focus to Faculty, and to cultivate a “culture of quality,” AQA has launched its first QUEST (Quality Unleashed: Empowering Skillful Teaching) series of virtual workshops, scheduled to last at least through December 2023 and its lineup of workshops covers topics from Chat GPT to conducting course design self-assessments.
The team behind the QUEST Series and other quality initiatives includes Mamta Saxena, Assistant Dean, Academic Quality and Assessment; Ori Fienberg, Academic Affairs Specialist and Lecturer; Barbara Ohrstrom, Academic Director, Online Writing Lab and Lecturer; Asim Javed, Learning and Assessment Data Analyst; and Jennifer Turrentine, Digital Learning Specialist.
“Every member of this team is here because they believe strongly in CPS’ mission. It sounds totally cliché, but when you combine that commitment with deep, subject-matter expertise and a passion for education, that’s a pretty potent force for positive change. Their humanity, and the sense of humor they bring out in each other is icing on the cake.”
Ruda says the team’s desire to shine a light on outstanding teaching, and to use QUEST as a platform to exchange ideas and diffuse effective practices has been extremely rewarding. To date, faculty members from every CPS division have been active partners not only in initiatives like QUEST, but in other aspects of the quality initiative, such as revising the CPS syllabus template to include more inclusive language, enhancing course readiness processes with the integration of new tools, and modernizing and enhancing the CPS’ use of Canvas. Many of these elements are on track to roll out more broadly in late Fall.
Before managing the AQA initiative, Allison was Senior Strategist, Program Design, with Northeastern’s Online Experiential Learning team (now EDGE). In 2013, she earned her doctorate from CPS’ Graduate School of Education. Through her varied tenure with the college, her passion for consistent improvement is evident. In 2007, when she was first hired by the university as an Instructional Designer, online programs did not yet exist at Northeastern. Since then, she has witnessed a complete revolution in how CPS’s faculty-empowered approaches placed the college in an industry leadership position, resulting in other universities fast copying their approach.
“Under Chuck Kilfoye’s leadership, NU Online began in CPS and ultimately created a strong model for online course and program development for other institutions to follow. With the level of expertise and commitment of our faculty, and the experiences we’ve gained over a decade of doing this work, I believe it’s possible—maybe even inevitable—that with continued commitment and elbow grease, we will continue to be pioneers in this space.” Ruda said.
Why is Quality Assurance important at CPS?
Looking at opportunities and challenges from new perspectives is the best way to meet new learner needs. The AQA team’s expertise is helping CPS think creatively about building a learning community where it becomes easy to have consistency and clarity in a way that ensures academic quality and student success while establishing CPS as a leader for the broader Northeastern community.
“We aren’t asking faculty to take on additional work; that would be contrary to the goal. We’re implementing processes that, once faculty adopt, will have easier ways of accomplishing the work they came here to do in the first place.”
Due to the significant amount of technological change, unbundling higher education requires different processes than what was required even ten years ago. This work requires a significant amount of organizational adaptation and change.
In line with the mission of CPS, AQA’s work is centered on designing a modern and engaging digital learning experience that fosters a lifelong love of learning. While Ruda and her team are at the beginning of the work, the goal is to eventually get to a point where CPS is centered on ‘measurable quality.’
“Allison and her team’s work is the essential piece that will enable us to really drive our mission across the globe, in a way that delivers what learners need. By enabling Faculty to work within a defined system and with valuable supports in place, they will be able to create deeply immersive learning experiences that will positively impact learners in a palpable way.”
CPS Dean Radhika Seshan.
When asked where she thinks CPS is headed in five years, Allison says, “We want to be the college and university that people look at when they wonder what the future of higher education is going to be. When people are talking about access to higher education and how it is changing to make itself more available and accessible, we want CPS to come to mind first. Because that is what we do.”
Allison holds a Doctor of Education in Curriculum, Teaching Learning, and Leadership from Northeastern. She also holds an EdM in Technology, Innovation, and Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Mount Holyoke College.
Learn more about the QUEST Series.
The Mirror Effect: Adebukola Ajao Gives Back
A look at how the College of Professional Studies succeeds in its mission of meeting Learners where they are in their lives, helping them become leaders along that journey, and simultaneously enriching and expanding the quality of the vast Northeastern network.
Adebukola Ajao, CPS Alumni, Adjunct Professor, and Business Owner, was recently honored by Northeastern University’s 2023 Women Who Empower Innovator Awards. Northeastern University also spotlighted her in a recent article and she was the Special Guest Speaker at the CPS Town Hall meeting this July.
From a young girl growing up in Roxbury, Boston, just across the street from the Northeastern campus, to becoming an adjunct professor of Digital Media at CPS now teaching the next generation of CPS Life learners, Ajao has always championed the same mission and values that CPS upholds, in both her personal, academic and professional endeavors.
In her formative years, Adebukola was chosen for the Crimson Summer Academy, a highly selective program for low-income students enrolled in Boston Public Schools. As a result, she attended Harvard Summer programs, setting her on a path to valuing education as an avenue to opportunity. Later, while taking her undergraduate degree at Emmanuel College in Africana Studies and Politics, she became active in racial advocacy. It was during her undergraduate degree that she launched a Social justice coalition called We Are the Ones, which won an NAACP Next Generation Leadership Award. Around graduation, she became a freelance journalist who traveled the country to cover stories of racial transgressions against Black Americans; her work was picked up by the Huffington Post, Teen Vogue, and other well-known outlets. Having found her voice that resonated with people via digital media, her articles continued to go viral. Through this work, Ajao’s fascination with digital media was born, and she became mesmerized by the editorial process and the power of conveying a perspective in a way that people were able to hear on digital platforms.
“I saw the power of digital and became obsessed with the editorial process.”
Adebukola Ajao
Her passion for community, and her newfound fascination with the digital space, led her to discover and engage with the Northeastern University John D. O’Bryant African American Institute. Through the support she received at the institute, she was awarded the MLK Graduate Fellowship from the institute to enroll in the CPS Digital Media Graduate Program in 2018.
“I needed a program that was truly accommodating to my situation; I worked full time, over 40 hours a week, and I needed a program that could be flexible with that,” she said. “With the [CPS Digital Media Graduate Program] program, I could do what I needed to do and go to classes at night,” she said.
She graduated in 2020, the same year that the COVID-19 pandemic struck. When asked about the challenges of graduating in that climate, Ajao insists that there were more benefits than downfalls to launching her new skill set during a time when people needed to depend upon and understand the digital space.
“It was actually great to throw myself into consultancy during the pandemic because, for the first time, many businesses were forced to acknowledge the digital sphere as a means to reach their clients; it sort of worked in my favor,” she said.
She also said it was helpful that many of her classmates and teachers were not just students, but professionals. “Sure, I graduated in chaos. But it didn’t feel like I took a big hit. While enrolled in the program, I saw the camaraderie between teachers and students and I wanted that for myself. Most of my professors were executives in marketing and they shared their industry connections, and that was valuable to me. I felt like I spent so much money in my undergrad but that I needed to make my own opportunities after that. With CPS, the opportunities were baked into the program. CPS offered me real-life connections and so much more. I was willing to leverage the Northeastern network immediately and that was powerful.”
“My professors pushed, supported, and encouraged me. They led me to see beyond what I could see. While in the program, I got exactly what I had hoped for. I felt like I gained not only friends but also colleagues that I work with to this day. The instruction I received was so powerful; it was exactly what I needed to propel me forward; I gained a lot.” she said.
Ajao recalls one professor who was particularly impactful to her; James Gardiner, lecturer of Digital and Social Media. She said, “He changed the way I thought educators should be; he was always joyful and informative and had his way of demanding excellence without being overbearing. He made me want to achieve and that approach released my fear and anxiety and just let me focus on the learning.”
“Sometimes it’s obvious,” notes James Gardner, who remains a mentor and friend to Ajao. “Ade is a natural leader, bound for success. Coaching her and accelerating her path has been really gratifying. She’s going to make a difference in the world.”
And making a difference is exactly what Ajao is focused on. Today, she helps many businesses develop brands and get their name out to market through the provision of full-scale agency services. Her business has two arms: a consultancy called BDY Consult; the other named ‘For all things Digital’, a free open-source destination for small businesses. Her approach is to target bigger companies as clients while offering a sliding scale fee structure to smaller companies, with a particular emphasis on businesses that have a community, racial, or ESG (Environmental, social, and governance)-based mission.
“Marketing is not just about making money or doing business, it’s a tool that community can use to get to freedom. It effects how people think about how people view themselves. I want to give people the tools to build a better place for everyone.”
“I wanted the women to tell their stories” – Tracy Threatt
Northeastern graduate making female veterans feel less ‘invisible’ with help from the George W. Bush Presidential Center
CPS Alumn, Tracy Threatt, helps female veterans feel less ‘invisible’. She was recently named as a scholar in the Stand-To Veteran Leadership Program at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, and she embodies the college’s ethos of bringing opportunity to those she meets.
Beyond the classroom
Discover How Three Dedicated CPS Professors Empower Underrepresented Entrepreneurs
In 2021, visionary CPS professors Francesca Grippa, Youngbok Ryu, and Carl Zangerl leaped at the opportunity to further the College’s founding principles: meeting Learners where they are and going beyond the classroom to deliver opportunities.
After the country found itself in a second civil rights wave in 2020, politicians and public leaders scrambled to produce fiscal resources to eliminate race-based discrimination and level the economic playing field with a fervor not seen in over 60 years. Northeastern University’s College of Professional Studies (CPS), a legacy champion of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion well before it was trending, found itself in a position to receive external support for something it had always upheld.
Grippa, Zangerl, and Ryu were well-positioned and eager to take full advantage. Through their individual experiences teaching Learners and seeing the challenges they faced as they applied education to improve their lives and communities, the Professors each had their own understanding of where additional resource provision would prove beneficial.
The US Economic Development Administration (EDA) and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation both opened bids for a five-year and three-year grant opportunity to support diverse small businesses and after securing funding in 2021, thanks to these Professor’s passion for their work, The CPS Lab for Inclusive Entrepreneurship was born. Its sworn mission of ‘contributing to economic development and community resilience by promoting inclusive, equitable innovation and entrepreneurship and assisting small businesses in addressing their technical and managerial challenges’ laid the groundwork for a three-pronged service platform for small businesses; it included: the Inclusive Entrepreneur Fellowship Program, Technical and Managerial Assistance and Procurement Research on Supplier Diversity in higher education.
About the Lab:
The Lab assists both historically disadvantaged entrepreneurs whose business models are centered on giving back to their communities and businesses with strong missions to help disadvantaged communities. It largely provides small, minority-owned (Black, Brown, women, LGBTQ+, Indigenous) businesses in Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island with resources they can use that to improve their business operations, evolve their business models, increase market reach, or tackle other challenges, and ultimately improve their communities.
We asked how the Lab fits with CPS’s overall offering. Francesa Grippa, Executive Director of the Lab, said with her soft and rich Italian accent [she hails from Lecce, Italy], “Because we give opportunities to improve lives through learning; because we engage Learners in real business challenges to provide that experiential aspect; and because we care about inclusive prosperity beyond the classroom, we want to genuinely give Learners the tools to be successful, not just dole out diplomas and send them on their way. For us, going outside of the program model and reaching outside the classroom to support these Entrepreneurs is a perfect fit and exactly where we need to be.”
Inclusive Entrepreneur Fellowship Program & Technical/Managerial Assistance
The Fellowship Program hosts annual cohorts of small business owners – some of whom are existing CPS Learners or recent Alumni – who receive support, mentorship, and training to grow their venture, learn how to respond to RFPs, or negotiate contracts. Fellows have the opportunity to tap into Northeastern University’s vast entrepreneurial ecosystem including research centers and institutes, start-up labs, and potential funding resources. Qualifying applicants have to be in business for at least three years. The program is a la carte, not curriculum based, and true to the CPS mission of fostering the development of lifetime learners, focused on meeting Fellows where they’re at. Now in its second year, the current cohort is scheduled to graduate this September.
An entrepreneur’s experience
Fellow Alumni Gayl Crump Swaby has experienced first-hand what the Lab can do. She is president of the mental-health provider New Generation Consultants and as an experienced counselor with a master’s degree in social work from Boston University and an Ed.D. in child and youth studies from Nova Southeastern University, her expertise combines rigorous scholarship with years of real-world experience. Particularly in her work with children, Swaby says, “My purpose has become my passion.”
As an entrepreneur, however, she felt she still had a lot to learn.
“The business side of running a business was not something that was taught in school,” she says. “I didn’t have a lot of those skills and I wanted to get a deeper dive into looking at financials and business models. How do I finance it? Anything and everything related to managing a small business.”
At the Lab for Inclusive Entrepreneurship, she found exactly what she was looking for. Over the course of her fellowship, Swaby gained critical knowledge of negotiating contracts, setting fees, managing expenses, and working with subcontractors—all knowledge and skills she could apply directly and immediately to her professional life. She also learned strategies for increasing sales and practical techniques for boosting her leadership skills. Along the way, she earned the badges that now adorn her LinkedIn profile: Building Blocks of Strategy, The Finance of Funding, and Commercializing Your New Venture.
“The program helped me to really begin to scale my business up and think about what it means to be a small business owner,” Swaby says, “especially being a Woman of Color—and how difficult it is just getting access to resources and being able to break through barriers. The fellowship program helped me to think about not only not letting those barriers get in the way but the ways in which I can remove those barriers or get the support to remove those barriers.”
Supplier Diversity
The research arm of the Lab is a persistent powerhouse; its work is close to the heart of Youngbok Ryu, who leads the effort on Supplier Diversity. Census analysis projects that in 2045, the US will have a complete demographic shift, placing people who identify as white in the minority – this affects all sectors. “The Higher Ed sector represents billions of dollars of spending each year. Our hope is that Supplier Diversity can be one way to close a significant socio-economic gap,” Ryu says.
The research team has so far published two impactful reports on the subject.
The goal is to expand the Supplier Diversity research beyond New England and really engage not just owners of vendor companies, but also bring in the Procurement professionals who have the authority to implement institutional changes needed to remove internal barriers faced by smaller players, the same businesses that are most likely owned by Black, Brown or other minoritized people. The work in this area has the potential to be game-changing for the Higher Education sector and create an effective blueprint for how to implement this change.
Grippa notes that faculty across Northeastern have begun to recognize the program’s effects, and she is hopeful that momentum will continue to build for the Lab and the entrepreneurs and students it serves. She said, “Our efforts have been contagious, and we have been able to forge new alliances and collaborations that will help us to achieve even greater success in the future.”
Resources:
Learn more about the Lab for Inclusive Entrepreneurship: https://nl4ie.sites.northeastern.edu/ie2-fellowship/
Read the Supplier Diversity reports: https://nl4ie.sites.northeastern.edu/supplier-diversity/
Submit a request to the Lab for Business Assistance: https://nl4ie.sites.northeastern.edu/business-assistance/
Newsworthy mentions:
LAB on Boston Chamber of Commerce’s website: https://bostonchamber.com/thought-leadership/growing-into-larger-contracts-northeastern-and-drb/
Mass. colleges fall short of the goal to expand minority contracting: https://www.wgbh.org/news/education/2022/06/06/mass-colleges-fall-short-of-goal-to-expand-minority-contracting