So, You Didn’t Get the Internship. Now What?
February 22, 2023
Making Waves Foundation’s Wave-Maker Success Framework is meant to open a pipeline for student success in college, career, and life by making explicit the supporting intentions, actions, and resources in ways that are authentic to Wave-Makers’ sense of self and community.
For realizing goals
For independent thinking and application of knowledge
For productive and supportive relationships
Making Waves recognizes that students’ experiences, emotions, knowledge, and skills do not exist independently of each other – particularly as Wave-Makers transition into this stage of young adulthood.
Through coaching and integrated supports, Wave-Makers and coaches and team members develop a relationship that is rooted in agency toward long-term positive outcomes. Wave-Makers partner with their coach to reflect on making meaning of their experience and charting a path forward toward their goals.
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Concept | Definition |
Adaptability | Being flexible when things change |
Agency | Making intentional choices and adjusting course as needed to derive a course of action |
Collaboration | Working with others, including people with different backgrounds, values, points of view |
Communication | The ability to synthesize and share information in a way that is received by the audience |
Creativity | Thinking of new solutions; perceiving the world in new ways, finding hidden patterns, making connections between seemingly unrelated things |
Critical Consciousness | Recognizing oppressive social forces shaping society and taking action against them (integration of identity, purpose, and agency) |
Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving | Careful consideration based on synthesized evidence, directed to a goal |
Curiosity | Wanting to know more |
Growth Mindset | Believing you can improve your abilities |
Identity | Having a sense of internal consistency of who I am across time and multiple social identities |
Intellectual Humility | Recognizing the limitations of your knowledge |
Interdependence | Having the drive to pursue goals and the wisdom to ask for support when I need it |
Judgment, Decision-Making | Evaluating options and making deliberate and thoughtful choices |
Leadership | Guiding and assisting a group in meeting goals |
Networking | The ability to connect with other people |
Planning & Prioritization | Creating a road map to reach a goal or complete a task; making decisions about what is and is not important to focus on |
Purpose | Clarity of and commitment to making a meaningful contribution to the world |
Resilience | Passion and perseverance for long-term goals, including managing through failure |
Responsibility | Owning actions and outcomes |
Self-Awareness | Understanding your feelings and using them wisely |
Self-Efficacy | Belief and confidence in one’s ability to influence their own motivation and actions |
In crafting this success framework, Making Waves Foundation team members drew on decades of insights, expertise, and experiences from college coaches, financial services coordinators, and Wave-Makers. We are deeply grateful for those insights and for feedback provided on early drafts. Key references from youth development research, higher education standards, and career readiness frameworks that informed this work include:
Additionally, Making Waves Foundation partnered with Project Evident during spring 2022 to develop an aligned measurement framework. Through that process Project Evident supported with additional refinement of the success framework as we further clarified program priorities to inform metrics.
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