Hello future educators of the world! My name is Shawn Caven and I am a proud alum of the Ursinus Education Department graduating in 2014 while completing my student teaching in a 9^th semester. I currently am the Director of Abele Scholars and the Chairman of the Bear2Bear Committee here at Ursinus College. I lead roughly 60 scholars through their experience here at UC and teach workshops on the soft skills of life. I also teach everything they need to know that students don’t learn in the classroom.

My journey is one that is full of twists and turns, but one thing remains true: the skills I learned via the Education Department at Ursinus powers me to be successful. Time management, delivering under pressure, and people skills are just a few of the many I learned in my studies. Once I left Ursinus, Dr. Mackler helped me obtain a job teaching in Japan. I came back to America and joined the corporate world where I quickly rose in the ranks because I knew how to effectively communicate and run meetings that had clear objectives to them. The skills you learn as an educator translate to almost every job imaginable. After the intrinsic desire to help others outgrew the corporate paycheck, I went back into teaching at the high school level for three years in Philadelphia. The courses in Universal Design and Vygotsky’s scaffolding techniques I learned at UC came in handy when I had a classroom of 33 kids of drastically varying skills sets. I then turned my experiences into the dream job of working at Ursinus as a director! The presentation skills and learning how to effectively manage a room of people were astronomically valuable in all my interviews. Without the education department at Ursinus, I certainly would not be where I am today. Currently, I am attending Villanova to earn my masters degree in higher education leadership which I hope will lead me to my career goal of becoming the President of Ursinus one day! If anyone would like to learn more about my story, I’d be more than happy to share scaven@ursinus.edu. Thank you, and please make the great life decision of taking courses with our education department.