Mandatory Job Training for Bowdoin Students

When Solomon Aborbie was a sophomore at Bowdoin College in Maine, he had only a faint understanding of what he wanted to do with his life—or even what his options were. His mother and father, immigrants from Ghana, had worked in grocery stores and factories, so those were the jobs he knew the most about. Before college, his dream was to become a gym teacher. Now, a year after his graduation, he works as a cloud engineer at Google. The turning point for Aborbie came during Bowdoin’s Sophomore Bootcamp, a mandatory program that students attend at the end of winter break in their second year. The three-day bootcamp, which just completed its fifth year, trains students in a wide range of job-hunting skills—from writing résumés to networking—and offers them exposure to an array of potential career pathways.