Teaching | Dr. Jenny Strakovsky

Culture-Driven Career Design

I take a culture-driven approach to career development. As a career advisor, I want to do more than help students with a job application. I want to help them become part of a professional community and get a long-term vision for their future.

At Georgia Tech, I managed the Career Design Studio, the in-house career services office of the School of Modern Languages, which offers coaching appointments and materials review for graduate students in the MS-GMC and MS-ALIS, as well as Modern Languages majors in any language.

I also taught several career courses that use culture-driven approaches, including Building Community: Culture, Identity, Diversity, & Inclusion, a course on communication and culture change management designed for graduate research assistants in marketing and student engagement roles.

My amazing team of graduate assistants in the Modern Languages Master's Program, conducting recruitment to help new applicants "design their dream career."

My work in curriculum design and instructional design is informed by my own experiences as a teacher in the university classroom, where I have had the pleasure of working with students from radically different disciplines, cultural backgrounds, and perspectives. It has been very gratifying to learn about the world through the many different ideas, approaches, and life paths that my students have brought to the classroom.

Career Courses at Georgia Institute of Technology:

Career Design for Global Citizenship
Career Portfolio, M.S. in Global Media and Cultures
Professional Portfolio, M.S. in Applied Language and Intercultural Studies
Global Career Lab auf Deutsch (Taught in German)

Coaching and Consulting:

Walk-in Career Counseling, MLA Convention, 2019
Workshop: Talking to Recruiters, MLA Convention, 2019
Ad-hoc consulting for liberal arts departments, 2018
Academic Skills Coach, Stanford University
Freelance career coaching for PhDs in humanities

Career Education auf Deutsch: Values self-assessment cards for third-semester German at Stanford

Cultural Studies and Media Studies

It's been 15 years since I started teaching in the college classroom, first as an instructor of intensive German language, then in interdisciplinary programs like Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric and as a TA for "Chemistry and Art," and later at Georgia Tech, where I taught German as well as life design and organizational culture.

As an instructor, I see my classroom as a laboratory in which students can experiment with raw materials and develop their understanding through trial and error. Most of my courses involve project-based learning and collaborative activities -- inspired by the communicative approach in foreign language studies, which uses roleplay and authentic materials to help students build the courage to connect and communicate with native speakers in unfamiliar settings. In addition to the career courses listed above, which I love to teach, here are some of my favorite courses:

Building Community: Culture, Identitiy, and Inclusion

Designed for graduate assistants working in marketing and community engagement roles, this course covers theories in communication, design, inclusion, and organizational culture. We talk about customer narratives, resilience psychology and optimism, team culture and belonging, mental health and well-being, graphic design, and public writing.

Germany Today: Politics and Culture

In this course, students follow current events in Germany and learn about the politica system, major debates, and the history of German politics, working directly with speeches, news media, and election data. This course has been taught during the Syrian civil war, EU financial crisis, the signing of the Paris Accords, Russia's first invasion of Ukraine, and during two election cycles in Germany. Taught in German.

Old Stories, New Media: Great German Tales and their Adaptations

There are some stories we see again and again: the star-crossed lovers, the battle of good vs evil, the mad genius. This course surveys German cultural history through the eyes of its most enduring myths and tales, such as the Grimm fairy tales, Tristan and Isolde, and the Faust Legend. Students learn about translation and adaptation theory, and explore many versions of each tale to discover how narratives evolve across historical periods and media. Taught in German.

Russian for Spies (public workshop)

A one-hour crash course in introductory Russian, held at the James Bond Convention, 2018. Students learned to deliver a secret message that the mission had been accomplished, as well as some basic phonetics, cognates, and 1970s-era pop culture.

Students in "Chemistry of Art" Course" (Chemical Enginereing and Cantor Arts Center) examining 4000-year-old artifacts from northern China

"What do inventors do?" Intermediate German students collaborate to brainstorm how science has changed and what creativity means to them.

I was honored to be invited to say a few words at the Latin American Association annual convention in 2019 -- and stand on the same stage where Stacey Abrams had spoken hours earlier!