Students at NDSU are provided an array of opportunities to gain valuable experience in their career field. Olivia Svanes, a recent graduate with degrees in history and emergency management, worked on a new campus safety campaign that allowed her to help keep fellow students safe while gaining knowledge that sets her up for success in the workforce.
The campaign, which launched this month for National Preparedness Month, is geared to make current and incoming students aware of potential hazards on campus and inform them on what to do in certain situations.
Svanes, who interned with NDSU’s Safety Office while working on the campaign, said her main role was finding ways to increase student preparedness.
“I can’t take credit for all the ideas myself; I did a lot of research,” said Svanes, who is from Kintyre, North Dakota. “I looked at what other colleges did across the nation with student preparedness. I had a lot of conversations with students on campus, my emergency management professors and spent a lot of time brainstorming.”
The hard work paid off with a comprehensive campaign that includes multiple factors to inform and prepare people on campus. Students will receive informational preparedness emails describing events such as fires, situational awareness, severe winter weather, summer weather and more. Additional questions surrounding safety preparedness have been added to the roommate agreements students living in the dorms complete. Also, a newly designed emergency management webpage on the NDSU website has in-depth explanations of these hazards and resources for students to learn from.
Despite her knack for safety preparedness, Svanes didn’t know she wanted to pursue emergency management at the start of her academic journey. She started college as a civil engineering major but chose to switch to history after finding a passion for her history-centered classes. While she was happy, Svanes said she still felt like a piece was missing when thinking about what she wanted to pursue after college.
“I went to the career center and happened to be paired with a student advisor who was majoring in emergency management. It clicked right away; this was my missing piece. I wanted a job where I was doing something different every day, working with many different people and a job where I was directly helping to better people’s lives,” she said.
Now an environmental health and safety intern at Marvin Windows and Doors in Fargo, Svanes said her education and work on the safety campaign have taught her many important lessons to help her be successful in her professional pursuits.
“I credit it to the emergency management professors at NDSU. They know what they are talking about,” she said. “What you learn in class is exactly what you are going to be doing and having the ability to put my skills to work during my internship and my current internship at Marvin has made me even more sure of my choice in my major.”
Her mentors include Bradley Benton, NDSU associate professor of history, who convinced Svanes to “take the leap of faith” to pursue a major she cared about, as well as Carol Cwiak, professor emeritus of landscape architecture, disaster resilience and emergency management, and Caroline Hackerott, assistant professor of landscape architecture, disaster resilience and emergency management, who both prepared Svanes to become an emergency manager.
Svanes recommends the emergency management program at NDSU for those wanting a top-notch education taught by caring faculty who ensure you have everything you need to achieve your goals.
“If you want to go into emergency management, you would have a hard time finding a better school, or one with as much prestige as the NDSU emergency management program,” she said. “The program is known around the nation and our professors are rockstars in their field and are very well respected. The classes you take at NDSU do an amazing job at preparing you for the field. I could not have asked for a better program, and I feel confident going out into the world with my degree.”
Svanes advice for students is to trust and listen to yourself and what you want to do, such as taking classes on topics of interest even if they’re outside of your academic discipline.
“Trust the process. Take it day by day if you have to,” she said. “If someone told me five years ago that this is where I would end up, I wouldn’t have believed them.”
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