Rusty Anderson is retiring as Director of Career Services after serving in the position for 31 years at Southern Miss. As he looks back at his years at USM, Anderson is proud of the guidance he gave students and grateful for what Southern has given him.
Career Services is a tool on campus that helps students not only decide their major and career but also sets them up for the job market and gives them a better opportunity to get hired after graduation.
“Our role is to help students create options for themselves, to evaluate those options, and to use a good rational decision-making process,” Anderson said. “Having those resources and tools like services professionals can help students walk through that process fairly quickly.”
Before he was director here, Anderson was Career Services director at Millsaps College for 11 years, and prior to that, worked for three years at Southern in the Career Development Center. Anderson did not know he would end up in higher education; after he graduated, he was going into the counseling field. But after a graduate program in the development center, he fell in love with career services. So when students come to him unsure about their career, Anderson knows just what that’s like. His experience made him not only find his dream job but also realize the importance of internships.
“Not only internships, but the importance of exploring your career before you jump in and go to grad school,” he said. “I’m really kind of the role model for ‘don’t let this happen to you,’ but I got it figured out, I found the right place and loved my career for the time I’ve done it.”
Although he is the director, Rusty Anderson still makes sure to have one-on-ones with the students, just like all the members of his staff. His favorite aspect of the job is not managing Career Services, but mentoring students.
“If they took away that role, I’d probably have retired a long time ago cause that’s a passion, that’s what I trained to do. Any time I have an opportunity to interact with a student and help a person in their career journey, it’s very rewarding,” said Anderson.
In his time at Southern Miss, Anderson has accomplished a lot. In 2016, he was inducted into the USM Alumni Hall of Fame. He is very proud of that exclusive honor as well as of how far Career Services has come since he entered as director. But Anderson cannot take all the credit.
“I don’t know if it’s anything I did, but it’s hiring good people and making sure you have a good team, and without a good team, you can’t accomplish anything,” he said.
But over all of that, Rusty Anderson said his biggest accomplishment is all the students he has helped.
“I think the best thing is interacting with alums out there that say, ‘you helped me so much,’” Anderson said. “Those are the things that are the most rewarding to me. And that’s why we do this job, is we make differences in people’s career trajectories and their lives.”
Rusty Anderson has enjoyed working as director of Career Services, but recognizes it is time to pass the torch. The new director is yet to be decided on, but Anderson leaves them with some advice.
“Learn the university and the culture of the university,” he said. “Southern Miss is a very unique place, in terms of being still focused on the individual student. And to make sure that they build camaraderie with their faculty and professional staff across campus, because we can’t do this without the support of faculty, we can’t do that without staff and the advisors, sending us students.”