Career Services, Residence Life and TRIO are hosting a three-part series on budgeting, career management and the Game of Life.  

The first of the three sessions took place on Monday, March 28. Twelve students attended this session covering budgeting and savings. 

The speaker, Luke Behaunek, Director of Institutional Effectiveness, taught students about the basics of budgeting for everyday expenses, large purchases, loans and long-term needs such as retirement.  

“You need to budget for wants, needs and savings,” Behaunek said. “A common rule is 50/30/20 in percentages of your income.” 

The 50/30/20 rule represents how much should be budgeted out of one’s paycheck and placed towards future needs and goals; 50% should go towards needs, 30% towards wants and 20% towards paying off debts such as credit cards. 

The second session will be hosted by Laurie Dufoe, Director of Career Development, on Monday, April 4 from 12:45-1:30 p.m. The session will cover career management and the workplace. The final event will be a Game of Life held Monday, April 11 from 6:30-7:30 p.m. 

Seniors will compete to win prizes in the Game of Life, which is sponsored by TRIO the department advancement and the department of alumni. The athletic offices provided some of the prize giveaways. There will be over $500 worth of prizes and a cash bar. 

The adulting series was created after a brainstorming session as a way to end the year with a fun educational sendoff. After a previous networking event was canceled, the group tried to plan an event to gain student involvement. 

Residence life was also involved in helping to plan the event. Heather Emery-Cunningham, Associate Director of Residence Life, helped develop the idea of the Game of Life.  

“The idea came from student staff that I worked with at one of my previous institutions,” Emery-Cunningham said.  

The adulting series is a senior-centered event aimed at fully preparing students for post-graduation and the transition from school to the working world. The job search and culmination of capstones can be an incredibly stressful time for students. The event is meant for students to ask questions and focus on topics that will be important to them in the coming months.  

“I’m hoping that it will be successful so that we can repeat it every spring and hopefully have it fully incorporated into the 100 days of senior,” Emery-Cunningham said. 

Dufoe began developing the program by thinking about questions she receives from alumni. The Career Services UGA’s, Maddie Jansen and Marissa Salber, had a large part in creating the topics around information they felt would be most helpful to students. They also helped design the game of life.  

“We came up with a few of our own ideas like giving bonus points for attending previous events, adding a cash bar and creating a score sheet and checklist to make the participants roll smoothly through the game,” Salber said.  

This will be the first time this event has been hosted on campus, which poses unique challenges. Coordinating the events has been a large undertaking for the departments, with scheduling meetings and assigning tasks made difficult by organizers’ heavy involvement on campus. Planning ramped up at the beginning of February.  

“It’s not an event that we can really rehearse, so we just have to pray a little that things will come together and run well,” Salber said.  

Though the event is not only for seniors, taking the step of leaving Simpson College puts them at the forefront of the event’s attention.

“It will be great to see senior students attend, play the game and collect some fun prizes to start adulting,” Dufoe said. “We recognize our students have been adults, but graduation moves it to the next level, and this is a way for us to support that transition.”