Three weeks ago, in a 15-minute advising Zoom meeting, I found out that I’m graduating a year early. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited and relieved (financially), but my career stress has amplified tenfold. In the first few seconds after my advisor told me, my college life flashed before my eyes. I thought of all the career fairs I didn’t attend, all the research projects I didn’t apply to, and all the ways I didn’t do enough to set myself up for success after college.
I still had no idea what I wanted to do after college, and my fear of making the wrong choice paralyzed me. I had the rough idea that I wanted to go into environmental law (because I liked one of my law classes), but other than that, I was clueless. I had been procrastinating on choosing a career, but after the Zoom call, I knew the time had come. It was a procrastinator’s nightmare — everything I had been putting off had to start immediately.
I started by talking to a trusted adult (my former law professor) to get some motivation for my journey. I told her about my troubles, expecting to get one of the routine responses: “You don’t need to know!” “You’re still young!” “The world is your oyster!” These things are nice to hear, but tend not to be as helpful as they seem. In my procrastinating mind, “You don’t need to know!” translates to “Deal with it later!”
Luckily, I was reminded of why I went to this particular professor for advice: she explains things in a way that makes much more sense to me. She said, “You don’t need to know which direction you’ll end up in, but you have to start picking a direction, and seeing what that brings you.” This mindset was a lot more palatable. I didn’t have to start making perfect or binding decisions; I just had to start in any direction. Over the past month, I’ve started exploring a few directions using informational interviews. Instead of making the end of my college career a final decision, I set my sights on something more realistic. By the end of my third and final year, I would decide on my first direction.
Anyone who has taken the Undergraduate Seminar course at Cal Poly will be familiar with informational interviews from the required text, “Designing Your Life.” For those who don’t know, the authors (Stanford professors Dave Evans and Bill Burnett) prescribe informational interviews as a way to gain insider information about prospective life paths. They recommend reaching out to people in the field, scheduling a short, low-stakes meeting, and asking pointed questions to help with career and life decisions.
This practice can take many forms, but the overall objective is to help inform the decision-making process (with the bonus of making connections and unlocking more opportunities for the future). Evans and Burnett argue that the best way to find out what a career will really look like is to talk to someone who is living it.
When I took Undergraduate Seminar as a freshman, I completely wrote off the idea. I understood the merits of informational interviews, but I’m not usually someone to take social risks. For my informational interview assignment, I talked to my cousin, and I was even nervous about that. But given my looming graduation, I decided to reach out to four Cal Poly alumni on LinkedIn, with the promise to myself that if no one responded, I wouldn’t have to do it again (and would have presumably just worked at Starbucks for the rest of my life).
To my absolute surprise, two of the four responded. The first woman I met with was an Environmental Consultant for Steven W. Carothers & Associates (SWCA), a nationwide environmental consulting firm. For those outside of the environmental field, you’re not out of the loop. I knew as much about the environmental consulting business as you do. For reference, I asked her (and my other interviewees) the following questions:
- What does your day-to-day look like?
- What do you like and dislike about your career?
- What qualities do you think someone would need to do well in your position?
- If I wanted to pursue the same career, what should I start doing now?
After speaking with her, I found out that her job is mostly online work and meetings. She explained that environmental consulting can include field work, but her particular role primarily involves document review and preparation. She likes the work and her team, but finds working from home limiting when it comes to community-building. As someone who thrives in a more social environment, I ruled out her position. For my next informational interview, I chose someone whose career was a little more hands-on. I talked to a State Park Interpreter for San Luis Obispo County.
I asked the same basic questions and again gained a ton of information about the role. Her work mostly involves public education, open-ended projects, and site visits. The projects especially caught my eye. She receives broad directives from the higher California State Park office but has substantial freedom in how she implements them. For example, she and her staff give informational talks to school field-trip groups visiting park locations (like the Morro Bay Museum of Natural History), in which they can speak about almost any environmental topic they are passionate and knowledgeable about. After talking to her, I realized I also really value freedom and variety in my work, so my career direction was narrowed even further.
These are just two examples of the many informational interviews I’ve conducted in the last month or so, but you can see how I was better able to align my personal interests and goals with the roles once I spoke with people in them. It’s possible to get a lot of information about a job just by researching online, but the day-to-day responsibilities and overall workflow are harder to understand without an inside perspective.
When it comes to informational interviews, don’t worry about the outcome before you try it. The worst thing they can say is no, and you’ll learn and grow a lot just by reaching out in the first place. In my experience, you’d be surprised by how willing people are to help out (they’ll probably be flattered that you even asked!).
My advice to anyone who struggles with career anxiety is treat your college experience as a conversation, not a declaration. You don’t have to leave college with answers to the world’s many questions; least of all, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” You just have to participate in the conversation, to try new things and see what happens. When you treat your life as an experiment, not a test, you’ll open up opportunities you didn’t know were possible. In short, I encourage you to start looking for your first direction and to trust yourself to figure out the rest from there.