This fall, the Center for Career and Professional Development (CCPD) brought a workshop called “From Reflection to Direction” into every sophomore seminar! Led by Alejandro Alaniz, assistant director of the CCPD, it asked students how their experiences, interests, and values might shape their academic and career choices, and what small step they could take to learn more.

Students filled out the Guiding Compass on their own first: who they are, what they’re good at, what they’ve done. Then they compared notes with a classmate. They looked for patterns in what matters to them and what sparks their curiosity. Students wrote on their own, then talked with classmates about the activities they enjoy and the ones they find less rewarding. They used those answers to start narrowing down where to look next.

Richard Koenig, whose sophomore seminar Framing Difference participated in the workshop, appreciated how the questions gave students different ways to approach decisions about their futures. 

“I found the workshop to be appropriate for the sophomore level (developmentally) and it dovetailed nicely with my seminar in particular,” Koenig said. “The students were engaged and it elicited a good level of participation.” 

The workshop also introduced career conversations as a way to find out what different jobs involve. Students talked about how alumni and other professionals can describe their day-to-day work, answer questions about a field, and help them judge whether a path might fit. KConnect and the CCPD’s Career Conversations Module offered starting points for making those connections.

Before leaving, each student wrote down one thing to do in the next two weeks. That could be emailing an alum, attending an event, talking with a professor, or looking into an opportunity that caught their interest.

Afterward, Romina Viramontes Vargas ’28 said, “It’s really good because it gets the ball rolling in people’s heads about the future in a not-so-scary way.”