FACILITATING CAREER EXPLORATION EARLY IN THE CURRICULUM THROUGH COORDINATED REFLECTION ASSIGNMENTS

The Department of Geological Sciences at CWU requires a senior seminar for students in all of our majors. The course includes a panel discussion with alumni in geoscience jobs, resume and cover letter writing, and mock interviews. Student feedback indicated that these experiences were both valuable and too late: they wanted to learn about career options earlier to better guide and motivate their coursework. At the other end, beginning students had little opportunity to engage with the breadth of research areas in the department at a level appropriate for their academic maturity or to explore the geosciences as a major and a career.

To address these issues, we developed 3 courses at the 200 level to build students’ excitement and interest in the geosciences, to develop their data analysis, quantitative, GIS, field, and lab skills, and to facilitate their exploration of a range of career paths. In one course, students write a career reflection, addressing prompts about their goals, the skills they have and would like to develop, and opportunities they would like to have at CWU. In two courses, students complete a weekly or biweekly assignment in which they watch a 15-minute Zoom interview with an alum about their job, the skills they use, and advice they have for current students; they then describe one thing that resonated with them and how it will influence their remaining time in college. I collected the essays and short reflections from 2021-22 and matched students’ responses across courses, resulting in 4–12 short reflections from 41 students, including 11 with essays.

Inductive coding reveals several themes. Students commonly report not knowing about a particular job before watching an interview, and describe aspects of several jobs as “cool” and “interesting.” As frequently, they identify jobs they would not want and describe the reasons. They mention application of skills they developed in other courses, and motivation to acquire new skills. Across the range of interviews, they compared local, state, and federal government jobs with private industry; large firms with small firms; and different mixes of field and office or lab work. The emergent themes suggest that we are achieving our goal of facilitating career exploration early in the program to help them envision how they will apply their skills and to motivate them to persist.