When college students enter their freshman year, some already know what they want to major in and what career they want to pursue.
Some, not so much.
“I just want to find out what I really like,” no preference freshman Sam McCarthy said. “I really, really, as fast as I can want to find out what I like or else I’m going to be really nervous. If at the end of this year I don’t know what I’m going to be majoring in by the end of the year, it’s going to really suck.”
Some undecided students at MSU don’t know where they can seek help and get resources or services on campus.
One of these resources is Career Services Network at MSU.
“The quicker they find their way to Career Services, the quicker they probably dive into a major and say ‘wow, this looks really good and will get me to something that I will be interested in,’” Career Services coordinator Bill Morgan said.
Morgan also said some undecided students are accustomed to using the “high school model,” where a partnership between career services and the academic advisers is born.
“You come out of a world where there’s a guidance counselor at your high school ... but basically that’s the one person you go to if you need help with applications or signing up for the right classes,” Morgan said. “Then you come to MSU ... you get connected with the academic advising world and they’re the ones you go to, that can help you with anything.”
From the advisers, Morgan said students find their way to Career Services.
“But ultimately what they say is ‘go talk to Career Services, and they’ll help you figure out what happens after college and then when you come back (to the academic adviser), you’ll have much greater confidence and awareness about what majors — or hopefully one major — you’re interested in,’” he said.
However, Morgan said a survey conducted by Career Services found there’s an overlap between students who are confident in their current major and students who say they’re likely to switch majors before they graduate.
“At first we thought they might have not understood the question or somehow the data got messed up,” Morgan said. “But if you take a step back and put yourself in the shoes of a college student who’s going through a lot and looking at the world in new ways, you realize ... ‘I want to be an accountant. But I also know I have to go through 15 accounting classes."
Morgan add that many students worry about selecting a major they are confident in, because they will no longer enjoy the content of the major.
Career Services coordinator of Neighborhood Career Programs Marcus Sanderlin agreed with Morgan.
“For undecided students navigating one of the challenges that we see very often is that students thinks they know what a job is, but they don’t know what that job really entails,” Sanderlin said. “So there’s a preconceived notion of what it’s like to work in that position.”
He said one of the hurdles Career Services faces, are the different options students have to pick from when deciding on what passion of theirs they want to pursue.
“Also what challenges us is that there are so many options,” he said. ”(Undecided students say) ‘I like music, but I like science, but I like art.’ How do those things go together. A part of it is being open-minded and saying how do we want to impact the world, what’s something you want change? What’s your passion?”
From there, that’s when Career Services employees start “digging” in to what opportunities are available for the undecided students.
Morgan said students being unsure of their potential career now is better than them ending up in the work force with a profession they don’t want to be in anymore.
One of the most used strategies by Career Services is trying to find out what the students’ interests are and “pinpointing” what their skills are.
Sanderlin said the first step is finding a passion to pursue. Then from there, finding the right avenue to choose from.
“We (Career Services) use things like career assessments to see what they’re good at and not good at,” he said. “We also do things like job shadowings, internships and part-time work. One of the biggest things is getting experience.”
Even with all of the resources offered by Career Services, there’s one that’s unique and new that Morgan is excited about.
“We just got into a brand new system called Handshake,” Morgan said. “It’s a way for a student to go find that first part-time job, that summer job, that internship, but also to have people to reach out to the individual student to share information about events, about job postings that are targeted to what the student seems to be interested in.”
Morgan also said Handshake is a lot like Facebook, in that it organizes what users see on their feed based on what they like and are interested in. It also allows them to see a job description and help decide what they may want to major in.
“Where they use it for different things, the more valuable and informative it will be,” Morgan said. “It will help them through the process learning more ... A lot of things will be out there that will help them without them really realizing that (they’re) creating this personal inventory of resources.”
