"All Life Events Are Formative": Undergraduate Students' Career Goals and Making Meaning of Career-Related Experiences

Abstract

Constructing a career goal is a key developmental task that often generates stress and confusion for students. Participating in career-related experiences during college can help students identify personally meaningful career goals. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the relationship between meaning-making capacity and career goal formation through college students’ interpretations of their career-related experiences. Two main conceptual frameworks were used to investigate this relationship: career development and self-authorship. The analytic sample was comprised of the 216 career goal formation experiences that were reported by 73 unique students. These students attended six institutions and were interviewed annually as part of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education. Sophomore through senior year interviews were used in this study for a total of 168 interviews. Career goal formation experiences are career-related experiences that lead to goal formation and explicitly link with what a student will do after graduation. Based on the nature of these experiences, I identified nine main categories of experiences related to the formation of career goals. The top five types of experiences reported were related to courses, internships, co-curricular/extra-curricular experiences, information seeking, and work. I then collapsed related types of career-related experiences into general categories to reflect the context (i.e., environment or setting) of these experiences. The most frequently reported contexts were work-based followed by curriculum-based, introductory, and advising contexts. Next, I identified the following six main effects of these experiences on career goal formation (reported from most to least frequent): knowledge of self, exposure to a potential career, knowledge of a specific career, skill development, impact on self-efficacy beliefs, and the impact on graduate school attendance and the job search process. Finally, I presented three case studies tracing students’ career goal formation and self-authorship development over time. In all three cases, these students’ career goal formation and self-authorship development journeys were woven together to help them construct personally meaningful career goals. Cross-case themes emphasized the importance of exposure and the impact of advising and counseling on career goal formation. Nearly half (42%) of the career goal formation experiences discussed by students within these case studies facilitated the development of self-authorship, suggesting the importance of career-related experiences on student development. This study also provides a conceptual model to better understand the cognitive processes underlying the relationship between career goal formation and self-authorship development. Future research can benefit from examining self-authorship development using a career goal formation lens and examining career goal formation using a self-authorship lens to identify career-related high-impact practices that are developmentally effective. Implications for theory, research, and practice are offered.