5 Essential Questions to Ask Yourself at a College Visit or Job Interview
While we are students and young professionals, many of us experience a concentrated number of career-related transitions: deciding what to do after high school (or college, or graduate school), accepting our first job, leaving our first job, etc.
If you think back to the last major transition you had, a swirl of emotions may come to mind. If you’re like most people, you probably felt excited by the possibilities that lie ahead and perhaps a bit nervous about the uncertainty.
Maybe a bit harder to remember are the questions that were running through your head, either consciously or unconsciously, at the time: Where are my friends going to college? Will I like this job? Will I be any good at this? Will these people like me? Will I like them? What will the cafeteria food be like? What’s the best way to make new friends? Who are the most important people to impress? Where’s the bathroom?!
It’s natural to have these types of questions come to mind. However, most of them are manifestations of reactive thinking, meaning they deal with things you cannot control.
On the other hand, proactive thinking focuses on the aspects of a situation over which you do have some influence.
When it comes to transitioning into a new environment, there will always be aspects of the environment over which you have no influence. But if you haven’t yet made the decision of where to go for college or what job to take
then your greatest power lies in choosing your environment.
Optimizing a transition requires 1) preparing to ask the right questions, 2) asking them effectively and at the right time, and 3) answering them thoroughly and honestly.
I recommend that you consider the questions below any time you are evaluating a potential move, be it for study or for employment. They are designed to turn your focus away from, What do I need to do to fit in here?, and instead consider, To what degree will this place help me flourish as the unique individual I am? - a much more powerful question, if you ask me.
FAIR WARNING: If this group of questions was a kid’s toy, the package would definitely say, “Some Assembly Required”. They are not grab ‘n go. Each one has lots of smaller, more specific questions packed into it, and each will require some self-reflection as you prepare to use them in the field.
-
Will you have ample opportunities to use your favorite skills and knowledge?
We all have favorite skills and favorite things to learn and think about. The jobs in which we work, the projects we complete, and the degree programs in which we study are all aggregates of different skills and understandings. Skills will exist in different ratios in different places, even if the job title is the same. Some of the required skills and understanding will be obvious while others are more hidden until you actually begin functioning in a given role.
The better the expectations of the environment align with your preferences, the more you will flourish.
So, you need to have a good grasp on what your favorite skills and content area are. Ask yourself: What brings me joy while I’m doing it? What are the accomplishments I’m most proud of, and what did I do to accomplish them? What type of content do I like taking in? What types of problems do I like to solve, and how do I approach solving them?
One more note about required skills that may be less obvious from the perspective of an outsider: Many career guidance experts agree that the best way to predict success (flourishing) in a given role is to actually try it out. This is why we have job shadows and overnight stays for prospective college students. These are alright, but more extensive trials are better. If you are looking into a degree program, get a hold of some of the syllabi for the main coursework and even have a look at the textbooks if you can. If you are looking into a job, see if you can speak with someone who works at the same place (and doing similar work, ideally), and ask them if there is a task that they do a lot, or perhaps a workplace dynamics, that they weren’t expecting.
-
Will you Be able to learn what you hope to learn?
Developing our understanding of ourselves and our world is a continuous process that helps us move toward our goals and our highest potential. Both consciously and unconsciously, we scan our environment for people we want to be more like and ask, What do they know that I can learn? (this is why companies pay big bucks for celebrities to endorse their products and services - they know we listen to them).
If you want to identify the environment in which you will flourish most, you’ll want to bring this process to the conscious level.
First, you’ll need to have a sense of what you want. That may sound simple, but some people spend their lives trying to figure it out while chasing after false promises of fulfillment. You don’t have to have your whole life planned out - you just need to start with an inkling. Also What You Want might be a certain job or skill set, but it could also be a worldview or a way of feeling about life.
When you’ve got that sense of what you want, find people who are experiencing it, and ask them for an informational interview. This is a great way to get a sense of what they like about the experiences and what has been a challenge.
While you’re talking, ask them about the things they need to learn to get to where they are with respect to what they have that you want. Their answer should go on the list of things you hope to learn, and having that list will allow you to be much more discerning while considering a prospective school, degree program, or job.
-
Will you have or be able to gain access to the right people?
In addition to learning more about your prospective environments ( i.e. new job, new college, new career path, etc.), informational interviews are great for networking. While who you know may not be everything, it certainly has an impact on the doors that will open for you.
If you have a good sense of the direction in which you are headed, who are the ones leading the way in that field? How can you best learn from them?
If you are looking at schools, who are the people who may become your professors? What work are they doing other than teaching? What networks are they moving through? Can they help you to get connected? If you are looking at large schools where access to professors is limited, how will you be sure you have face time with those who could be game-changers for you?
-
Will the geography of the place help to facilitate your desired lifestyle?
This question isn’t career-related, but of course, there’s a lot more to your self-fulfillment than how you earn a paycheck. Geography can impact us in big ways.
First there’s preference: Do you like the mountains, or the ocean, or some place else? Would you prefer to be in the middle of a bustling city or tucked away in the countryside? How do you like to fill your free time? What about regional culture (life in Texas and. Massachusetts are two very different experiences)?
Then there’s vitality: How does your body respond to air quality, altitude, humidity, noise, etc. If you have an ongoing health concern, you are probably already thinking of these things. But, these factors can affect anyone with varying degrees of nuance.
-
Will you be appreciated for the genuine value you have to offer?
This is perhaps that most important question, and there are also some important prerequisites to asking it. First, YOU have to appreciate the value you offer as a completely unique individual. If you don’t, it is very easy to defer to the expectations of others and discount your own self-worth if you don’t live up to those expectations.
Of course, you must have a clear picture of your unique value. This is often one of the first exercises I do with the students and young professionals who work with me as a coach. We unpack those things that make them marvelously unique and articulate them clearly.
After you’ve done this, you’ll have greater clarity on what is most important to you, how a given decision will resonate with who you are, and the value that you may offer to others. This is the foundation of unshakable self-appreciation and self-confidence.
Having cultivated this inner-knowing and inner-strength, you’ll be able to arrive at a new place and get a read on the culture. Do they want someone to be just like them? Do they have narrow definitions of success that perhaps are not your own? Or can they see what you bring to the world and appreciate how you will enrich their environment?
You can see now that these aren’t questions that you just throw out to a college tour guide or at the end of a job interview. They require deep reflection, but it’s worth it.
As students and young professionals, many of us are desperate for approval, recognition, and a sense of accomplishment. We are so eager to be accepted or hired, that we may all too easily sideline our own intuition and sense of well-being. I believe this happens largely as a result of our educational institutions (the systems and structures, not necessarily the people functioning within them) and how they incentivize compliance and inadvertently dismiss individuality.
I believe this is also a major factor of what’s come to be known as the mid-life crisis. When people fail to genuinely ask these questions in their younger years, Life (with increasing intensity) taps them on the shoulder to get their attention. After keeping their head buried in obligations and false indicators of success for a few decades, the Universe finally gets their attention by causing some major part of their life to fall through, and at age 40 or 50 they are forced into serious self-reflection.
If you can ask yourself these questions at 17 or 21 or 25 instead, you are certainly off to a great start. You will be building the skills necessary for making self-honoring decisions. You will use them your entire life, and they will get stronger with time.
It can be extremely valuable to work with an experienced guide as you make your way through these questions. Feel free to reach out. We can talk about your situation with no obligation and determine if coaching would be a good fit for you.