The graduating-senior "what now" appointment
This is for a senior, months from graduating, who feels every option ahead is starting over. They talk about four years of classes, jobs, and clubs as if none of it counts. Help them see the thread that carries forward.
That fear usually comes down to one thing: they've tied who they are to being a student, and that chapter is ending. So the first move puts their identity on what carries, not the closing degree.
Open Discovering Your Strengths in their Career Discovery results. The highest-ranked ones showed up long before this degree. Keep their own results open.
Then work one through-line, in three links.
- Name what carries. Have the senior pick two or three strengths that were true before college. Check each against one real moment, a first job or a family role. If it was live at seventeen and it's live now, it travels.
- Put it in their own words. Turn each strength into one plain line: the strength, where it showed up, what it produced. Something they can say out loud, like "I get stalled group projects moving," not a line on a transcript.
- Set what the first step needs. Open Aligned Work Areas and read the job areas that fit how they're built. From the ones that land, pull two or three things the first role must have. Now the search runs on fit, not whatever will take a new graduate.
The senior leaves holding a page: two or three carried strengths, each a line they can say out loud, then a short list of what the first job must have.
Before they leave, warn them about the rough start that's coming, so it doesn't blindside them. The first job almost always feels wrong at the start, and many read that early dip as proof they chose wrong.
It isn't proof. Finding your footing takes months of trying, not one clean decision. Tell them the first three to six months are the trying-on part, not the verdict.
Then close on one small probe into the area that pulled hardest: one message, one conversation, one hour this week.
The real work happens the moment the senior hears their own thread. The questions below are built for that flash.
Coaching questions
Not a worksheet to run in order. Once the senior can name what carries, pull whatever fits the room.
Finding the thread
- What have you been good at since long before college?
- Which of these strengths showed up in your first job, or at home?
- Who were you at fifteen that you still are now?
Sizing up what's next
- Read these areas. Which one makes you lean in, and which one tires you just to read?
- What do you want your first job to have, even if the title is still fuzzy?
- What are you glad to leave behind with the degree?
Naming the shock, gently
- If the first months feel hard, what will you tell yourself it means?
- What would "still figuring it out" look like as normal, not as failing?
Making the move real
- If none of this is starting over, what is it the start of?
- What's the smallest step this week toward the area that pulled you?
- Who's already doing that work that you could talk to first?
