The graduating-senior "what now" appointment
This is for you when a senior, months from graduating, sits down and every option ahead feels like starting over. They talk about four years of classes, jobs, and clubs as if none of it will count once the degree is done. You want them to see the thread that carries into whatever comes next.
Every option feels like starting over, and that fear has one root. The senior has tied who they are to being a student, and that chapter is ending. So the first move puts their identity on what carries into any room, not the degree that's closing.
Those strengths are already named. Open Discovering Your Strengths in their Career Discovery results. The ones ranked highest showed up long before this degree, in classes, jobs, and clubs. The senior needs their own results open for this, because the whole move runs on what's on their page.
Then work one through-line with them, in three links.
- Name what carries. From their strengths, have the senior pick two or three that were true before college too. Check each against one real moment, from 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 carried 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 again." Now it's portable language, 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 has to have. Now the search runs on fit, not whatever will take a new graduate.
The senior leaves holding a page. On it: two or three strengths that carry, each written as a line they can say out loud. Under that, a short list of what the first job has to have. Read it back, and it's one person's next chapter, not a blank page.
One more thing before they leave, and it matters most for a senior. Name the reality shock now, so it doesn't blindside them later. The first job almost always feels wrong at the start. The work is unfamiliar, the footing is new, and plenty of graduates read that early dip as proof they chose wrong.
It isn't proof. Forming a new footing at work 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, though, happens earlier, the moment the senior hears their own thread and stops talking about starting over. That flash is the coaching, so follow it. The questions below are built for that moment.
Coaching questions
This isn't a worksheet to run in order. Once the senior can name what carries, pull whatever fits the room and follow them. A few that help.
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?
