Student Services

Guides for a winding career path

With a series of career guidebooks for liberal-arts students under their belts, three campus counselors prove that degrees and careers — including their own — can lead to unexpected places

By Barry Bergman

Sarah Dunham, Jay Wall, and Rachel Klein (from left) are campus Career Center counselors and authors who help start Berkeley grads on the nonlinear path to “the real world.” Peg Skorpinski photo

Fall 2007 | On a bookshelf in Rachel Klein’s Career Center office sits a poster that reads, “Resist the permanent career implant chip. You have the right to choose your own
dead-end job!”

The admonition is clearly meant to get students to lighten up, in more ways than one. Humor, Klein believes, is an indispensable arrow in any career counselor’s quiver. Still, the poster’s real message — that the best career is a lifelong adventure, not a forced march to a fixed destination — is one that many undergrads would do well to take to heart.

“Careers are becoming increasingly nonlinear, but students are increasingly linear in their approach to them,” observes Klein, whose own “circuitous” path led her to counseling five years ago and now, serendipitously, has made her a published author. Just because you happened to study English lit, she says, “You don’t have to be an editor, or a teacher, or a journalist, although those are wonderful occupations. There are other options out there that might be a
better fit. And some students don’t even want to hear that.”

Klein is the co-author of What to Do With Your English or Communications Degree, from the Princeton Review. Two other Berkeley counselors — Jay Wall and Sarah Dunham — have also co-authored volumes in the series, which is aimed at liberal-arts majors unsure of what awaits them beyond the campus.

“Like every English major, I always wanted to write,” Klein says. “Who knew that, as a career counselor, I would get a chance to write a book?”

Taking a creative approach

The notion of broadening horizons is a theme common to all three books. The authors don’t advise students to “follow their bliss,” exactly — at least not at the expense of networking, internships, volunteer opportunities, and other activities that can make them more attractive to potential employers — but suggest they take a creative approach to parlaying their educations and interests into careers that might not be on their (or their families’) short lists. As Dunham writes, “Don’t think that what you decide to do now is necessarily going to be what you’ll be doing for the rest of your life.”

The three were approached separately to write their books. Dunham, whose entry is titled What to Do With Your History or Political Science Degree, has written for the center’s website. Only Wall had professional writing experience — articles for UCLA publications and for the Wall Street Journal’s online job-search site, CollegeJournal. His book is aimed at psychology and sociology majors.

Wall, a psychology major himself, began his career in human resources at Lockheed Martin, left the corporate world to head employee relations at MIT, then decided to “scale back a little bit” from the high-stress post by leaving HR for a lucrative stint managing properties. His financial gains allowed him to move to Berkeley, where he works three days a week.

“I’m here because I love doing it,” he says.

Love pops up with surprising frequency in the counselors’ discussion of jobs and careers. Klein, noting wryly that “people tend to mock English majors more than any other major,” has a simple response. “I never regretted majoring in English, because I loved it,” she says. “I really, really enjoyed the subject matter. And I just think that if you love something, you have to pursue it, regardless of the application. That may have had something to do with my very circuitous career path.”

There is a life lesson, however, in that path. “Whatever entry-level job you take when you graduate from college isn’t necessarily going to determine the course of your career trajectory. Things are going to change, and you’ll meet people, and you’ll get ideas about what you want to do,” she explains, noting that she sometimes draws from personal experience when advising students. “Few have a more pitiful story than me,” she says, laughing. She finds the silver lining: learning what you don’t want to do is “a great place to start for most people.”

Most people, of course, are not Berkeley students, who, despite their extraordinary qualifications, also have to contend with what Klein calls the “pervasive low self-esteem” that can result from the competition at an elite university and with “paralyzing indecision” about what to do once they graduate. Family pressures often add to the stress of thinking about the future. “There’s a terrible fear of making the wrong move.”

And that’s where Klein comes in. She and her Career Center colleagues work at getting students to take the long view — to look at career development as a dynamic process, and to see themselves as more than the sum of their academic course loads.

Oh, the stories they hear

For Klein, giving students the tools to carve out their own career paths brings satisfactions she never envisaged as an English major at UC Davis. “I’ve heard some horrible, horrible
stories from students about experiences they’ve lived through that I can’t even imagine. And I’ve heard some amazing, triumphant stories…. It’s just really interesting to hear how people ended up where they are, and to hear about their dreams and where they want to go.”

Dunham agrees. She sees students at the point of a “major life transition” and gets special satisfaction watching them realize that getting a real job and continuing to pursue what they love don’t have to be mutually exclusive. “Sometimes I feel I’m witness to the kind of ‘aha’ moment a student has where they think, ‘Wow, that sounds really interesting. Do you think I could do that?’ And maybe they can’t do it right away, but then they go off and start networking and asking people, ‘Well, how did you get there?’ And they start moving forward.

“I love it,” Dunham says.

To learn more about the Career Center, visit career.berkeley.edu.