Major Decisions, Major Discoveries: Exploring Vocation in the Undergraduate Years, a series of posts from Nebraska Wesleyan University about helping students develop meaning and purpose as part of their major coursework
For Joel, it started with dinosaurs. Reading about them, collecting them as toys, and drawing them stand out among his childhood memories. He filled his wandering map with meaningful moments, including the time a teacher gave him a fossil. Ultimately, a circuitous line connecting one history-related experience after another emerged. As he took stock of 20 years of memories, colorfully scattered across a poster board, he saw a pervasive lifetime love of history that inadvertently led him to his undergraduate major.
I adopted the wandering map activity several years ago while working with another colleague in the history department to add vocation lessons to our program’s required historical methods course, which caters predominantly to second-year history majors. Katherine Brooks explains the process and value of creating a wandering map in You Majored in What? Designing Your Path from College to Career. She argues that a person’s path to a career is not linear and that a lot of what feels like chaos in our academic and leisure activities actually adds up to a clear direction forward. The wandering map assignment is less structured though similar in its goals to the stepping stones timeline activity described by Kim Garza.
The process of creating a map invigorates students and helps them let go of the feeling that they must have a clear rationale for every academic or career choice they make. As Jeff R. Brown notes in “Unplugging the GPS,” “vocational discernment [is] something akin to mapmaking.” We need to provide opportunities for students to uncover paths that they did not overtly plan for themselves and, at the same time, to realize that they likely have not ended up in their major randomly. Instead, their strengths and interests put them on a particular path. Once they identify their passions, then they can more deliberately connect them to their values and vocation.
You Majored in What? explains the steps of creating a map, which include brainstorming about all of the important events in your life and writing them anywhere on the paper. For the process to work, the creator should avoid organizing the events and instead jot them down in bubbles. To make the activity fun and even more engaging, I provide each student with poster board and a package of eight crayons. You Majored in What? offers prompts to guide students, such as “objects you use or enjoy” and “events in your life.” After completing the map, students use Brooks’s process to identify categories, themes, and skills. I share my own wandering map as a visual example for the students.
The history department has since added more activities about finding meaning within a chosen major to other courses beyond historical methods as part of a larger project sponsored by a NetVUE program development grant. This project aims to fill the gaps between introductory vocation lessons in the first-year seminar and culminating activities in the senior capstone to offer students the chance to make connections and discern vocation after declaring a major—typically in sophomore- and junior-level courses such as historical methods.
We believe that we are called as faculty to ensure that more students have the opportunity, once they choose a major, to explore vocation further. Vocation discussions fit neatly into the first-year seminar when students are exploring majors, but once they have chosen a major, these conversations typically end as though selecting a major marks the conclusion of a vocational path rather than a step along the way. We hope to open conversations within major courses to help students find the opportunities that fulfill them within a larger field. For a student interested in history, like Joel, that could mean a calling to work with the public through museums or libraries, non-profit or government work, education, or other fields.
Inserting vocation elements into major instruction requires faculty buy-in as well as finesse and training. The connections between vocation and a physics curriculum, for example, might not come intuitively to those in the STEM field; they require further education and reading. Faculty across disciplines need the opportunity to deliberate over the value of vocation in their majors, including those in the natural and social sciences. As faculty develop expertise in leading others to examine and reflect on their passions within their chosen discipline, their students will grow and learn that they can carry the habits of vocation with them beyond the undergraduate years.
In the following posts in this series, you will learn how colleagues in Health and Human Performance, Communication Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies are taking on the challenge to infuse questions of meaning and purpose into their sophomore- and junior-level courses. It is our hope with this project that every student will have the opportunity to find the meaning in their own dinosaurs.
Meghan K. Winchell is associate provost of integrative and experiential learning and a professor of history and gender and sexuality studies at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln. She has included vocation elements in her courses for over ten years.