A series exploring the teaching of vocation in physics.
“The new vocation section was by far my favorite portion of the course and greatly impacted my post-university goals.”
“I wish I had done this assignment my first year of college.”
Students in my physics capstone course at Pacific Lutheran University (PLU) shared these comments in their course evaluations about the new vocational curriculum that I introduced the last time I taught it. After reviewing these course materials, a colleague also wrote, “I am SERIOUSLY impressed by all that you have done with this course! It is amazing and I wish I’d had training like this when I was in college.” As a professor, there are moments when you know you’ve created something impactful. This was one of those moments for me.
I started rethinking this course in the summer of 2023 when I participated in a faculty workshop on vocation sponsored by PLU’s Wild Hope Center. During the workshop, I encountered Rachel Baker and Austin Young Shull’s post from this blog, “Embracing Uncertainty: Parallels Between the Scientific Method and Vocational Discernment.” Their analogy resonated with me: just as scientists systematically explore unknowns, students can use a structured, iterative process to explore their own vocational paths. The authors got me thinking: since we train students in the sciences to embrace uncertainty and methodically test their ideas, could we also teach them to do this when thinking about their careers and callings? I was immediately intrigued. And I wanted to take it further—I wanted to create a structured, step-by-step framework for my students to work through these ideas, just like they do in our science labs.
Like science, vocational exploration is a continuous journey, and as higher education evolves to be more inclusive, it is increasingly important to integrate it into the curriculum. Thanks to that workshop, I was able to develop practical ways to incorporate vocational discernment into my teaching.
I then integrated these new approaches into our physics department’s senior capstone, which meets once a week in the fall semester and has three modules—vocational discernment, professional development, and literatures—with each module taking about one month to complete. The vocation module includes weekly class activities and assignments. In the first few weeks, students identify their core values, investigate their signature strengths, and reflect on their “cultural commute.” They then study the vocational paths of others and conduct a job and graduate school search. In the final weeks, they meditate on identity, practice telling their vocational stories, and consider how vocation is different from career, all of which culminates in the writing a vocational mission statement.
As a part of my own preparation, I read Patrick Reyes’ The Purpose Gap, which I use to help my seniors as they reflect on their “cultural commute” and consider how they can make that path smoother for the generations of people who come after them. In this way, I hope to encourage my students to re-enliven the rural and urban communities where many of them come from, rather than staying in what some call “the ivory tower,” leaving their home communities behind.
I also have students listen to the Callings podcast episode that features Reyes and reflect on it. (See my next post for more details on this assignment.) Reyes challenges students not to wait for permission to pursue their vocation and encourage them to think about their “cultural commute”—both the literal journey that they make between geographic communities and the more conceptual journey between difference cultural expectations. His work prompted one of my student to reflect that we should “stop trying to make a single star shine, but to try and build constellations. We need to look beyond ourselves, which is really difficult because vocation and purpose are often marketed as an individual thing.”
Since then, I have reflected on my own cultural commute. I grew up in a small farming region in northern California and southern Oregon. When I prepared to go to college, I received a clear message from my community that if I wanted to succeed in science, I needed to move to a different place. “Move up,” they said, which I think is common. It was and still feels to me like a sad truth that small towns lose their young people to cities and college towns after raising them with such unique skills and independent personalities. Perhaps the same is true for urban communities? If all college-bound children interested in science, engineering, or medicine get this message, then those small communities that raise creative and thoughtful children risk losing their home-grown talent. I want to encourage students to think about who their communities are, as well as how they can give back to them in many different ways.
Last summer, I drove my children through the small town where I went to elementary school on our way to a hiking adventure. We saw a place that was becoming a ghost town. Once a thriving little farming community—focused on growing potatoes and horseradish, with a free county fair, surrounded by beautiful wilderness—my hometown was now full of abandoned and collapsing warehouses, boarded up businesses, and tumbleweeds. The advice the elders gave us—to leave—killed our town. Even as multiple factors contributed to its demise, including technology, environment, job opportunities, and telework, I wonder: what if people had not given me that advice? And what if the professors at my college had asked me to consider the young people who would grow up there in the future? And how would the cultural, political and intellectual divides in this country be different if college students didn’t think of where they came from as a place that they should never go back to?
As my own experience illustrates, vocational exploration emerges in complicated ways out of our economic conditions, which we must factor into our teaching, especially for those of us who work with students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. For some students, earning money is their vocation. I’ve taught many students whose families could afford to send only one child to college—and that child is expected to secure a job to support the family. These students carry a deep sense of calling and responsibility. For them, providing for loved ones is their vocation. We can and should offer the privilege of time for vocational exploration and discernment in undergraduate education, but we also need to respect these obligations. For some, a job is the means through which other callings come to life.
The results of all of this work have been inspiring. Students tell me they feel more confident about their next steps. Vocational discernment isn’t a single moment of discovery—it’s a process, just like science. We want our students to navigate their futures with curiosity, resilience, and a willingness to embrace the unknown.
In my next blog post, I will share my structured four-part assignment that applies the scientific method to vocational discernment. In the subsequent one, I will share how I discuss the difference between vocation and career, and guide students to see the difference in their own lives.
Readers interested in exploring vocational exploration and discernment in the sciences should check out a previous series co-written by Rachael Baker, Hannah Hooley, Amy Wilstermann, and Julie Yonker, including “Building a Thriving Research Team,” “Practicing Humility in the Sciences,” “The Vocation of Science,” and “Mentoring for the Cultivation of Virtue in the Sciences.”
Katrina Hay is a professor of physics at Pacific Lutheran University, where she teaches physics, engineering, and astronomy and serves as an advisory member of the Wild Hope Center for Vocation. Katrina’s scholarship interests include astronomy and fluid physics, and she mentors undergraduates in observational astronomy research. She wrote and illustrated a children’s book about the scale of the universe, Little Bear’s Big Night Sky. Katrina is a NetVUE Faculty Fellow and was part of NetVUE’s 2024 Teaching Vocational Exploration Seminar.
