A series exploring the teaching of vocation in physics.
A few years ago, I mentored a student in their senior year who, despite their best efforts, did not get accepted into graduate school. The student was crushed. They had identified the path of graduate studies as their calling. Now, with the gate to that path closed for at least a year, what was their calling? For students in the sciences, their vocation and even their value are often tied up in their career. As a practice, science is all-consuming. It has a way of eating up your time, energy, goals, and personal life. You feel that if you are not “all in,” then you are doing it wrong.
Reflecting on this student’s experience, I realized that I could have done more to help them see how their calling or vocation could play out in multiple aspects of their life, which is why I now have students think and write more fully about this part of their vocation exploration. In this post, I highlight the impact of my four-part vocational discernment assignment for science students, which I described in my previous post. I also discuss a follow-up assignment, which instructors can use to help students think about vocation as something that intersects with multiple aspects of their lives, not just their future career.
Impact on Students
My four-part assignment, which guides senior physics students through vocational discernment using the scientific method, has become more than just another class exercise. Most students have engaged it deeply, and their reflections reveal a growing awareness of vocation as something beyond just “finding a job.” As one student reflected,
“I want to have a job where I am in the field and doing things like math or building things and using my hands and applying that to a healthy environment and sustainability and equality. This is how a future career could connect to my vocational calling. I want to be able to help people, and I am very big on kindness and fairness. The way that our world allocates cleanliness and security is unbelievably disappointing, and I feel called to help the less fortunate.”
Another student valued applying their knowledge of themselves as they imagined their future. “This assignment,” the student wrote, “is really good in helping students organize the important things about themselves. We all know a lot about ourselves at this age, but we don’t know how to apply that to our lives and careers. This assignment helped me figure out how to apply my core traits to my career to ensure I am as satisfied as possible.”
A third student appreciated the focus on vocation and suggested an even greater emphasis on community:
“A lot of people in universities just want to get their degree so they can enter the workforce for a high-paying job. However, I learned that there is more to this … This is something everyone should put thought into, especially in such an alienated world.”
The Difference Between Vocation and Career
In June 2024, I attended an excellent NetVUE faculty seminar in Indianapolis, which inspired me to develop my four-part assignment further and allowed me to focus on something that troubled me and some of my students after I first used the assignment. Science students are often highly career oriented. But claiming that your career is your vocation can be dangerous. Let us consider two types of students to illustrate this point:
- The student who already knows what they want to be when they grow up. While all students engaged in vocational reflection in my course, those who already had a clearly identified career path found vocational discernment to be repetitive.
- The student who doesn’t get into graduate school or loses a job opportunity. Some students who identify careers that require further education find themselves without options if they don’t get into graduate school after their first round of applications. This also applies to scientists who lose their job later in life as well. To lose a career that is your vocation can be devastating.
For both these types of students, it is important for them to investigate vocation or calling as distinct from their career. In class discussions, we explore the difference between vocation and career, and I encourage them to see how living vocationally can occur outside of their desired profession. I explain that vocations are ongoing, that they go beyond work, and that they can be related to core values and gifts or strengths. A vocation can also be thought of as a mission, a calling, or a summons to some purpose that is greater than self. It can change throughout life.
I offer them this example of how a vocation to care for the environment might play out in different areas of one’s life:
| Calling/vocation | Action or job you can take? | Related to which of your values and/or strengths? | Area of life (academic/job /family/social/ health)? |
| Called to care for the environment | Environmental engineer, landscape architect, or energy production lawyer | Problem-solving, collaborating productively in a team, writing | Academic, job |
| Called to care for the environment | Teach family, friends, and children how to garden sustainably | Compassionately serving others, organizing, planning. | Family, social, community |
Next, students consider some worthy and life-giving callings—and I keep reminding them to focus on vocations, not careers—that they are experiencing. These callings might come from their values, from other people in their lives, from coursework, curricular activities, their spiritual home, needs of the planet, or needs of their communities. I ask students to list two to three worthy, life-giving callings—not the unworthy life-crushing callings that may be coming from untrustworthy voices. Then, they identify ways they can live out these callings in several aspects of their lives: in academic life, in a future job, in their family life, socially or in their communities, and in their health.
Final Thoughts
Through the structured process that I have described in this post and the previous two, science students move beyond merely identifying a career path—they consider how their work and life outside of work connects to their values, strengths, communities, and sense of purpose. By applying the scientific method to vocation discernment, students follow a step-by-step yet flexible framework.
Ultimately, I hope students will view their vocational journey as an ongoing process—one that, like science itself, thrives on curiosity, experimentation, and discovery. For me, authoring this series of blog posts is part of my own calling: to encourage faculty to incorporate vocational discernment into undergraduate curricula everywhere. This is one of the ways that I hope undergraduate education will become even more meaningful and impactful for future generations of students, including my own children. Ultimately, my hope is that all undergraduate students—not just science majors at my university—will have the opportunity to engage in reflective vocational discernment.
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. For more posts by Katrina, click here.
