As a college professor who teaches undergraduate students, I often ask them some version of the question that we ask kindergarteners: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” A kindergartner might answer, “astronaut,” “superhero,” or “dog-treat baker.” But by the time a student considers college, the answer starts to shed its innocence; it becomes weightier, accompanied by a concrete plan that students imagine will allow no deviations.
When I was in college, I thought I would become a rural doctor: not because I loved science (at least not in the way it was presented in school), but because of something harder to name that centered on a sense of place and a desire to serve a community that looked like mine. Because I was good at school—and good students who wanted to help people where I come from became doctors—my teachers prompted me to study science, and my vocational guidance ended. I was rarely challenged as to why, nor was I asked what else I loved, in order to understand why that might matter.
What nobody asked—and what our current system was not built to ask—was why this approach should ultimately determine a person’s calling. To ponder this question, we need to think about our current pipeline-like system and how we got here.
Scared into an Education
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit and the United States panicked. Within a year, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, the first comprehensive federal overhaul of American education, which was designed to convert academic aptitude into national manpower. Vocational formation was beside the point; the nation needed a workforce capable of winning the Cold War. To match student ability with occupational training, the NDEA gave educational institutions federal funding, institutional infrastructure, and a sense of urgency rooted in global competition. This urgency has not subsided, and it continues to drive the pipeline in our hyper-competitive global economy.
This investment has paid off in many ways: the NDEA expanded college access, produced generations of researchers, and helped build the scientific infrastructure that has genuinely improved human life. It has built a pipeline to prepare students to become scientists and engineers. But this system was never designed to help a young person discern whether to become a scientist or an engineer in the first place. These are two different tasks, and we have conflated them and created consequences for the students who are trying to figure out what their lives are for.
Consider that 6 in 10 graduates from STEM-related fields end up working outside these fields entirely, which suggests something of a broken pipeline. To me, it looks more like a feature of our education itself: a specific discipline formed these graduates, and then it took them somewhere other than the direction in which the pipeline was laid.
Looking Through a Pipe vs. a Lens
We often point students who excel in biology toward medicine or research. Students who love literature are often steered toward teaching or publishing. The subject matter becomes a channel and the job title where the channel empties out, with a current that students don’t necessarily choose carrying them along. This is what it looks like to treat education as a pipeline. And a pipe, by nature, does one thing: it moves what is inside it toward a predetermined destination, the channel narrowing until everything peripheral disappears. However, when looking through a lens, the world expands and unexpected things come into view. The same starting point yields a completely different relationship to what is possible. A pipe and a lens can both be used to look at something, but only the latter was designed for widening the scope of discovery.
When students study history, they are not simply accumulating facts about the past. They are developing a particular habit of mind—one that learns to reconstruct events from incomplete evidence and to sit with ambiguity. The learn to ask not just what happened but why it mattered, and to whom, and at what cost. These capacities do not belong to history alone; they belong to anyone formed by similar such encounters, which can lead anywhere. I know this because I am a cancer biologist who grew up loving history—two subjects that once seemed to have nothing to do with each other. But scientific inquiry is inherently a historical practice. It is a conversation about the natural world, conducted across centuries, where every finding builds on a previous observation, and every conclusion responds to the one that came before it. The habits that history cultivated in me did not disappear when I walked into a laboratory; they simply took on a new expression. Had I simply been swept up in the pipeline’s current, I might not have made such a connection, but a lens can make it visible.
The question for those of us in the classroom is how to help students get there.
Helping Students Focus the Lens
A lens out of focus doesn’t necessarily show you a blank image, but it can show you a blurry one. Vocationally, this image could represent something that a student gravitates to, but the image might be so out of focus that the student makes wrong assumptions about what the picture actually is. Think of teaching a student to use a microscope. You can help them adjust the focus, guide their hands, show them how to find the plane of the slide. But you cannot see what they are seeing or tell them what they are supposed to find. Nor can you access what they observe directly. Vocational discernment works the same way: the educator’s job is not to hand students a destination, but to help them see clearly enough to find it themselves. In practice, we need to learn to ask different questions.
Instead of asking, “What do you want to do with a biology degree?” we might ask, “What is it about biology that will not leave you alone?” Instead of, “What careers does history prepare you for?” we might ask, “What does studying history make you want to understand that you couldn’t before?” These questions are not therapeutic ones; they are vocational ones. They take seriously the possibility that a student’s education is telling them something important about who they are called to become.
The work of processing and refocusing the initially blurry picture requires patience. Students in the middle of their formation do not always have clear answers to all the questions, often because vocational discernment is not a problem of insufficient information, but rather one of insufficient attention. The instinct to resolve ambiguity and see a career path quickly is understandable. When we slow down long enough to look carefully at what a student’s deepest interests point toward, we often find something more genuinely theirs than anything the pipeline would have produced.
I became a cancer biologist because I loved history; not in spite of that love. I did it because of what loving history did to my mind, and what my mind found when it finally encountered a discipline that asked the same kinds of questions in a different language. It took years for me to see these connections clearly: the historian reconstructing events from incomplete evidence and the cancer biologist tracing the molecular history of a cell are, at their core, doing the same thing. No aptitude test or career counselor mapped it for me. It emerged from the slow, patient work of a particular mind that was allowed to develop a perspective through a lens and not through the narrow opening of a pipe.
Austin Young Shull is associate professor of biology at Presbyterian College, where he teaches molecular biology, cancer biology, and scientific writing, while also serving as the director of the Center for Inquiry, Research, and Scholarship. Austin is a NetVUE Faculty Fellow and was part of NetVUE’s 2019 Teaching Vocational Exploration Seminar. He will help his institution to host a NetVUE regional gathering in September 2026, focusing on mentoring. For other posts by Austin, click here.
