At the beginning of every academic year, NetVUE’s podcast Callings releases a bonus episode that highlights key conversations from the previous season. This year, Callings’ hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton have selected a number of excerpts that serve as advice for undergraduate students, featuring insights from literature professors, psychologists, theologians, and leaders in higher education renewal—all of whom care deeply about the shared work of supporting the collective work of vocational exploration. These guests share professional advice and personal stories as they emphasize the nuance and complexity of what it means to live a good life, encouraging listeners to ask good questions, to be curious, and to listen to self and others.
This episode offers educators a valuable tool they might use in their work with their undergraduate students. Each excerpt provides listeners with an opportunity to reflect on and respond to the advice shared by each guest, insights that might serve as a generative writing prompt or discussion starter for class or a scaffolded set of prompts for reflective journaling. This year’s guests explored several important themes that students might appreciate thinking more about:
- the importance of listening deeply to our lives and paying attention to what is life-giving;
- a focus on both passion and perseverance as we work to meet long-term goals;
- the encouragement to hone the skills required to meet these goals by cultivating craft through encounters with difficulty;
- the recognition that vocational exploration benefits from cultivating virtues—to know ourselves better and to build the character we need to pursue our vocations;
- and an invitation not to be distracted from the important work of learning that is in front of us as we prepare themselves for a future that we can’t see.
Hope, making good choices, mentorship, and living lives of abundance round out the topics considered. Regardless of which piece of advice might resonate with you or your students, the hosts of Callings share them with the intent that they will spark meaningful reflections and deepen our collective understanding of vocation.
This episode features Lee C. Camp, Michael Lamb, Willie James Jennings, Maria LaMonaca Wisdom, Barbara Brown Taylor, Angela Duckworth, Carlo Rotella, Anna Bonta Moreland, Jessica Riddell, and Almeda M. Wright.
To listen to this episode, “Vocational Advice for Undergraduates: Season 6 Highlights,” visit the Callings website on Buzzsprout.
Geoffrey W. Bateman is the editor of Vocation Matters and NetVUE’s director of strategic communications. In 2017, he participated in the inaugural NetVUE faculty seminar on Teaching Vocational Exploration, and his essay, “Queer Vocation and the Common Good,” appears in the fourth volume of the NetVUE Scholarly Resources Project, Called Beyond Our Selves: Vocation and the Common Good (Oxford, 2024). He contributed “Queer Callings: LGBTQ Literature and Vocation” to Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies (Edinburgh, 2022), and is a professor of criminology, sociology and justice studies at Regis University.