Tag: questions

The Power of Unexpected Mentorship

Mentorship can profoundly influence personal growth, as illustrated by Ben Gambuzza’s experience with a music professor, referred to as Professor J. Their connection encouraged Ben to explore deeper questions about himself and his future. Through unconventional guidance, Professor J taught Ben valuable lessons that transcended traditional classroom learning, emphasizing self-discovery over direct career advice.

Scott Carlson, senior writer at The Chronicle.

Mentorship can take many forms, and sometimes we cross paths with people with whom we unexpectedly form significant relationships that prompt us to see our lives in new and different ways. Last week, in his newsletter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Scott Carlson included an essay by Ben Gambuzza, an undergraduate student he met in 2019 when he gave a talk at Trinity College about “writing, college, and the future of work.” After the talk, Scott took on Ben as a mentee, and when Ben proposed writing a piece on mentorship for Scott’s newsletter, Scott supported his efforts and published Ben’s essay last week. In it, Ben tells the story of his serendipitous encounter with a music professor who became one of his most important mentors. This professor didn’t always provide Ben with concrete answers to his questions, but he helped him refine the kinds of questions he was asking about himself and his future. Readers of Vocation Matters interested in the role of mentoring and vocational exploration will find much to appreciate in Ben’s essay, which is included in its entirety below.

This piece by Ben Gambuzza was originally featured in Scott Carlson’s newsletter The Edge, which is published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Vocation Matters is grateful for the permission to repost it for our readers. If you wish to access the original essay, you can go to last week’s issue of the newsletter published on December 4, 2025, but you will need a subscription to view it.

Continue reading “The Power of Unexpected Mentorship”

Asking Good Questions: Caryn Riswold

Professor Caryn Riswold discusses her work and insights on NetVUE’s podcast Callings. She emphasizes the importance of social justice, identity, and culture in vocational exploration and discernment. Riswold urges listeners to ask ask meaningful questions as a means to foster human connection and empower others in their vocational journeys.

Caryn Riswold

NetVUE’s podcast Callings has released a new episode, which features an interview with Caryn Riswold, professor of religion and the McCoy Family Distinguished Chair in Lutheran Heritage and Mission at Wartburg College. An accomplished classroom teacher, Caryn is also the author of four books, including Feminism and Christianity: Questions and Answers in the Third Wave (2009), Two Reformers: Martin Luther and Mary Daly as Political Theologians (2007), and her most recent publication, ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on Abortion (2024). She is also a NetVUE Scholar, and her essay “Vocational Discernment: A Pedagogy of Humanization” appeared in the first volume of NetVUE’s Scholarly Resources Project, In This Time and at This Place: Vocation and Higher Education (2015).

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Interfaith Vocational Exploration: Proceeding with Caution

Is there an authentic way to create pathways of vocational exploration for people of various faiths and secular identities without simultaneously asking them to accept a Christian construct of vocation?

Peanut butter on your pancakes?!

Several years ago I found myself in the basement of a hallowed university hall serving as a chaplain’s office intern and flipping pancakes on a griddle for a study break. Students of all backgrounds were descending into the basement to hang out in the cozy space and grab some late-night pancakes in the midst of their studies. I chatted with students as they poured on the syrup or engaged in something I’ve never understood: covering their pancakes in peanut butter.  (Pluralism has its limits!)

Having gone to college at a school with a program for theological education housed in the chaplain’s office, it was natural for me to ask students, “So, what’s your vocation?” 

As if on cue, one of the staff members of the chaplain’s office rolled out of his office and waived the proverbial red flag: he pulled me over and shared with kindness that this was not a question we ask. Given the commitment the office has to a radical interfaith hospitality, asking students to conform their thinking to the terms and ideologies of one tradition was not appropriate. I have reflected upon this in the intervening years, and have been left wondering: Is there an authentic way to create pathways of vocational exploration for people of various faiths and secular identities without simultaneously asking them to accept a Christian construct of vocation?

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Transitions: A Powerful Time for Vocational Reflection

RedChairs
Welcome to summer

For academics, every summer contains an “eek!” moment right around the fourth of July. Suddenly one realizes that there are only five or six weeks left until the first faculty meetings of the new academic year.

Wait, didn’t we just sit through that long commencement ceremony?

One of the aspects of a life lived in school, to borrow Jane Tompkin’s felicitous memoir title, is almost constant motion. We, and our students, go through a lot of transitions. Consider, for example, the four or five years of the average student’s life cycle in college:

  • Leaving home
  • Moving into a dorm room, perhaps sharing a room for the first time,
  • Food always available, even Captain Crunch
  • The girlfriend or boyfriend left behind
  • The new girlfriend(s) or boyfriend(s)
  • Summer jobs
  • Part-time jobs on campus
  • Family members who divorce or get sick or die
  • Internships and/or study abroad
  • More roommates/new housing every year
  • Choosing (and often changing) majors
  • Graduating
  • Job seeking/applying to graduate school

These are just the most common and most obvious changes students navigate. Continue reading “Transitions: A Powerful Time for Vocational Reflection”

Now and Later: A New Way to Imagine Vocation

screen-shot-2016-10-24-at-9-14-19-am1Some of you remember these vintage candies with the enticing name: Now and Later. Have some now. Save some for later. They were the 1960s way of saying you can have your cake and eat it too.

We usually think of vocation as being about NOW. Listen for your calling, make a choice, and then follow it throughout your adulthood until retirement. But that’s an increasingly outmoded way of conceptualizing how vocation works.

What if we think of our callings as seeded at birth, confirmed in adulthood, and continued into old age all the way to the end? In other words, vocation is both being and becoming — both now and later. Evolving throughout the life cycle, vocation connects us with purpose:  before, during, and after paid employment.

Sounds good, right? But how many people Continue reading “Now and Later: A New Way to Imagine Vocation”