Student Edge: Studying How Students Form Career Plans
Standing at the podium in a Kendade classroom, Grace June Kim ’07 was not visibly nervous. But her presentation in the college’s second annual Senior Symposium was the culmination of ten months of research and fieldwork, and naturally, she wanted it to go well.
The symposium illuminates the academic passions that seniors have cultivated in the company of their professors and peers. Ninety seniors from twenty-seven departments were showcased this year, including Kim, whose topic was, “Adolescents’ Pursuit of Career Possible Selves: Examining the Relationship Between Social Capital and Procedural Knowledge.”
Kim grew up in the Bronx, New York, a daughter of immigrant parents from South Korea and the first in her family to go to college. A psychology and French double-major, her interest in how first-generation students construct their career plans was sparked both by her own experience and the work of her adviser, Associate Professor of Psychology Becky Wai-Ling Packard, who is investigating how young people transition from high school to college or work.
“I wondered why I was able to come to a renowned four-year college while others in my own community in the Bronx were not” going on to college at all, says Kim. So she devised a study examining twenty high school juniors and seniors with different socioeconomic backgrounds and whose parents’ academic experience was varied. Over a five-month period, she examined how each student went about getting information on possible careers and the steps required to meet those goals.
“I wanted to know how their social network of support, and the information derived from it, affected the quality of their plans for the future,” she explains. Previous research in the field had led her to expect that students’ methods of obtaining information would be quite different depending on whether or not their parents had gone to college. Her findings substantiated that. The more interesting outcome was that there was little difference in the quality of the students’ final career plan, which compelled her to analyze the type of support those networks were providing.
“First-generation students were rather strategic in information acquisition,” she learned. “They know that they can’t rely on their family for essential sources of information, and they branch [out].”
Kim ultimately plans to pursue a doctorate in psychology, and Packard thinks there’s plenty of room in the field for motivated scholars like Kim. “I can see there is a real need for individuals in psychology who are focused on class and cultural/racial backgrounds, and certainly for those interested in studying adaptive strategies rather than failures of certain groups of people.” —M.H.B.
Photo by Ben Barnhart
