If you have not already read the general guidelines for using the topical guides, please begin here. As a reminder, these guides are intended to stir your initial thinking, not offer comprehensive guidance. We encourage you to explore the questions and resources in this guide with at least one other person on your campus.
Introduction
Many undergraduate programs include a required capstone experience. Multi-faceted in nature, these culminating experiences provide opportunities for students to reflect on their learning and demonstrate that they have gradually mastered numerous skills and outcomes. Capstone experiences may include individual projects, a senior seminar, an internship or work-integrated learning (WIL), a portfolio, a public presentation, a co-curricular transcript, or some combination of these. Capstones can be discipline/major specific or part of a college-wide initiative.
Capstone programs offer a natural point within a student’s undergraduate program to engage in vocational exploration. Since capstone experiences are designed to demonstrate student skills and learning, they inherently provide opportunities for students to reflect on their academic, pre-professional, and personal development as they graduate. In addition, capstone courses provide an opportunity to look back on a college career and make meaning of both the experience and the person they have become, potentially revealing a vocational throughline that becomes clear only in retrospect. Finally, because many capstone experiences require either one-to-one mentorship or participation in a community of learners, they give students intentional space to reflect on the more intimate and philosophical threads of vocational discernment, such as: Who do I want to be? What communities do I want to be part of and serve? What are my core commitments, and how might I use those to make difficult decisions? What if I fall short or things do not unfold as planned? How can I contribute to the flourishing of others?
Questions to Consider
- How are capstone initiatives structured on your campus, and who is involved?
- Where are there organic entry points for incorporating a vocational framework into your institution’s capstone experience?
- Who on campus might collaborate to strengthen or expand your institution’s capstone program(s) to center vocation?
Resources
Blog Post
Embracing Uncertainty: Parallels Between the Scientific Method and Vocational Discernment
by Rachael Baker and Austin Young Shull
Two faculty members in the sciences observe a telling irony: science students trained to embrace uncertainty and iterate through hypotheses often adopt a rigid, fixed mindset when it comes to their own vocational discernment, treating the identification of a viable job as the end of the process rather than a provisional step. Baker and Shull propose meeting students on familiar ground—reframing vocational discernment in the language of scientific inquiry, so that curiosity, variable-testing, and openness to unexpected outcomes become natural postures toward calling just as it is toward the lab bench.
Blog Post
Should biography be used to teach vocation?
by Paul Burmeister
Burmeister makes the case that biography can bridge the theoretical and the practical in vocational education, offering students a crucially meaningful encounter with a life actually lived within a specific domain of knowledge— something personal narrative alone cannot fully provide. At the same time, he cautions against over-relying on the lives of “earthly giants,” whose stories can subtly reinforce an individualistic, achievement-centered view of calling and obscure the ethical obligations vocation places on us toward others. The post offers a nuanced framework for faculty who might consider biography as a pedagogical tool, particularly those working with domain-specific vocational formation.
Podcast Episode
A Big Enough Story
with Lee Camp
In this conversation, Lee C. Camp—a podcast host and faculty member at Lipscomb University—brings his wealth of experience as well as a personal and honest approach to bear on questions of vocation in higher education. In the process, he challenges notions of “meaningfulness,” encourages us to be good question-askers, and promotes creativity in pursuit of virtuous living. This podcast will help students during their capstone experience place their academic and professional preparation in the broader context of contribution and the common good, challenging them to consider whether they are telling a “big enough story” in and with their lives.
Podcast Episode
The Double Edge of Calling
with Bonnie Miller-McLemore
Pastoral theologian Miller-McLemore brings forward the nuance and complexities of vocational discernment. She explores the ways our callings can be fractured or blocked, relinquished or conflicted, missed or unexpected. By grounding calling in the realities of everyday life, she reminds us of the importance of being kind to ourselves and practicing forgiveness for self and others. As we realize the myriad ways our callings may be difficult, we continue to find that they are worthy of pursuit and consideration. This is well suited for students at the capstone stage as they may already be facing the complexities and “shadow sides” of callings as they turn toward a new chapter of life on the other side of graduation.
Example Activity
Here are two activities that help students deepen their vocational reflection. These example activities are meant to be examples to spark thinking about what might be possible in your classroom.
LinkedIn Profile
Invite students to develop a LinkedIn profile by studying the profiles of those who hold positions in their chosen field. What academic and co-curricular experiences, professional characteristics, and personal strengths do students want to share in their profile, and how might they narrate those using the “genre” of LinkedIn? Have students support one another and give feedback.
Then have them read or listen to David Brooks’s reflections on resume virtues vs. eulogy virtues (found in Leading Lives That Matter 2nded. or in various formats and lengths online). Discuss what they might include in their “Life profile.” How do the two profiles compare and potentially inform each other? If there are major contradictions, what tools might students use to navigate those?
Purpose Puzzle Activity
Discerning one’s vocation and leading a life of purpose requires that one listens to both “inner” and “outer” calls. The following questions encourage reflection that allows one to “hear” these calls and uncover their purpose.
- What am I good at?
- What is something you are really good at?
- What’s a strength or skill you’ve been complimented on?
- What do I love?
- When are you at your happiest?
- What topics or experiences interest you most?
- What does the world need me to do?
- How do you want to be remembered?
- Think about an ideal future version of the world? What part might you play in creating that?
Reflect on your answers to these questions. How do these pieces of purpose “fit” together? What do you need to achieve better alignment (e.g., new skills or credentials)?
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