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 do encourage you to explore the questions and resources in this guide with at least one other person on your campus.
Introduction
The academic major is often viewed as a pathway to a career. However, majors help students not only to specialize in a specific discipline but to develop broader skills that are relevant to life and work regardless of career choice. The role of educators is to support students in navigating their major explorations (and disciplinary formation) by equipping them to identify and articulate their interests, passions, and strengths alongside potential career opportunities—while also supporting them in understanding their own virtues and commitments as well as those of their chosen field.
The role that minors play in vocational development should not be overlooked. Academic minors offer students a way to diversify their studies according to their interests, which in turn can support students in articulating their unique identities and life narratives. Minors give students the chance to focus on pure interests since there tends to be less emphasis on career preparation. What educators know, of course, is that all studies have the potential to shape both a student’s life journey and their career trajectory.
While there are multiple initial entry points to vocation on campuses, the major or academic disciplines is not always the best place to start. Work in these areas is most impactful when students have already been introduced to at least the basic frameworks of vocation and calling and when educators also have significant fluency in the frameworks. A good first entry point might be gateway courses in the second year; see the second-year topical guide for more information.
Questions to Consider
- Where is vocation programming already happening on your campus? What are potential bridges between that work and vocation in the academic disciplines?
- How do your academic departments and your office of career services currently collaborate—or do they tend to run on parallel tracks)? Where might there be opportunities for collaboration?
- As you consider vocation programs in the major, what approach seems most promising, given existing institutional priorities: piloting initiatives in a subset of departments or undertaking a campus-wide initiative?
Resources
Blog Post
The Meaning of Dinosaurs: Embedding Vocation in the Major
by Meghan Winchell
Winchell describes her institution’s intentional effort to integrate vocational discernment into major-level coursework, particularly in sophomore- and junior-level courses where such conversations typically disappear after students declare their majors. Using Katherine Brooks’s “wandering map” activity in the history department’s methods course, Winchell helps students recognize how their seemingly chaotic interests and experiences actually reveal coherent patterns pointing toward meaningful vocational paths within their discipline. This work, supported by a NetVUE program development grant, challenges the assumption that choosing a major concludes vocational exploration and instead positions it as an ongoing journey requiring faculty buy-in, training, and deliberate curricular integration across diverse disciplines.
Podcast Episode
Heart Wide Open
with Meghan Slining
Even several years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities are still assessing the impact of the many losses and changes that we have experienced, both individually and collectively. Slining, an epidemiologist and public health professor, shares how we might model compassion and love as we address burnout and support vocations that serve the public good. This episode explores how vocations develop at the intersections of diverse disciplines and experiences, as well as how we can help prepare young people for sustainable vocations, or “vocations for the long haul.”
Podcast Episode
Close Readings, Expanded Horizons
with Stephanie Johnson and Erin VanLaningham
How might the field of literary studies uniquely expand our understanding of vocation? English professors Stephanie Johnson (Pacific Lutheran University) and Erin Van Laningham (Loras College) are co-editors Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies (published in 2022 by Edinburgh University Press). In this episode, together they observe that the imaginative work required by the close reading of texts can help us discern our callings, including those moments that the author George Eliot appreciated as our inevitable “blunders” in life.
Blog Post
Interdisciplinary Minors: Bridging Core Curriculum and Vocation
by Christine Wilson
In this post, Wilson explores how interdisciplinary minors can function as integrative structures connecting general education, disciplinary depth, and vocational discernment. By organizing learning around complex, real-world questions, such minors can help students synthesize knowledge across fields while clarifying their sense of purpose and direction. Wilson suggests that such programs can serve as durable curricular bridges, encouraging both intellectual coherence and vocational formation.
Podcast Episode
Sacred Invitations
with Anantanand Rambachan
Rambachan’s career as a teacher, scholar, and activist has been grounded in a “thirst for the sacred.” Rambachan is a scholar of Hinduism and interreligious studies and is professor emeritus of religion, philosophy, and Asian studies at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. In this conversation, he discusses his experience as a Hindu scholar at a Lutheran institution, the importance of dialogue, wisdom for the different stages of life, and our obligations for justice and the common good. Through it all, Rambachan’s gifts as a teacher are on display through his cultivation of reverence for students and his understanding of the classroom as a sacred space.
Blog Post
Discovering the Contours of Vocation through Undergraduate Summer Research
by Julia Fogg
Educator Julia Fogg argues that undergraduate research—particularly the process of identifying a passion-driven question, engaging scholarly communities, and articulating one’s own perspective—is itself a form of vocational discernment, mapping the terrain where a student’s deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger. Rather than treating research as merely a credential-building exercise, Fogg reframes the entire investigative process as a relational, self-revelatory practice through which students test and refine their sense of calling in conversation with mentors, disciplines, and ideas. This piece shows how deep intellectual inquiry and vocational exploration go hand-in-hand.
Example Activity
Here is an activity that helps students deepen their vocational reflection. These example activities are meant to be examples to spark thinking about what might be possible in your classroom.
Vocational Story Circle
Students benefit from hearing the vocational stories of educators and mentors, especially if their paths to a certain career or professional position were non-linear. Consider dedicating a class period or a gathering of all disciplinary majors to a vocational story circle in which you, your colleagues, and/or alumni share their journey to and through the discipline.
When you initially invite storytellers to the class or event, offer them some prompts to reflect upon as they prepare their presentation:
- What first drew you to the discipline?
- In what ways was it a natural fit, and how did it challenge you to grow your skills or shift your perspectives?
- What values or virtues are important to the discipline?
- What role did the disciplinary community—mentors, peers, and voices in the field—play in shaping your experience?
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