Stanford offers several courses designed to help students explore how their interests and passions can lead to meaningful work.
NEW! 10 Jobs in 10 Weeks: Leveraging Your Liberal Arts Career
Connecting concepts and interests from classes to careers can be daunting. You have the skills, but discovering, articulating, and applying them may seem elusive. Some fields of work don’t seem connected to specific majors, and some majors are not connected to specific fields of work.
Designed specifically for humanities students, this course connects the dots between the hallmark skills honed through a liberal arts education, and how they can be used in the working world. It’s designed to give students a taste of 10 career fields in just 10 weeks.
Each week we’ll have guest alumni or industry experts on hand to walk you though their field—giving a glimpse into their jobs, providing a peek into what a typical day might look like, and delivering a hands-on project pulled from an actual workday. Representing industries like marketing & advertising, government, media & journalism, social impact, business, and more, these guest speakers will help you translate your coursework into professional options. The last two weeks are reserved for industries chosen by students themselves… you!
You’ll take a proactive role in defining what meaningful work looks like to you, through hands-on exercises like building your personal brand pyramid and charting a career campaign, reflective activities, and group interaction. This is a 10-week tasting flight of industries, but you’ll also leave with tangible takeaways that will help you build a bridge from college to career.
Through this course, you’ll gain exposure to new industries and the ability to articulate skills employers value. You’ll come away with a clearer sense of how you feel about ten potential career fields, and materials you can use to land that summer internship or first job.
Priority given to undergraduate students in the humanities and arts. Enrollment limited to 20.
ME104B: Designing Your Life
This course is a partnership between Stanford’s dSchool, BEAM, and VPUE. It uses design thinking to address the “wicked problem” of designing your life and career.
The class offers a framework, tools, and most importantly a place and a community of peers and mentors where we’ll work on these issues through assigned readings, reflections, and in-class exercises. The course employs a design thinking approach to help students from any major navigatethe challenges of their twenty-something “Odyssey Years” and develop a constructive and effective approach to finding and designing their vocation after Stanford. Open only to Juniors and Seniors.
ME 104S: Designing Your Stanford
This course, brought to you by Stanford’s dSchool, BEAM, and VPUE, uses a Design Thinking approach to help Freshmen and Sophomores learn practical tools and ideas to make the most of their Stanford experience. Topics include the purpose of college, major selection, educational wayfinding, and innovating college outcomes - all applied through an introduction to Design Thinking. This seminar class incorporates small group discussion, in-class activities, field exercises, personal reflection, and individual coaching.
