When Your Uni Student Needs to Interview Someone With a Job: What Actually Helped
My daughter was home for the weekend, and on Sunday night she was parked at the kitchen table with her laptop open, scrolling through a course reader like the answer might pop out if she clicked it enough times. The assignment was for a business communications unit: find someone working in a field you’re curious about, interview them, and write a reflection. Three weeks to do it. She had ten days left.
“Can you think of anyone?” she asked.
I could think of plenty of people. That’s the difference between us. I’ve worked full-time for two decades, and my contact list is full of adults who talk about annual leave and superannuation without flinching. She’s nineteen, and the working world is still something other people do, somewhere else. She needed a real employed adult to answer her questions, and the distance between that need and the solution looked small to me. To her, it looked like the most awkward networking experience a person could survive.
So we made a list at the kitchen table. I suggested a woman I used to work with who now manages after-school care programs. “But what would I even ask a childcare worker?” she said. We went through other names—the accountant down the road, her cousin’s flatmate, a family friend who had spent years in retail management. Each suggestion came with a “maybe” and a pause. Nothing felt right because nothing felt familiar. She wasn’t rejecting the people; she was rejecting the idea of contacting a stranger to talk about something that felt too big to understand.
I almost did it for her. That was the temptation. She asked whether she should just tell the course coordinator she “didn’t know anyone” and take the late penalty. I think that’s a bluff most students try at some point. I said no.
We ended up settling on my friend Ellie. Ellie runs a logistics company, has been in the workforce for over thirty years, and has moved across at least five different roles in that time. She is warm in the way that makes students relax, and she has no problem filling silence if the interviewer forgets their next question. I knew Ellie would say yes. But the emails still had to be sent.
The drafting took half an hour. Her first attempt was a solid block of text that included a paragraph about her upbringing, her uncertainty about changing majors, and a sentence explaining that she “needed” the interview to pass the unit. We cut it down to four sentences: who she was, why she was contacting Ellie, what she wanted to talk about, and how much time she needed. I didn’t write the draft for her. I asked questions instead. “What do you actually want to know?” and “Why Ellie?” helped more than any rewording.
“You’re not asking for a favour,” I said, once the email looked ready. “You’re asking a question. Most people enjoy talking about themselves.”
Reading it back now, that sounds like a neat bit of parenting wisdom. At the time, it was just what I told her so she would press send.
She pressed send on a Wednesday at around four in the afternoon. Ellie replied within the hour. My daughter was genuinely surprised that a busy adult would respond that quickly. I remember that feeling, from years ago, like the professional world had opened a door I had done nothing to earn.
The interview happened the following week over Zoom. My daughter changed into a button-up shirt that I only recognised because she never wears it, and set up at her desk with a glass of water. I didn’t sit in the room. But the walls are thin, and I caught most of it anyway.
“Tell me about your typical day,” she asked. Ellie described checking in on trucks at six in the morning, dealing with a delayed shipment, spending an hour on a client call that could have been a text message. I heard my daughter scribbling the whole time. Then came the question that every student asks eventually: “What did you study?”
Modern languages.
“Did you use it?”
Only for writing clearly, Ellie said, and for learning to spot when someone is talking a lot without saying a thing.
The moment that seemed to land hardest was when Ellie explained how she got the job she has now. She hadn’t dreamed about logistics. She had finished uni, applied for anything that didn’t require a suit, ended up in a call centre, planned to leave after summer, and stayed four years because she liked her manager and turned out to be good at sorting out complaints. One thing led to another. The version of a career that sounded halting and accidental, full of decisions that seemed small at the time, was genuinely new information to my daughter. School tells you that life follows a plan. Ellie’s story told her that a career is mostly a series of adjacent moves.
Afterwards, she said “that was actually good.” She didn’t learn a specific skill. She learned that professional adults are just people who kept doing things until they found what they were good at.
If your student is in the same position, a few practical things are worth saying. First, offer names but don’t make the introductions. The entire weight of the assignment is in the student reaching out directly, writing to a stranger, handling the waiting, and dealing with the fact that not everyone replies. If you make the first call for them, they get the interview but miss the lesson.
Second, help with the message itself. Not by rewriting it, but by asking what they want to know and why they chose that person. Students usually already have the material. They just need permission to keep it short.
Third, don’t hover during the interview. Bringing tea and lingering in the doorway doesn’t make it easier—it makes it more awkward. Let them close the door, have the conversation, and debrief after.
Fourth, prepare them for silence. About one in three people won’t respond to a student they’ve never met, not because they’re rude but because they never check their inbox. That’s not rejection. That’s just the number.
There was no dramatic final scene when the assignment was done. My daughter wrote the reflection, submitted it, and got a mark that she hasn’t mentioned since. But a few weeks later, she brought up Ellie in a group project and wrote an email to a potential tutor without asking me to check the first draft. I don’t know if that counts as learning. It looked like becoming slightly more comfortable at the edge of the adult world, which, as far as I can tell, is exactly what a course assignment is supposed to produce.
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