How to Help Your Uni Student Find Someone to Interview About Their Job
My daughter came into the kitchen on a Tuesday night with her laptop open and a look I recognized—the one that means she needs something but would rather not ask. She’s in her second year, studying communications, and she had an assignment due Friday: interview someone working in a field she might want to enter. “Do you know anyone with a job?” she asked, as if I might have a spare one in a drawer.
I put down the dish towel. “Lots of people have jobs,” I said. “What kind of job?”
She shrugged. That was the problem. She didn’t know yet. The assignment was vague on purpose, her professor had said, to get students talking to people before they’d narrowed anything down. It sounded sensible in a syllabus. In our kitchen at nine o’clock, it looked more like a wall.
I remembered doing something similar in the nineties. I called a family friend who sold commercial insurance, drove forty minutes to his office, and sat with a notepad while he explained his day. I was nervous and it was boring in places, but I left knowing I didn’t want to sell insurance, which felt like useful information.
My daughter’s version is different. She doesn’t want to phone anyone. She doesn’t even want to email, really. She wanted me to produce a name, and possibly make the introduction, and possibly tell her exactly what to ask.
So we made a list on the back of an envelope. Not a list of jobs—a list of people. Our neighbor who runs the bakery on the corner. Her aunt’s friend who does something with hospital budgets. A former colleague of mine who works in local government. The barber. Her old soccer coach, who now manages a warehouse.
Three names went into an email that night. Two never replied. That’s normal, I told her, and she didn’t believe me, and then the third—my former colleague—wrote back within a day. “Happy to chat. Does Thursday at 4 work?”
Here’s what I’ve noticed about this whole exercise, watching it happen in my own house: the interview itself is almost the easy part. The hard part is everything leading up to it. Working up the nerve to ask. Handling silence when someone doesn’t answer. Sitting with the fact that you’re twenty years old and don’t know what you want to do, asking a near-stranger to explain their life.
Parents often want to smooth that path. I did. My first instinct was to email my old colleague myself and set the whole thing up. I didn’t, mostly because my wife pointed out that our daughter is the one who needs the practice. So instead I did small things. I gave her three actual names, not advice about networking. I let her write the email and didn’t edit it, even though it had a typo. I told her that two non-replies weren’t a verdict on her worth.
There’s a version of this where the parent becomes a kind of unpaid agent, lining up interviews with impressive people in impressive jobs. I don’t think that helps. It teaches the student that access comes from someone else’s rolodex. What seems to help more is a modest, unglamorous list—a baker, a warehouse manager, a person who does hospital budgets—and a nudge to send the email herself.
When Thursday came, she was nervous in a way that surprised her. She practiced questions at the kitchen table. I suggested she ask about the boring parts of the job, not just the highlight reel. What does a normal Tuesday look like? What surprised you? What do you wish you’d known at twenty? She wrote these on a sticky note and stuck it to her laptop.
The conversation lasted forty minutes. She came back downstairs afterward and said, almost disappointed, “He was really normal.” Then she said more: he’d started in a completely different field, he didn’t love every part of his job, and he’d told her that most of what he learned he learned on the job, not in a degree. She wrote two pages of notes. Some of it she’ll probably never use.
A few things I’d pass along to other parents in this situation. First, keep a running list of people you actually know—not important people, just people with jobs. When the assignment lands, you have names ready instead of a blank page. Second, don’t make the introduction for them unless the person has offered. Handing over a contact is a gift; making the call is a skill. Third, tell them plainly that most people enjoy being asked about their work. This is true. I’ve been interviewed by students twice, and both times I talked too long and felt flattered. Your kid doesn’t know that yet. It’s worth saying out loud.
One more thing, and this one took me a while to see. The assignment isn’t really about career discovery. It’s about practicing the act of asking. Twenty years from now, she won’t remember what the hospital budget guy said. She’ll remember that she sent an email to someone she didn’t know, and someone wrote back, and it was fine. That’s the part that repeats for the rest of her working life.
She has another interview to line up for a different course next month. She mentioned it in passing, almost casually, and then asked if I knew anyone who works in publishing. I gave her one name. She’s drafting the email now, typo and all.
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