How to Help Your Uni Student Find Someone to Interview About Their Job
My daughter called me on a Tuesday afternoon, which she never does. She texts. Calls are for emergencies, or when she’s walking somewhere and bored. This was neither.
“Dad, I need to interview someone with a real job by Friday.”
She’s in her second year, taking some course called “Career Foundations” that she signed up for because it fit her timetable. The assignment: find a professional in a field you’re curious about, ask them fifteen questions, write a report. Simple enough on paper.
“Okay,” I said. “Who are you thinking?”
Silence. Then: “I don’t know anyone.”
This is the part where a parent’s instinct kicks in. I started listing people. My brother-in-law works in logistics. The neighbor is a nurse. A guy from my office used to be an accountant. She shot every one of them down. Too boring. Too old. Too weird to ask. I could hear her getting more frustrated with each suggestion, not because the suggestions were bad, but because the whole thing felt impossible to her in a way I recognized.
When I was twenty, I would rather have written the report about myself than cold-call a stranger.
Here’s what I’ve learned since then, and what I told her that evening after we’d both calmed down: the assignment isn’t really about the interview. It’s about learning to ask. That sounds like something you’d read on a poster in a guidance counselor’s office, but it’s true in a very practical way. Most university students have never had to approach an adult they don’t know and ask for something. They’ve been in classrooms their whole lives, where access is managed by teachers. The idea of emailing a stranger and saying “I’m a student, would you have twenty minutes?” feels like a violation of some unspoken rule.
So we worked through it. Not the interview itself, but the mechanics of finding someone.
First, I told her to stop thinking about “dream jobs.” That’s what was paralyzing her. She was trying to identify the single most impressive person she could find, and then figure out how to reach them. Instead, I asked her a different question: who do you already know who works? Not famous people. Not CEOs. Just people with jobs.
She listed six people. Her roommate’s mom, who manages a dental office. A former babysitter who now works at a marketing agency. My brother-in-law, who she’d already dismissed. Her old piano teacher. A family friend who runs a small bakery. A cousin in HR.
The list took four minutes. The paralysis had been about scale, not access.
I suggested she start with two. The dental office manager and the marketing person. Both were people she could reach without it being strange. She didn’t have to explain herself too much. She could say, “I have this assignment for school, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?” That’s a normal request. Adults get it. Most of them remember doing something similar.
She pushed back on one thing: she didn’t want to interview someone she already knew. It felt like cheating, she said. I understood the feeling, but I pointed out that the assignment was about learning how to have a conversation with someone about their work. The person’s familiarity wasn’t the point. The questions were.
So she emailed the dental office manager on Wednesday morning. Got a reply by lunch. They set up a call for Thursday evening. She wrote her questions on a legal pad, practiced them out loud in her room, and then talked to this woman for thirty-five minutes about scheduling, staff conflicts, insurance paperwork, and what it’s like to run a small office when the dentist is having a bad day.
She got a B plus. Not because the interview was spectacular, but because the report was honest. She wrote that she’d been nervous, that the conversation had gone in directions she didn’t expect, and that she now understood the job was mostly about managing people rather than teeth.
What I took from the whole thing, and what I’d tell any parent watching their kid struggle with a similar assignment, is this: the barrier is almost never access. It’s the belief that asking is a burden. Students imagine that professionals are too busy, too important, too annoyed to talk to them. In reality, most people are flattered to be asked about their work. It’s a rare chance to talk about what they actually do all day, which is not something most jobs allow.
If your student is stuck, here’s what worked for us. Sit down together and make a list of every adult they know who has a job. Not a career. A job. Include the obvious ones. Then pick two and draft a short email together. Three sentences: who you are, what the assignment is, and what you’re asking for. Twenty minutes, they said yes or no. No pressure.
Don’t write it for them. Don’t make the call. Just sit there while they do it, if they want you to. The point is for them to feel the small discomfort of asking and discover that it doesn’t kill them.
My daughter ended up doing a second interview for extra credit, with the marketing person. She said it was easier the second time. She still doesn’t know what she wants to do after graduation. But she knows how to ask someone about their work now, which is probably more useful than any answer she could have gotten from a single conversation.
I don’t know if she’ll remember any of it in five years. But she called me again last week, not for an emergency, just to tell me about a professor who’d mentioned an internship. She wanted to know if I thought she should email the person listed on the flyer. I told her to go ahead. She sent it that night.
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