My University Student Needed to Interview Someone With a Job—How We Found One Without It Being Painful
On a rainy Sunday evening, my daughter came home from university looking like she had been given an impossible assignment. She dropped her bag on the kitchen floor, sat down at the counter with her laptop, and let out a long sigh.
“I have to interview someone with a job,” she said. “Like, a real job. For my career development class. And I have no idea who to ask.”
I had to stop myself from laughing. She is twenty years old. She has been alive for two decades. She knows dozens of people with jobs—including her own father and mother. But I understood what she meant. She wanted someone impressive. Someone with a title. Someone she could put on a reflection form and not feel embarrassed about.
“I don’t know anybody important,” she added, scrolling through her contacts as if hoping a CEO would magically appear.
This is a familiar moment for anyone with a young adult in their life. The assignment itself is simple: find someone who works, ask them questions, write a summary. But for a student who has spent most of her life in classrooms and lecture halls, the task feels enormous. It requires reaching out to a stranger, making a request, and then sitting through an awkward conversation. That is genuinely hard for people who have never done it.
So we sat together at the kitchen counter and I walked her through what I’ve learned from decades of working and hiring people.
I started by asking her what she actually needed. She pulled up the assignment rubric. She had to do two things: learn what a typical day looks like in a real job, and ask about the skills that matter in the workplace. That’s it. No one required her to interview a vice president. No one said the person needed to work in her dream field. The assignment was about understanding the world of work from someone who was in it.
“You know the Masons, right?” I said. “Their daughter-in-law manages operations for a delivery company. She has a real job. She supervises people, deals with schedules, handles problems.”
My daughter looked skeptical. “But she doesn’t work in media.”
“You don’t work in media either,” I pointed out. “You’re a student. She’s doing the thing you want to learn about—having a job.”
That seemed to land. The problem was not that she lacked options. The problem was that she had a narrow idea of what the assignment was supposed to look like. She thought she needed to impress someone with her ambitions. She didn’t. She just needed to have a conversation.
The next step was the hardest part for her: sending the email. She stared at a blank screen for ten minutes. I didn’t take the keyboard. I just sat beside her and suggested a structure.
“Keep it short,” I said. “Three sentences. Say who you are, why you’re asking, and give them a way out.”
She wrote: Hi, I’m Ellie. I’m a second-year university student doing an assignment to learn about real-world careers. Would you have 20 minutes sometime this week to answer a few questions? I can work around your schedule.
It was simple and honest. We sent it to the daughter-in-law, who replied within a few hours and offered a video call that Thursday. My daughter felt a small rush of relief. But then came the next hurdle: what to actually ask.
I suggested she write down seven or eight questions. Not twenty. Not a formal interrogation script. Just enough to guide the conversation and leave room for follow-up. She came up with things like: What does your morning look like? What do you spend most of your time doing? What do you wish you’d known when you started? Those are the questions that actually get useful answers.
We spent twenty minutes practicing. I played the manager. She asked her questions, wrote notes, and only looked at her phone once. When she got stuck, she used one of the follow-up phrases we talked about: “Can you tell me more about that?” That one question, I told her, keeps a conversation alive without you having to think of anything clever.
On Thursday, she did the interview at the kitchen table with earbuds in. I tried not to hover. I made tea and stayed in the next room. She came out after about thirty minutes with pages of notes and a slightly confused look.
“She said the best skill for her job is being able to handle people getting upset,” my daughter reported. “Not spreadsheets. Not logistics. Just staying calm when someone is mad.”
That was the moment I knew the assignment had done its job. No lecture I could give her about workplace skills would have landed the way that real conversation did. She heard from someone who was actually in the middle of it that soft skills aren’t soft at all—they’re the entire job.
She wrote a thank-you email the next day. That was another lesson. Sending a short note saying “thank you for your time, I really appreciated hearing about your experience” is not just good manners. It leaves the door open. In this case, it led to an invitation to come shadow for a few hours during her semester break.
What surprised me most was how her view of the whole thing shifted in the following days. She started talking about her own part-time job differently. She noticed how her manager dealt with a shipment delay. She came home and said, “I think I understand why he did that now.” The interview changed what she paid attention to.
I don’t think this is just about an assignment. It’s about something bigger. Students today are often given a lot of information but very little practice in how to navigate an unstructured social request. Asking someone for twenty minutes of their time is a skill. It involves clarity, conciseness, and the ability to accept a no. It is not a natural skill. It needs rehearsal.
As parents and teachers, our instinct is often to solve the problem for them. We want to make the phone call, or give them the answer, or even be the person they interview. But that defeats the purpose. What they need is for us to sit beside them while they figure out the first step. Help them identify a real person. Help them draft the email. Help them practice saying the questions out loud. And then get out of the way.
It was not a dramatic moment. No career suddenly became clear. My daughter still doesn’t know what she wants to do next year, let alone in ten years. But she learned that asking a stranger a simple, respectful question is not as terrifying as she thought. That may not sound like much. But for a twenty-year-old facing the working world, it is one of the most useful things she could have learned.
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