When Your Uni Student Needs a Working Professional to Interview for Class: What Parents Can Actually Do
Last Tuesday at 9:17 p.m., I was folding mismatched socks on the couch, half-watching a Great British Bake Off rerun, when my phone buzzed three times fast. It was Lila, my 20-year-old daughter, a second-year media studies student living on campus 90 minutes away. First came a blurry assignment brief screenshot, then a meme of a student submerged in library books, then: mom emergency. comms 101. due thursday. need to interview someone with a full-time marketing job. 20 mins. can’t be immediate family. do you know anyone.
I rolled my eyes and sipped my chamomile tea. She’d mentioned this assignment once over Sunday dinner three weeks prior, waved a hand and said she had it handled. My first instinct was to type back why didn’t you sort this earlier? Can’t you ask your professor for a contact? Can’t you just message someone on LinkedIn yourself? It’s the line I’ve heard many parents use when these last-minute uni requests pop up: you’re an adult now, figure it out.
I almost hit send. Then I remembered a grocery store line chat I’d had a month prior with a woman who works in career services at Lila’s uni. She said these short informational interview assignments are her team’s most common last-minute panic request, and it’s almost never pure procrastination. Most 19 and 20-year-olds have never asked a stranger for a professional favor. Up to that point, every opportunity they’ve gotten—summer jobs, sports teams, volunteer spots—came through a teacher, coach, or family friend. Hitting send on a message to someone you don’t know, asking for a chunk of their time, feels rude at best, like setting yourself up for rejection at worst.
I called Lila instead of texting. She picked up on the second ring, breathless, and said she’d been scrolling LinkedIn for an hour and a half. Every marketing coordinator she found looked too busy, too important, like they’d laugh at a second-year asking basic questions. “I rewrite the first line every five minutes,” she said. “I sound like an idiot no matter what I say.”
I told her I did know someone: Jake, my cousin’s 28-year-old son, who does digital marketing for the regional grocery chain near campus. She’d met him once at a 2022 family Christmas party, but never would have thought to reach out on her own. I didn’t text Jake for her, didn’t set up the whole thing and hand her a Zoom link like I’ve heard other moms admit they’ve done. I just gave her his cell number and walked her through exactly what to write, no fancy formal language required.
That’s the thing no one tells you about these requests: kids don’t need you to do the work, but they also don’t need a lecture on personal responsibility. They need a concrete script, because no one has ever taught them what a low-stakes professional ask actually sounds like. Most swing too far one way: either stiff, mid-century formal lines about “humbly beseeching 15 minutes of your valuable time,” or messages so casual they read like a text to a high school friend (“hey can u answer some marketing questions for my class thx”).
I dictated the structure to her while we were on the phone:
Hi Jake, this is Lila, my mom is Sarah Henderson, we met at the family Christmas party in 2022.
I’m a second-year media studies student at Western, and I have a quick class assignment that requires a 20-minute interview with someone working in digital marketing.
I just have five basic questions about your day-to-day work, and I can fit any time that works for your schedule this week, over Zoom or a quick call.
No spam or long follow-ups, I promise. Thanks so much!
I told her to hit send before we hung up, before she could rewrite it another dozen times. She groaned, but did it, holding the phone an arm’s length away like it might explode. He texted back 12 minutes later: he had a 25-minute gap between client meetings the next afternoon, and attached his Zoom link.
The rest was mostly smooth. Her mic cut out two minutes in, she had to borrow her roommate’s AirPods, and Jake laughed and said he did the exact same thing on his first internship interview. She got her answers, wrote her paper, got a B+, and texted me a blurry photo of the grade. The real takeaway wasn’t on the rubric, though. Jake mentioned he gets two or three of these student asks every semester, and almost always says yes. He remembered being 20, panicking over the same assignment, cold-emailing 12 people and hearing back from one. Most working people don’t see small, clear asks as a nuisance. Kids just don’t know that—they’ve only ever seen marketers on TikTok talking about six-figure salaries and 5 a.m. routines.
I’ve talked to enough parents to know two common missteps here. Some pull every string, cold-message random local business owners on Facebook, set up the interview, even edit the paper, just to make the panic stop. That robs the assignment of its entire point, which isn’t the interview answers—it’s practicing the small, low-stakes outreach they’ll need for internships and entry-level jobs a year from now. The other camp writes it off as laziness, tells the kid to figure it out alone, and more often than not, the kid interviews a family friend in a totally unrelated field just to check the box, or turns in a half-done assignment, and never builds the skill at all.
The middle ground takes 10 minutes of your time. Dig through your own casual contacts first—you don’t need a CMO or CEO. A 26-year-old admin, a warehouse supervisor, a freelance graphic designer working out of their basement all meet the “person with a job” bar, and most kids don’t realize that. Give them the exact four-part script: name your connection, state exactly how much time you need and what it’s for, offer flexibility, keep it short. Make them hit send while you’re still on the line, so they don’t put it off another three days.
A month after that first interview, Lila texted me again, no panic this time. She’d seen Jake post that his team was hiring a summer marketing intern, drafted a follow-up note referencing the class interview, and just wanted me to glance it over. I cut one rambling line about her favorite TikTok trends, sent it back, and she hit send on her own 10 minutes later. She didn’t get the internship—they hired someone with a year more experience—but Jake spent 15 minutes going over her resume and pointing out other openings to apply for.
Last week she sent me a screenshot of another informational interview request, this one to a woman who runs a small social media agency in Toronto. She’d written the whole thing herself, just wanted a quick check. I told her it looked good. She wrote back “thanks” and that was it.
I still fold socks on Tuesday nights, still get last-minute panic texts about group projects, broken bike chains, and overpriced campus parking tickets. I know the argument that stepping in for these small things coddles kids, that they’ll never learn independence if you don’t push them straight out of the nest. But I remember when she learned to ride a bike: I didn’t yank the training wheels off, push her down the driveway, and walk away. I ran alongside her for the first block, holding the back of the seat, until she told me she could balance on her own.
She still messes up. She forgot to send a thank-you note after that agency interview last week, sent it two days late, and panicked the whole time that she’d blown it. But she fixed it herself. Next time, she probably won’t even text me to look over the draft. That’s enough for now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » When Your Uni Student Needs a Working Professional to Interview for Class: What Parents Can Actually Do