When Your Uni Student Needs to Interview Someone With a Job
The email arrived on a Tuesday afternoon and by dinner it had become a household problem. My daughter, six weeks into first year, had an assignment for her careers unit: find someone working in a field you’re curious about, interview them for twenty minutes, write it up. Fifteen per cent of the grade. Due in eleven days.
She’d been staring at the same LinkedIn profile for half an hour. A woman who worked in environmental policy. Perfect on paper. Completely unapproachable, apparently.
“Mum, do you know anyone who works in environmental anything?”
“I might. Let me think.”
“No — don’t text anyone. That’s weird.”
So we sat with it. I stirred the pasta and she refreshed a page that hadn’t changed.
What she wanted, I eventually worked out, wasn’t a name. It was for the whole thing to be over. The interview itself didn’t scare her. The asking did.
—
Here’s what the group chat looked like that week, according to the bits she read aloud. One boy’s uncle got him a slot at a bank. Everyone else was stuck. Three people had drafted emails they hadn’t sent. One girl had emailed a stranger and been ignored, and had now decided the whole assignment was impossible.
I’ve taught long enough to recognise this pattern. We spend years asking teenagers what they want to be, and almost no time showing them how to approach an adult they don’t know and ask for twenty minutes of their time. Then at nineteen we hand them an assignment that requires exactly that and act surprised when they freeze.
The interview, as far as I can tell, is not really the point. The ask is the point. The interview is just what happens if the ask works.
—
What we did, over two evenings, was small and unglamorous.
First, we made a list of ten names. Not ten impressive names — ten possible ones. Her old swimming coach, who now ran a physio clinic. Our neighbour who manages a pharmacy. A friend of mine who does something in local government that I’ve never fully understood. Her cousin’s flatmate. Two people she found on LinkedIn who lived in the same city.
The point wasn’t quality. It was volume. Because the first two would say no, or say nothing, and she needed to know that was normal before she started rather than after.
Second, we wrote a message. Four sentences. Who she was, what the assignment was, exactly how long it would take, and an easy way out. That last part mattered more than anything else we did. If you’re too busy, absolutely no worries. It turned the email from a request into an offer of a short, low-stakes conversation. It also meant a no wasn’t a rejection — it was just a no.
Third, she sent three in one sitting. Not one. Three. Sitting on the couch next to me, phone face-down, sending them fast enough that she didn’t have time to talk herself out of each one. Two went quiet. One came back within an hour with a yes and a suggested time.
The interview ran forty minutes instead of twenty. The woman talked about how she’d fallen into her job by accident, how her first graduate role was genuinely awful, and how the skill she uses most days is writing clear emails. None of that is on a careers website. All of it was more useful than the website.
—
A few things I’d say to any parent in the same spot.
Don’t send the email yourself. I offered, twice, and I’m glad she said no both times. Doing the ask for them removes the exact thing the assignment is quietly teaching.
Widen the list past “impressive.” The pharmacy manager next door gave a better interview than my friend at the consulting firm would have, because he had time and wasn’t being approached by six students that week.
Put a deadline on the asking, not just the assignment. “Find someone to interview by Friday” is a task. “Find someone to interview” is a fog.
Let them read the message out loud to you. Not for editing — she didn’t want my edits — but because saying it aloud once makes it less frightening to type.
And when it’s done, nudge the thank-you email. Two sentences. That’s the one that tends to come back around in two years when someone’s looking for an intern.
—
She still doesn’t know what she wants to do. The interview didn’t solve that, and I don’t think it was supposed to. She has a follow-up coffee pencilled in for March with someone she met through the assignment, and she’s already mentioned cancelling it twice.
But she sent the email. Three of them, in one go, to people she’d never met. That was the part she genuinely believed she couldn’t do, and now she has evidence that she can. The rest is still open, which seems about right for first year.
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