Episode 118: Christa Acampora and Julia Lapan on How Career Design Enables Student Success
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How can career design transform student success when integrated directly with academic courses and advising, starting in the first year? How can higher education institutions shift student mindsets from passive box-checking to true agency and self-discovery where every experience is an experiment or prototype they can reflect on and learn from? How will AI change the “products” of career development like a LinkedIn profile or a project portfolio and what does that mean for students? We talk through these with Christa Acampora the Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Julia Lapan the Director of Career Design and Discovery at University of Virginia.
Designing for Student Success: Integrating Career Discovery into Higher Education
How do we truly measure student success in higher education? For decades, the standard metric has been employment data at graduation. While securing a job is undeniably important, focusing solely on that final transaction misses the deeper purpose of a liberal arts education. True student success is about human formation—helping students understand who they are, who they are becoming, and how they want to impact the world.
To achieve this, institutions must move away from transactional career services and embrace institutional career design. By integrating self-discovery directly into the academic curriculum and advising structures, universities can help students shift from a passive "box-checking" mindset to an active, agentic approach to life and work.
Moving Beyond the Transactional Job Search
In traditional higher education models, career services operate on the margins. Students often view the career center as a place to visit during their senior year to clean up a resume or find a job listing. However, this siloed approach creates a significant gap between expectations and reality.
When career development is treated as an extracurricular add-on, it perpetuates the misconception that a career is separate from a student's academic journey. True career design is not an instrumental track or workforce training; it is liberal education made explicit in its application. It is the bridge where intellectual development meets a family’s reasonable questions about institutional value and cost.
Integrating Career Design into the First-Year Experience
To make career design accessible to all students, it must be embedded early and systematically into the university architecture. At the University of Virginia, this is achieved through a required first-year curriculum called The Engagements. Rather than a standard introduction-to-college seminar, this program consists of four seven-week courses taught by faculty fellows who also serve as pre-major advisors.
By embedding career design into an existing first-year requirement, institutions gain the scale and impact needed to reach every entering student, not just those already inclined to visit a career center. Within this curriculum, tools like a "commonplace book"—an ancient technology repurposed for modern self-reflection—allow students to track curiosities, unpack core values, and document informational interviews. This integration ensures that career learning is completely intertwined with academic exploration from day one.
Shifting Mindsets from Box-Checking to Student Agency
High-achieving students often arrive at college with an achievement framework. They have spent their lives checking the right boxes: taking advanced courses, securing top grades, and crafting perfect applications. They naturally expect their careers to follow a similar linear path.
Career design disrupts this paradigm by reframing the future as a series of prototypes. Instead of asking "What should I do with my life?", students learn to ask "How might I design a life I want to live?" This shift fosters student agency and resilience. When a student views internships, research projects, or even summer jobs as experiments to test fit and learn from, wayfinding takes over planning. They become equipped to navigate a non-linear professional landscape with confidence.
Human Formation in the Age of AI
The rise of generative artificial intelligence has fundamentally altered the landscape of higher education and career readiness. Traditional outputs used as evidence of learning—such as standard resumes, cover letters, or basic portfolios—are now easily replicated or produced by machines.
In the age of AI, policing these outputs is a losing battle that assumes the final product was the sole point of the assignment. Instead, institutions must recruit students into their own learning. The focus must shift toward deep human formation and pedagogical design that lets a student notice the exact moment a capability is strengthened. When students are trained to articulate the "before and after" in their own thinking, they develop the unique human skills that AI cannot replace.
Conclusion: Building a Connected Campus Ecosystem
Adapting to the future of higher education requires a culture shift that moves beyond institutional silos. Presidents, provosts, and deans must champion career design as a connected, institution-wide priority where student success is a shared responsibility across faculty, advising, and experiential learning teams.
When universities successfully leverage their existing structures to meet students where they are, they do more than prepare them for a workforce. They give students the tools to author their own lives, confidently face uncertainty, and become more fully themselves.
Episode 118 Transcript
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Christa Acampora: We have to design the pedagogy that lets a student notice the moment that a capability is strengthened, the before and after in her own thinking, and we have to do that early and often.
Julia Lapan: So many students try to iterate their futures just within their own heads, and it's so important that they get out and experience the world, make connections, build things, and create things that others can react to.
Elliot Felix: That was Krista Acampora and Julia Lapan from University of Virginia, in that order. We had a great conversation about the role that career design can play in student success when you connect it to courses and advising, and how an intentionally designed first-year experience amplifies that impact. We talk about how to shift mindsets so it's not just about checking boxes, but it's about students owning their own learning and development with every experience as an experiment or a prototype they can reflect on and learn from along the way, and how AI might change this and the traditional career development products like a LinkedIn profile or a project portfolio. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Connected College podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and the way they're organized to enable student success. Join me for insightful interviews with higher ed innovators, sharing the stories, stats, and strategies to create better connected colleges and universities. Welcome Krista and Julia. I'm so excited for our conversation about career design and how we integrate that into everything we do to help students succeed.
Christa Acampora: It's great to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.
Julia Lapan: Thank you.
Elliot Felix: I think a great way to get started would just to hear how you both did. So tell us a little bit about how you got started in higher ed and what you are up to today at UVA.
Christa Acampora: This is Krista. I'm a philosopher, and I spent nearly 20 years teaching philosophy at one of the country's largest and most diverse public universities. I would have 200 students in an intro class where more than two dozen first languages might be spoken reading the whole of Plato's Republic, not excerpts. And I really think that's where I learned what education is for. So today I'm Dean of the College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, and we're focused, Julia and I, on rebuilding undergraduate student advising and career readiness around that same promise to students: Come here, and we'll create the conditions to encounter your humanity and become who you are.
Elliot Felix: Love it.
Julia Lapan: And I got started in higher education through athletics, first as a student-athlete and then a coach, where I found my passion for helping college students flourish. Along the way, I pivoted to career development and have spent the past two decades in mostly traditional career services offices across multiple institutions, most recently at UVA's School of Engineering. Today, I'm excited to be leading a new career design and discovery initiative at the University of Virginia's College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where we're building a connected ecosystem to integrate career learning and self-discovery into the undergraduate experience.
Elliot Felix: Full disclosure for our listeners, I went to UVA, so I am and will continue to be a big fan. And my own career journey was linear and non-linear. As part of the architecture school, I got welcomed into a community where the academic programs and the practice were so intertwined. A lot of the faculty were practicing architects and it wasn't that hard to meet role models and imagine your future path. Ironically, I ended up doing something different, for a while architecture-adjacent, and then heading into higher ed strategy. But UVA holds a special place in my heart, and I know it does in yours. And I'm really excited to hear how you are doing this career design and discovery and how it's enabling student success. And I wonder if a good place to dive in is just understanding how you define success. Uncovering and discovering your humanity, who you are as a person, that you mentioned earlier maybe is part of that. But how do you define student success?
Christa Acampora: Yeah, Elliot, I would say your pathway was not necessarily architecture-adjacent. Your focus on how the architecture of the university does or does not support student success is absolutely the right kind of question to be asking. To go back to my Plato days, you achieved a higher form of architecture, I would just say. But to answer your question, how do we think about student success here, it's definitely not just a job at graduation, although recognizing that our students aspire to that as a viable and lively outcome after their graduation. As we think about student success here, I really am focused on that formation piece. Has the student become capable of authoring her own life and joining in the governance of a free society? And it was great that you had role models in architecture for that. Finding ways to integrate modeling, I think, is a big part of how Julia's bringing the practice of career design discovery to her work.
Julia Lapan: So from a career development perspective, I define student success as helping students understand who they are, who they're becoming, and how they want to impact the world. It's really about helping students build lives and careers with meaning and purpose, and to look to the future with a sense of anticipation, confidence, and agency.
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Elliot Felix: Makes so much sense because the foundation of design is understanding people, figuring out their needs, and solving their problems. And so it just makes so much sense that the foundation of a career design process is understanding yourself as a student: who you are, who you're becoming, and then thinking about how you take that into the world, whether it's the first career or the fifth, or where you thought you'd go or where you end up going. I really like that approach.
Christa Acampora: It's all about acquainting students fundamentally with what are the human capabilities that they have to think, to feel, to imagine, and through the process of education, taking those capacities and transforming them into capabilities to reason, to create, and to connect. And that to me is the essence of education. If we can help students catch sight of that through the process along the way, and then articulate how it's manifest in their own lives and why it matters, that's success to me.
Elliot Felix: How do you do that translation of a capacity, of a potential, into a capability? How are you doing the career design and discovery part of the College of Arts and Sciences?
Christa Acampora: I think it's important for listeners to understand the way that we are approaching this work. So at UVA, we have a full-year learning program for all of our first-year students. It's not an introduction to college seminar. It's four courses that open students to the wonder and discovery that a liberal arts education can provide. They're taught by some of our very best faculty, and our academic advising is fully integrated in that program. So Julia, in her new role, has the opportunity to tap that network and impact our full entering class through that work.
Julia Lapan: Career design is both a process and a mindset shift. It helps students shift from what I call an achievement framework, where they feel they must check boxes to get ahead. And instead, we want students to design their lives by reflecting on who they are, exploring multiple possibilities, and learning through real-world experiences. At its core, career design connects formation to action. And so as Dean Acampora said, we start as soon as the students arrive on grounds. Our required first-year curriculum, called The Engagements, is comprised of four seven-week courses that all students take in their first year. These courses are taught by college fellows who also serve as advisors during the first and second-year experience. Career design is embedded into The Engagements curriculum via curiosity and values reflections and a required informational interview. Now, for many students, this is the first time they will have encountered this type of assignment. As students gather information about themselves and the world, our advisors help them connect those insights with their academic pathways. The goal is not to add something extra like separate career advising. It's to leverage existing structures that help students make meaning of their college experience.
Elliot Felix: I think that's a great approach and I'm really taken with two parts of it. One is the integration. I think one of the most surprising statistics I uncovered in my book was that only 24% of students took a for-credit class that had some career development component, which is not nearly enough. That really should be 100%. And I think that's because so many folks are stuck in the old model of career development as this extra thing I do in spare time that I don't have. And the fact that you're integrating it into these four courses that build on each other, and it's not a simple 101, it's this integrated approach, I think is really great. Like, what led you to that course career development discovery integration?
Christa Acampora: So I'll say there are two parts to how I would answer that, Elliot. The first is that it's critically important to me that the opportunities that we can provide, that we think are important and that are powerful for the students' formation journey at the university, it's imperative to me that they be accessible to all of our students. And at full scale in a public university, that can be a high bar. So that was a first principle for me, that we were designing something that wasn't just for the students who were already inclined to go. If we thought that career design and discovery was going to be a useful framework for helping a student develop, then it had to be early on in their academic journey in the first year. We had this piece of academic architecture, just to go back to our earlier metaphor, of that first-year curriculum built in. And when we needed to transform undergraduate pre-major advising, we leveraged that architectural feature. So when we decided to introduce career design and discovery, it was a natural step that gave us scale and impact to start right there at the first year and through that piece of architecture.
Julia Lapan: Elliot, you made such an astute observation about career readiness and career learning being seen as something that students do apart from their college experience. After 20 years in higher education and working with students to help them design their careers, I've come to realize that students themselves do not see their futures as something separate from what they're doing through their college experience. In my own experience teaching standalone career courses, the reason this is something that we're doing that is different from other universities is we are not creating a required career course for our students to take because that perpetuates the same idea that career is something separate.
Elliot Felix: Separate, when the whole thing is you're trying to do it together. Yeah.
Christa Acampora: Absolutely. And in the context of a liberal arts institution, we're the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, so we've got that full spectrum of learning opportunities. Some might say, "Why are you doing that in a liberal arts setting?" and I don't really see career design as a separate or instrumental track. It is liberal education made explicit in its application. It's where I think this perhaps nebulous concept of formation meets a family's reasonable questions about cost and value head-on. So that idea of connection as the real work—connecting what a student studies to who she is, who she's becoming, and where she's going. And for every student, not just the ones who find their way to a career center.
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Elliot Felix: Yeah, and it gives you a way to connect the access, the advising, and the academic program all in one effort, which I think makes just a ton of sense. And like Julia, you were saying earlier, the other thing you've been able to do with this integrated approach is maybe shift from an achievement-oriented approach like checking the box, which is also so important. I think one of the reasons career services gets such a bad rap and low satisfaction—it's only roughly like a third of students nationally that are happy with career services—part of that is there's this gap between expectations and delivery, right? Students somehow have this misconception that "I'll go to the career center and they'll get me a job." Turnkey service. But it's flipping the script on that and resetting expectations and saying, "We're going to help you figure out who you are and what your strengths are and how you might apply them, and help you envision these future paths. But you have to do the work and your sleeves have to be rolled up." Are you encountering resistance as you try and change that mindset?
Christa Acampora: The really exciting thing about this work, Elliot, as I've watched Julia take on her role and find her way into this initiative, is that she's found a lot of champions for the cause. So we're really excited about what the future holds.
Julia Lapan: If you're talking about resistance from students, I would say initially, yes. This is a paradigm shift for them. So many of them have gotten to this point in their lives by doing all the right things. If you think about how they got to college, they took all the right courses in high school, they got great grades, and they did a great college application. They, I think, in some ways expect their careers to evolve in a similar fashion. They expect to go through their courses, do well here, and then in their third or fourth year begin applying to internships and jobs. And I think the expectation setting that we need to give to students is that is not how the world works. So the sooner we can engage them in this process of becoming, and if we can give them permission to not follow someone's prescribed path for them, but to begin to build their own paths forward, leaning into their curiosities, their interests, and begin to develop their capabilities. As we do that, I've started to see many students over the years relax into themselves and honestly have more success. The students that do that work are the ones that are more successful in finding the internships, the research experiences, and ultimately the jobs.
Christa Acampora: So it's really about agency, as you were saying, Elliot.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, and it seems like it's almost like kind of meta-preparation, right? Because you're helping students understand that their own career discovery and design is non-linear and that it involves coursework, understanding their strengths, and understanding themselves, all these things together. And you're preparing them for a future world of work that is very much non-linear, where the students that have the human skills and the ability to thrive in ambiguity and uncertainty and to proceed when they're doing whatever the project is they're doing, it's not going to proceed in a linear way either. So it seems like you're getting like a two-for-one there. You're getting the preparation and the meta-preparation. I don't know if that's even a thing, but it seems like it is.
Christa Acampora: Yeah, we change the question so it's not what should I do with my life, but how might I design a life I want to live? And that's active and generative, not passive. Wayfinding takes over planning. Take a step, learn from it, adjust, step again. A research project or an internship can serve as a prototype and evidence, not a resume line.
Elliot Felix: Right? You're doing it not to check the box, but to learn: Is this a fit? What does this say about who I am, what I can do, and what I want to do?
Christa Acampora: And how can I develop in the future? A student who spends a summer as a lifeguard because they didn't get the consulting job that they want still has an opportunity to think about themselves as becoming more capable, as forming relationships and building on it. There are a lot of things that we can help students recognize and catch along the way in their journeys with us.
Elliot Felix: And how do you make those, especially in the liberal arts, how do you make those journeys real to students? How do they imagine, with so many possibilities, what they can do as a history major, as an English major, as an econ major? How do you make that tangible for students? In one way you want to demonstrate their limitless potential, right, and all the options and opportunities. On the other hand, there is the paradox of choice, right? If there's 13 jams to choose from, people buy less than if there's three.
Christa Acampora: Right.
Elliot Felix: How do you make it tangible and like square that circle for them?
Christa Acampora: Yeah, a history or English student who's learned to recognize her own formation can give an account of herself, what she can now do that she couldn't do before, and how she knows it, and that's exactly what every serious interview asks for. So we don't narrow the major to one job. We try to make the breadth navigable. A specific example of how we're trying to make that concrete for students is that through that engagements year-long learning, we give students something called a commonplace book. That ancient technology of keeping track of ideas, opportunities, pathways, and things that catch students' attention. So they'll become practiced in using that throughout that first year.
Julia Lapan: So for our commonplace book that we're integrating into our first-year engagements, there will be several assignments that will involve self-reflection, the first one around curiosities. When I've worked with students in the past and I've asked them, "What are you curious about?" many of them have said, "No one's ever asked me that question." So we're deliberately getting students to reflect on what is it that makes them curious, what lights up their imagination. And then in a similar way, we have them reflect on their values, what matters to them, and not only come up with a list of their values, but to really discern in what ways are they currently living those values, and how might they want to bring those values into practice in the future. Beyond the reflection, though, what's really important is for students to—and I'll borrow this language from the Designing Your Life curriculum—just try stuff. So many students try to iterate their futures just within their own heads, and it's so important that they get out and experience the world, make connections, build things, and create things that others can react to. Those are the ways that they're going to get feedback from others, the ways they will get insights into what does the real world need, and how can I contribute to it. Also, that self-knowledge of what really is exciting me and in what ways do I want to build my way forward. We're not asking students to develop a 20-year career plan. We're asking them to take one step forward and reflect on it, and then iterate on that step.
Elliot Felix: What I think is so exciting about that is using the design metaphor and the design approach. So much of design involves creating some kind of artifact in order to get feedback. It sounds like this workbook, these activities, are in a way like artifacts that come out of the career design process, so that people aren't just in their own head but they're in the world and they're getting feedback. Are there other artifacts that you're creating like a LinkedIn profile or a portfolio or other things that they have to tangibly make digitally or physically?
Julia Lapan: You're absolutely right. The commonplace book is in itself an artifact. Where I see that it's not simply just a record of a student's thoughts and feelings or a snapshot of one particular moment in time, but it is something that they can bring into their advising session. When they sit down to meet with their advisor, which they are all required to do at several points during their first and second years, they are able to bring that into the conversation. The advisors are able to invite students to talk about what is important to them, what do they want to build in their futures, and what do they see next year looking like. So in terms of that particular artifact, I see that as really connected to this personalized advising structure that we have. But in terms of other artifacts or other products that students might create, I think this is where their creativity comes into play. Every student will need to decide for themselves what is it that will help me learn, help me develop, and help me further my vision for the future.
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Christa Acampora: I do want to make a point about the product piece of it, because I think this is critically important as we are in an age of increasingly capable AI, in which the products, the outputs that have served in the past as evidence of a student's learning are easily producible and reproducible by AI. Agentic AI will even come up with new types of products perhaps that students hadn't thought about. So we could decide to, in the confrontation with AI, police the outputs to ask whether it's the student or the machine that produced that. But I do think that's the wrong question. It assumes that the output was the point. And so instead of policing, I think we need to recruit students into their own learning, and that will require and entail producing outputs that students take pride in, that they're able to critique, build on, and iterate. But the point of simply producing the outputs and collecting them, that's going to fade into the background. I do think recruiting students into their own learning is one of the most important challenges confronting us in this age of AI.
Elliot Felix: The idea of what are artifacts and how do they change in the age of AI, and how do you keep emphasizing the agency and the accountability and avoiding the box-checking that we were talking about earlier, I think makes a ton of sense and is the perfect lead-in to our last question. I would love to just hear your thoughts on how this is all changing, right? As you shine up your crystal ball and you look into the future, how can institutions adapt to those changes?
Julia Lapan: I have definitely seen a paradigm shift in how institutions think about career development. Career readiness is no longer something that happens on the margins. It's being integrated into the core of the student experience, and that's leading to a transition away from standalone career centers to connected ecosystems where student success is a shared responsibility across faculty, advising, and experiential learning.
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Christa Acampora: We have to stop thinking about general education as just another variety of workforce training, and we should stop talking about it in that way. The whole transferable skills case undersells what we do. And now that AI performs those tasks, it's woefully inadequate. We have to make the case, and the person it matters to the most is the student. That's the case for formation. We have to say it with confidence and not apology. And then we've gotta make that formation visible for them. We have to design the pedagogy that lets a student notice the moment that a capability is strengthened, the before and after in her own thinking, and we have to do that early and often.
Julia Lapan: And in terms of advice for institutions to adapt to these changes, we are so lucky to have Dean Acampora, who is visionary in these efforts. And I really believe that these conversations need to happen at the very top. The presidents, the provosts, and deans need to champion career design as a connected, institution-wide effort. Institutions also have to move beyond silos and use the structures they already have—their curricula, their advising, and experiential learning—to meet students where they are. Ultimately, this is a culture shift. The goal isn't just to help students land jobs or prepare for careers, but to help them become more fully themselves. And when we do that well, the outcomes will take care of themselves.
Elliot Felix: That's really sage advice and an inspiring program put together, and I love the embracing design as part of career discovery, and the integration, the agency, and accountability instead of pure achievement. I think there's so many great things to take away from this conversation and I'm so thankful for both of your insights, to my fellow future UVA grads and beyond.
Christa Acampora: Fantastic. Thanks so much, Elliot. I enjoyed the conversation.
Julia Lapan: Thank you, Elliot.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to Elliotfelix.com for more information about my book, The Connected College, articles I've written, and talks I've given. There are also tools you can download, information on upcoming events, and information on booking me to speak at your institution or organization. Please support the podcast by rating it and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where all students succeed.