After “What Are You Going to Do With That?”, A More Useful Conversation
By the time students reach a campus careers panel, most have already done the private math.
They’ve weighed the cost of a degree against the cost of confusion. Quietly, they’ve learned that the hardest part isn’t sustaining ambition. It’s translation: turning what they’ve studied into real-world possibilities. That was the underlying subject of the Brooklyn College session co-hosted by the Humanities & Social Science School and The City Tutors: how someone turns coursework into next steps without feeling overwhelmed.
The event was hybrid, with students in the room and others joining from across the CUNY system. It unfolded less like a panel and more like a live mapmaking exercise, a few professionals describing what their paths actually looked like, and a room full of students testing those paths against their own.
The panelists did not arrive as a single type. Jimmy, who studied business administration, had just stepped into a senior management role in data engineering and described his work as turning raw data into information leaders can use. Jolie, who majored in education, technology, and entrepreneurship, now works in product marketing in K–12 education technology. She spoke as someone close enough to graduation to remember the moment when an entire industry suddenly came into view. Angela, a Brooklyn College alumna, traced a longer arc: a communications degree, a career in human resources, continued education along the way, and a recent shift into coaching and consulting. The moderator, Brian, a doctoral candidate working in epidemiology and oncology research, kept the conversation grounded, returning again and again to the questions students actually bring with them.
The opening question was simple: what did you study, and what do you do now? The answers mattered because they resisted mythology. Statistics can lead to data engineering. Education studies can lead to education technology. Speech communications can lead to HR leadership. These weren’t dramatic reinventions. They were practical linkages. For students worried their major might narrow their options, the panel widened the horizon. Many left naming alternative career paths they had not previously considered as a central takeaway.
From there, the conversation moved into the space students live in most: the gap between what work is imagined to be and what it turns out to be.
Jolie described realizing she loved education but didn’t want to teach, and responding by widening her definition of what education work could include. She pursued internships that were adjacent rather than perfect—policy, research, startups—anything that let her test roles before committing. She didn’t frame this as a bold leap. She framed it as exposure: the process by which a vague interest becomes a specific direction.
Jimmy admitted that he once dismissed advertising as hollow, built only to sell. Working inside it complicated that view. Advertising, he explained, can function like infrastructure, shaping norms, spreading public health messages, influencing behavior. His role in ad tech sits at the intersection of systems and attention, where the data includes not just numbers but reactions, surveys, and qualitative feedback—what makes someone stop and engage. For students who associate data work with narrow technical paths, it was a reminder that research skills and social-science instincts travel.
Angela’s story began with a narrower horizon and widened through work. She knew retail and restaurants and assumed those were the primary options. Then someone told her about an entry-level assistant role, and she took it ready to learn. What followed were jobs she couldn’t have pictured in college: recruiting, training, employee relations, investigations, and eventually strategic work through acquisitions and a company sale. Her point wasn’t that she had a master plan. It was that the plan emerged as she gained vantage points.
Again and again, the panel returned to a concern students often carry quietly: not having a network. The speakers named it directly and then demystified it. Jolie talked about translation—reading job postings closely, pulling the language employers use, and rewriting experience in those terms without pretending she’d already done everything. Jimmy described building a funnel: broad outreach at the top, visible projects in the middle, narrowing into interviews and opportunities at the bottom. Angela emphasized what doesn’t live on a screen. Ask questions. Volunteer. Meet someone for a conversation. Show curiosity without apology.
When the session moved into smaller conversations, it became practical. Students had the chance to ask direct questions, compare notes with peers, and practice introducing themselves with clarity. Several described the experience as confidence-building: speaking up, making connections, and leaving with names and next steps.
When asked which skills mattered most, the answers were steady and unglamorous: research (before you get the job and once you’re in it); comfort with ambiguity (the ability to move forward without clean instructions); and writing—not academic prose but clear, compelling communication that earns attention and trust quickly. They also pointed to LinkedIn, not as a performance, but as a tool—one way to make interests legible and keep momentum after a conversation ends.
By the end, the session offered concrete stories of how people made the jump, and concrete methods students could borrow immediately. The quiet argument of the afternoon was this: careers are built through translation, exposure, and repeated, honest conversations with people already doing the work. For many students in the room, that reframing made the next step feel less like a guess and more like a plan.