This piece was coauthored with Bob Moesta, the founder of the ReWired Group and co-creator of the Jobs to Be Done theory. Bob is also the coauthor with me of the books “Job Moves” and “Choosing College.”
We are often told that it’s impossible to learn about what it’ll be like to be enrolled in college because it’s “an experienced good”— a product or service where its characteristics are difficult to observe in advance and can only be understood during consumption.
Many have told us the same is true, however, about taking a new job. That you can only learn what it’s like after you take it.
Yet the research in our recent book “Job Moves”—and the actual work we’ve done coaching hundreds of job switchers—shows that’s not necessarily true. We can “learn before switching” what a new job will be like—and more specifically how it lines up with our priorities, the things that give us energy and our assets.
Those findings have led me to believe that we can do the same about college—help people figure out how a given college or major will and won’t fit them before they enroll. But it requires a different approach than most prospective students take currently.
The key is in learning how to prototype your college experience. And to do that, you need to stop thinking about what you’ll be—a student at “insert-name” college or an “insert-name” major—and instead focus on what you’ll do day-to-day.
Andy’s College Application Story
As Andy—a prospective college student one of us advised informally (his real name disguised to preserve anonymity)—was applying to colleges, he realized that for many colleges, he would need to apply to a specific major.
With a limited sense of what majors were out there and immigrant parents who hadn’t gone to college in the United States, Andy felt lost. He gravitated to applying for business majors but for no clear reason. The return on investment to business degrees looked promising and he figured it couldn’t hurt, but he had no real sense of what he would do in business classes and what future career pathways might look like in terms of the day-to-day work.
Now, granted, what you major in doesn’t equate to what you’ll do professionally. But in looking at Andy, we saw other things.
We saw a kid who didn’t love sitting in class and doing problem sets and the like, but loved hands-on learning. Whereas physics class drained his energy, he soared when doing projects for the Physics Olympics. His work ethic when it came to practicing music were stunning. And he had delved into the art of cooking—and had skills and knowledge that put us and his parents in our place.
Will the day-to-day of studying business line up with what gave him energy—or will it feel like a chore and reduce his odds of college success and completion? Given he is apathetic about enrolling in college in the first place, we are unsure as of this writing.
Energy Drivers and Drains
A better approach for students starts with getting clear about what you do and don’t like doing. What drives your energy and drains it?
If you’re thinking about that as it concerns your potential major, for example, you’d look to your past classes, extracurricular activities in high school, and other arenas where you spend time. Write those experiences down and some of the things you did and learned in them. What were the classes like? What comprised the work? And what were your accomplishments?
This will help jog your memory so you can remember what drove and drained your energy in these different experiences.
Energy drivers are the things that make you excited to go to class or a particular activity, dive in, and get into the flow of the work. Energy drains, on the other hand, are the things that irritate or frustrate you, that diminish your enjoyment of what you do, or that you even dread about the class or activity.
Over the course of a couple weeks, jot down anytime you remember feeling driven or drained in your various classes and activities.
As you do this, you’ll realize that there are energy drivers and drains that recur across your time in high school. Start to connect the dots and focus on what are the major five to 10 energy drivers and drains that you see repeatedly.
Importantly, don’t settle for surface-level understandings of what these mean to you. Unpack them to understand what specifically is driving or draining your energy in an activity.
For example, if group projects haven’t been your thing, what about them has drained your energy? What specifically made them difficult? Have there been times where you’ve worked in teams where you’ve had positive experiences? That might start to illuminate what’s really going on. Or keep asking “why” at least five times to precisely figure out what’s impacting your energy.
Assets
At the same time, you want to understand the capabilities, skills, and knowledge you’ve built up through your experiences. What are you really good at doing in other words?
This is different from notions of strengths and weaknesses, personality, aptitude or things like that. Those are fixed and don’t change. But what you develop is a choice. It just takes different levels of investment in terms of time, effort, and sometimes money. But what are the personal assets you’ve really developed at this point?
Sadly, these are questions most high school students don’t know when they leave high school. They may have a general sense of things such as “I like math” or “I love gaming,” but they haven’t developed deeper understandings of what about math or video games they are really good at doing. What are the skills they’ve actually developed—and what does it suggest about what they’ll be good at doing in the future?
As you work through this, try to come up with somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to 12 skills that you’re really good at doing—and start to think through what other capabilities you might be good at developing based on this list.
Activities like CliftonStrengths can help. This assessment, formerly known as StrengthsFinder, allows you to better understand your natural proclivities and where things will come easier for you versus what will be more effortful.
But this tool is also helpful because it’ll help you have a clearer idea of the things you actively don’t want to develop based on what your weaknesses are. Too often in schooling we push individuals to keep “remediating” their weaknesses rather than figure out how to accentuate and build on their strengths. In our professional lives, you realize that playing to your strengths is how you can really differentiate yourself and carve out a career.
Lining Your Energy Drivers and Assets Up with What Different Colleges, Majors Will Be Like
At this point, the next step is to create an array of divergent prototypes for what major you could do so that you can figure out how what energizes you and your current capabilities and those that you want to build will line up with what you’d actually do on a day-to-day basis for the classes you’d take in a range of majors. How and where do the activities in different majors line up with the things that really give you energy and the capabilities that you really enjoy and want to lean into more?
The way you can answer that is by talking to people who have taken those same classes and have them walk you through how what you do on a day-to-day basis in them—and how those line up with what you like doing and what you’re good at doing.
You could imagine that you start to learn that electrical engineering, for example, may have a big payoff in earnings, but the things one does as an electrical engineering major and then the careers that one would likely go into with that degree in hand might not line up. Or it might mostly line up—after all, nothing is going to be a 100% match.
But with that information in hand for a variety of majors, you’d then figure out which of the tradeoffs in the different options you’re considering are worth doing because of the things that you’d get from the experience. Which is how you’d ultimately converge on a particular option.
Using Prototypes To Choose College
To this point, we’ve been treating this exercise to help someone focus on their major.
To adjust the exercise for colleges, you’ll focus more on what drives and drains your energy—and zoom out to make sure you’re thinking not just about your classes, but also the broader set of activities and experiences you do for fun.
Then take the college petal-flower diagram from our book, “Choosing College,” to help you understand what different colleges are like along seven dimensions: purpose, people, geography, campus life, size, academics, and extracurricular activities. Then figure out where a given college does or doesn’t line up with what gives you energy along those petals to help you make the tradeoffs right for you.
The next step then is interview students in different colleges to understand what they do on a daily and weekly basis—and assess how what they do lines up with what drives and drains your energy.
One tip is that for most folks, it’ll be far easier to rule colleges with certain elements out of the picture rather than say “this is what fit looks like for me”—particularly in the beginning of this exploration. That’s because most colleges are relatively undifferentiated and 18-year-olds are still malleable enough that they can fit into different environments.
But going through the exercise will help you understand what college will be like on a daily basis—and how it is likely to be a nonstarter or a terrific possible landing spot before you’ve actually enrolled.
And if you’ve eliminated choices that are non-starters, that’ll put you way ahead of the pack when it comes to making sure you’re not just successful in college, but also enjoying the experience.