Hacking College with Dr. Ned Scott Laff & Scott Carlson – College Bound Mentor Podcast #29

Welcome to the College Bound Mentor podcast! Each episode, hear trends, case studies, and interviews with students who have gone through it all.

This is Episode #29 and you’ll hear us talk Hacking College with Dr. Ned Scott Laff & Scott Carlson. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review if you’re enjoying the show!

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College Bound Mentor Podcast Episode #29: Hacking College with Dr. Ned Scott Laff & Scott Carlson

Does your college major even matter? Dr. Ned Scott Laff & Scott Carlson explore the surprising answer in their must-read book, Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter―and What Really Does. Dr. Ned Scott Laff has over 35 years of experience in college and university settings in administrative and faculty roles. Scott Carlson is a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education who explores where higher education is headed. In this episode, they dive into the difference between a major and field of study, their favorite student case studies from Hacking College, what makes their process different, how to ask your aspiring college students the right questions, and what’s broken with the college advising process today. This episode covers everything from Hacking College to case studies. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

• Where is college failing?
• How do you help students figure out what they want to do in life?
• What questions should you ask aspiring college students?
• Is it okay to not be a Business major?
• What advice do Ned & Scott have for aspiring college students?

Get Hacking College on Amazon and connect with Ned & Scott on LinkedIn, and Subscribe to College Bound Mentor on your favorite podcast platform and learn more at CollegeBoundMentor.com

Check out the episode and show notes below for much more detail.

Show Notes

• Hacking College with Dr. Ned Scott Laff & Scott Carlson
  • [0:19] Welcome to College Bound Mentor
  • [0:28] Lisa Bleich, Abby Power, Stefanie Forman
  • [0:30] Get Hacking College on Amazon and connect with Ned & Scott on LinkedIn, and Subscribe to College Bound Mentor on your favorite podcast platform and learn more at CollegeBoundMentor.com
  • [2:15] How did Ned & Scott meet?
  • [3:23] What’s the difference between a major & field of study?
  • [6:55] What are Ned & Scott’s favorite case studies from Hacking College?
  • [13:45] Where is college failing?
  • [20:56] How do you help students figure out what they want to do in life?
  • [25:08] How does the Research Investigative Interview work (RII)?
  • [29:52] What questions should you ask aspiring college students?
  • [37:52] What’s one of the most impactful case studies from Hacking College?
  • [49:32] What’s the case study about a French major?
  • [55:45] Is it okay to not be a Business major?
  • [1:01:02] What does luck have to do with your college experience?
  • [1:02:18] What advice do Ned & Scott have for aspiring college students?
  • [1:02:48] Get Hacking College on Amazon and connect with Ned & Scott on LinkedIn, and Subscribe to College Bound Mentor on your favorite podcast platform and learn more at CollegeBoundMentor.com
  • Theme Song: “Happy Optimistic Americana” by BDKSonic

What is the College Bound Mentor podcast?

Lisa, Abby, and Stefanie know college. They also know students. With over 30 years combined experience mentoring young people, they’ll show you why understanding yourself is the key to finding the right college. Each episode, hear trends, case studies, and interviews with students who have gone through it all – giving you valuable insight to survive the college application process and beyond. Hosted by Lisa Bleich, Abby Power, and Stefanie Forman, Partners of College Bound Mentor.

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

Scott Carlson 0:01
The learning experiences are there within the college. How do you get the students to understand how to take advantage of those? That’s the big piece of hacking.

Lisa Bleich 0:19
Hey, CBMers, welcome back to College Bound Mentor, where we help you survive the college application process and beyond. We’re your co-hosts, Lisa,

Abby Power 0:27
Abby, and Stefanie.

Lisa Bleich 0:30
And on today’s episode, we are super excited to chat with Ned Scott Laff and Scott Carlson, the authors of Hacking College, why the major doesn’t matter and what really does. Just for some introduction, Scott Carlson has been a writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education since 1999 where he has covered the financial sustainability of higher education institutions, the relevance of the curriculum, the impact of college on low income populations, and the path from college to career, among other topics. Dr Ned Scott Laff has over 35 years of experience in college and university settings and administrative and faculty roles. He has worked in curriculum development, program, assessment, general education, review and revision, self design majors and developing centers that integrate advising, mentoring and career development. He was awarded the civic engagement award for the Washington Center for his work in service and community based learning. He has brought interest in improving the quality of Undergraduate Education and revitalizing the liberal arts. He has a special interest in the role mentoring plays in helping students and integrate their educational, professional and personal gains into successful undergraduate education. So welcome. We’re so happy to have you guys on our podcast,

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 1:35
on our pod. It’s nice to be here. Thank you so much. Yeah.

Lisa Bleich 1:39
First off, I just want to thank you for writing this book. I mean, we all loved it. I read it, and I was like, Okay, we gotta get these guys on. And I was so happy when you said, Yes, we have been saying, you know, similar things, or at least I’ve been saying similar things to families for years. You know, as a European cultural studies and French major, you know, it’s, I could totally see where you were going with this, but it’s a hard message for many parents and students to understand. And in the book, you introduce a number of terms that provide a practical approach to delving into interests towards a career. And of course, found the case we all found the case study super fascinating. So before we get into it, I just wonder, how did you guys meet? Like, how did you come together to write this book? Well, that’s

Scott Carlson 2:20
an interesting story. I mean, basically Ned just harassed me for a few years ahead of writing the book. He would say so at the time, at the time I was writing these reports about college to work and what was happening to low income students going through college, and what was leading them astray sometimes. And he started sending me emails saying, oh, you know, there’s a better way students could do this, and there’s a different way of thinking about all this. It’s not about the major and so on. And you know, I had a lot of stuff ahead of me, and so finally, I was going to Chicago to visit old friend of mine, and Ned. And I got together, we just started talking. And you know, I could tell from the stories he was telling me, or what he was telling me about his vision of what college was sort of aligned with what I had been reporting on, and also what my my own experience was going through college as well,

Lisa Bleich 3:12
right? That’s so interesting. And so now you kind of bring in this idea of the field of study, like the field of study versus a major, which is usually how people think about things. So what’s the difference? Why does this reframing help students?

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 3:26
The interesting thing is, we often use the term major and feel the steady as synonyms, and they’re not a field of steady is an integrative approach to looking at what we call in the book a wicked problem. But that wicked problem emerges from what we call students hidden intellectualism and vocational purpose. That thing right that if they could cut out all the noise, they would actually pursue, if you could say to them, I’m Bill Gates, I guarantee you an income. And what that often opens up, right? Is a completely different way of looking at the job market, but most importantly, a completely different way of looking at the institution that they’re they’re studying here, a field of steady is integrated. So general education, there is no distinction between general education, the major the elective hours you would have to fulfill, and how you create the experiential learning opportunities that you want that will get you into that world that you want to be in. So it’s almost

Lisa Bleich 4:37
like how Brown has like an open curriculum, but it’s that you’re trying to take all of the different, you know, the wicked problem that you want to solve, and then how do all of those pieces come together? Not like thinking, Oh, this is a Gen Ed requirement, and this is my major requirement, but really thinking, How does everything Connect? How does all of the different ways that I do things within my classes, my. My activities, my internships. How do they all have a theme that connect them? Is that really what it is, right,

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 5:06
right? And in a way, it actually reflects what faculty actually do. There are no generic faculty on a college campus. All faculty are field of study specialists. We just never translate that down when we’re talking to students. And

Scott Carlson 5:23
you would know from, you know, being in a college counseling business, how students mostly approach this, which is, oh, I need to pick a useful major or a high paying major, quote, unquote, high paying. And then what happens to the rest of the the selections through college? That’s that 50 to 70% that it could be, right? It’s like, Well, that’s easy. I like that professor. Oh, my friends in that class. You know, right? This is, this is trying to make the college experience into this more integrated, synthetic thing

Abby Power 5:51
of the three of us. I’m the one who has recent college grads. My son just finished his senior year at USC, and then I had one who graduated a couple of years ago, and I wish I’d read your book before they went to school. That was unfortunate for me, but I’ll tell you my my younger son did a really good job of doing it on his own, and so everything you said in the book really resonated with me. And along these lines, I particularly love that question, if you could do whatever it is that you genuinely care about no matter how crazy it might sound, and we could guarantee you a comfortable living. What would you pursue? I’d love to hear some examples that you’ve heard from students you had given a bunch of case amazing case studies in the book. But what are your favorites? What have been your favorite answers to that question? Well,

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 6:38
you know, my favorite answers change day by day. Let me go back to my wild and reckless youth, when I was still a doctoral student and working on this problem, I had a pre med oboe major, because oboe, right, oboe is what he really loved. He wanted to do medicine, but he loved the oboe, and what we told him was, there’s no conflict in this. You can put the two pieces together. And what he did, which was kind of interesting, he put together a senior research project. Because, you know, the major problem that many oboe players have is that they have to shape their own reads. So if you could genetically engineer a natural oboe read with the resiliency of a plastic oboe read, then you’d have the best of both worlds. You’d have something that would last, but something would have the great sound. That’s what he did. His, his senior research project on people went nuts. It was such a crazy I mean, this, it sounds like such a crazy idea, right? But all of this, all of this, is what study at a university is about. Plus, he did have all the pre med sciences. He just wasn’t a biology major, and he did engage in the right experiential opportunities while playing elbow right. And yes, he is, he is, and I have to say, I mean, having an aging out crisis, he is probably retired now as a doctor,

Scott Carlson 8:18
you know, it’s interesting. Ned would tell it also a really interesting story about someone who had lung health issues and also wanted to enter the world of bicycles. But I’ll tell one in the meantime, which is comes from a trip that we made to Michigan recently where we talked to some students, and we were talking to a group of students, and then we talked to these sort of individual classes, and then at the end of the day, we talked to students, one on one always talking about this sort of field of study method that we were working on in one of the classes, was a philosophy class, and there was this young woman sitting in the front who was, you know, sort of really paying attention to what we were talking about. And then she turned up at the end of the day to the one on one sessions, and she came up to me and she said, Well, here’s the deal. I’m I’m in philosophy. I’m majoring in philosophy. I’m interested in philosophy and religion. But my dad keeps asking me, like, what are you going to do with philosophy and religion, you know? And I just, I can’t come up with an answer for him, but I just, I just really love this stuff. And I said, Okay, let’s just take that major assignment that you’ve got philosophy and religion. Let’s put that aside for a second, and let’s talk about what, why? Like, what is it that calls you to this? Why? What is it that you’re actually interested in this is something that kind of comes out with a lot of the students that we talk about in the book and the students that we’ve talked to since, and that is that at first, they’re sort of, like, bashful about, like, what this, this thing might be, because it, you know, it sounds kind of, it might sound kind of stupid or really silly, or like, maybe they don’t think it’s a real world or whatever. So she says to me, Well, you know, I don’t know I don’t know, this is going to sound really weird, but I’m really into death. And I said, death. And she said, Yeah, you know, like death, like near death experiences, how people die, what happens to people when they die? Is there life after death? You know? I, you know, I don’t know. And I said, Well, that’s interesting. Have you ever heard of Stephen Jenkinson? You. So Stephen Jenkinson is this Canadian philosopher was trained at Harvard, who is now this international death guru who goes around talking about, like, how we need to face death more, you know, more honestly with ourselves about what it actually is. And he worked for a long time in palliative care, so we called him up on Google, and I showed her, Look, this is real. But then also, then we went to other things. There’s all of these centers at, say, the University of Virginia or UC Riverside that study near death experience and the Parapsychology around that. There are researchers at the University of Michigan who attach nodes to people’s heads as they’re dying to look at, sort of the brain activity that happens as people are dying. There are people who play music for the people who are dying to sort of calm them. There are researchers at Hopkins that use psychedelics and give psychedelics to people who have terminal cancer and help them cope with this notion that one day they’re going to die. The world of death is huge, right? And she came away from this experience, and this is like, sort of the key thing. Came away from this experience, she’s looking at the at the Google search results on my laptop. And she’s like, Oh my God, it’s real. Like, this is actually so cool. And then sent me a note at the end of the day to say, you know, I’m so glad that I met you, and I’m I feel like I have direction now, and I know where I look. I mean, this is just sort of the first step of this process, right? But so important to to see that kind of inspiration that’s going to carry the student through the next four years? Yeah,

Abby Power 11:24
that’s amazing. That’s a great, that’s a great, a great and unexpected example. But I mean, that’s really driving home the idea of this hidden intellectualism. It’s just a nugget that is just something that’s so important and you shouldn’t really have to explain it to the world, but it is nice to have validation

Scott Carlson 11:42
now, you know the opposite situation from that that I’ve encountered at some colleges recently. You know, I go to this pottery firing every fall, every other fall in Minnesota that happens College of St Ben’s and St John’s University, and I ran into these two students who kind of passed through the studio. And I said, Well, what are you guys doing here? And one of them said, Oh, business. And the other one was like, oh, international business, you know? And I said, Well, why? Why are you guys doing that? And they were like, ah, you know, I don’t know. You know that typical thing, like the major equals the job, right? And they said, well, let’s put that aside. What are you actually interested in? And one student said, Well, I love astronomy. I love everything about astronomy, which itself is this huge hidden world, right? And the other students said, well, skiing is the thing, right? And skiing can be international business, you know. So there’s, there’s all these opportunities. There’s this other student that I met from CU Denver not long ago who, you know, I talked to him, what? Well, why? What are you doing in college right now? And he said, Well, I’m pre vet. And they said, Well, why are you pre vet? And said, I don’t know. It’s gonna get me out of college in four years. You know, I’ve already changed my major two or three times. I said, Well, what are you really into? And he said, Well, I’m, I’m really into finance, but I hate Wall Street. And I said, Well, you know, finance is, like, so much bigger than Wall Street. You could work with low income populations to help them save. You could invest. You could work with nonprofits to to work on their financial aspects of what they do, how they invest their endowments and so on. And this sort of look passes over his face, like, ah, you know, like, I screwed this whole thing up. I was here for four years, and I spent all this money, and that’s what I really wanted to do. And I didn’t see the whole of it, right? So that’s why the hidden job market thing is huge.

Lisa Bleich 13:25
Where do you feel like colleges are failing? I know like, because obviously they’re there for four years. So where, where do you see because I know that you were a lot of your career was at, was not at a school that many people would have necessarily been you know, vying to get into at least our clients, right? And I’m so I’m wondering, like, where do you see it failing?

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 13:46
Where would you like to start? I mean, think about, I think about this for a minute, right? So one of the things that is profound about Scott’s stories, right? Was the palpable change in body language and expression and joy in the students and all of a sudden, right? You know how we’re talking about engagement? Well, what we don’t talk about is this, have you ever gone to a movie with your friends? Sure, right. Did you see exactly the same movie? Yeah, no. Well, I can turn five students in the same five classes, and when they have this movement of this is what I want to do, all of a sudden they’re pulling what they need out of the classes. They become agents of their education. That’s failure number one, right? Failure number two is the hidden job market is so vast it never comes to career services. Often. Businesses. So when you look at the media, when you here, are the top 10 majors to get a job, right? And here’s the top 10 you never want to get into. All of a sudden, where does this student go? They’re disconnected. This is why. I mean, according to latest data, almost 80% students will change their majors at least once before they graduate. Okay, well, when you tack that onto, oh, now you’ve added more time onto your degree. Now you’ve added more student debt in. That’s another part of the problem. And then a third part of the problem is we’re not we don’t have a system that actively looks not at institutional change. Take what you have and then make it work differently, rethink the process. So for us is, if you’ve ever been on a college campus, and if you look at a degree audit, what you find is it’s all blank space in Gen Ed. On most campuses, there’s two required courses, comp one, comp two. Some campuses will want you to have communication. Maybe there’s a course that might apply to the field you’re in, but then it’s blank space, and you’ll always hear students. I want to get my gen ed out of the way before I start my major. Well, how do you know what you should pick from that holistic courses that would be relevant to that thing you want to do you don’t because students aren’t getting those questions asked. And then there’s the other part. What do you do with the other third of your education, which are the electives, and can you create, can you, as a student, become agent and create your own experiential opportunities? That’s not how the system. There’s nothing in the system that a lot that says students can do this, but there’s something in the culture of the system where the students aren’t even being asked these questions. These are all dramatic, and when students become agents of their own education, they still come out with a stamp on their transcript that says, Yes, I majored in French, right? But it doesn’t say, Hey, I majored in French and I minored in Spanish, and now I’m teaching medicine. I’m on clinical faculty at Yale Medical School. That’s not in there. And when you look at the system and you say, pre med, what’s the first thing they do, they send you to the pre med advisor, and where’s the pre med advisor, mostly in the biology department or in the life sciences department. Why? Right? And the job of that life sciences advisor is to keep you in life sciences, yes and no and so, but it’s not the structure of the school. What we’re arguing is you can take this model, and from the student perspective, the entire university changes institutionally. From the administrative perspective, they don’t even know what’s going on. Nothing changes.

Abby Power 18:22
Yeah, after just watching my son, you know, go through his advising, and it’s USC, has a lot of Gen Ed requirements. It’s it’s almost oppressive, but my son navigated it very gracefully, but no one ever asked him what he saw himself doing. And as you say this in the book a bunch the career services office was completely transactional. You know, I’m looking for this, and they would just give him a list or send him to a link. There was, there was literally no one ever asked him. I mean, I do this for a living, so I did, but no one at that wonderful university had any idea how to help him figure out how his interests intersected with the job market, or the hidden job market, or his passions, you know,

Scott Carlson 19:08
and what you just said was the key, I do this so I could help him figure that out, right? And that’s kind of what we show in hacking College, with the stories of like Cameron Hardesty compared to Isaiah, or the story of Pierce, you know, compared to Isaiah or Beth acres, compared to Amanda blue. You know, it’s like some kids come in with kind of this, this cultural capital that allows them to see the VISTAs. Oh, this is possible. Or I could get there, you know, because I’ve seen other people do it, right? It’s these other students who don’t have this, this background. That’s why they that’s why they sort of end up on the rocky shoals of dropping out, or, you know, underemployment afterwards, right? I mean, and I think that’s sort of the under that’s sort of the underappreciated story. When people are talking about the value of college, you’ve got all these people out there saying, oh, you know, college isn’t worth it. Look how many students drop out, you know? Well, I think that. Your part of it is like, Do you know the resources are there within the college, the learning experiences are there within the college. How do you get the students to understand how to take advantage of those that’s the big piece of hacking.

Abby Power 20:12
I absolutely agree with

Abby Power 20:13
that. Yeah. And like you were saying before, Scott, like you were just you stopped these two students, and you had these conversations at this college you were at about but what do you really want to do? What are you really interested in? And just like, What a gift you’re giving them to feel seen. That’s all I mean, that’s all they want. And then how do you have them turn that into becoming an agent, like you were saying. But I want to go back to the question that we all love and we talk about together, Lisa, Lisa, Abby and myself. If you could do whatever it is that you could genuinely care about, no matter how crazy it might sound, and we could guarantee you a comfortable living, what would you pursue? You know, this is something that we all ask our students, and you know, sometimes our clients, they honestly don’t know how to answer that. So how would you help them clarify their thinking approaching that question? Because, you know, sometimes they get to it on their own, but a lot of times they really struggle.

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 21:14
Yeah, what I do with students is I give them the parameters. Because the first time you start the first time, as you start asking these questions, they think in terms of like majors or big jobs, right? So I come back in and say, if you wanted to be the best half pipe snowboarder in Aspen, Colorado, that bounce, that that’s what I want to hear from you, that all of a sudden it frees the student, right? It frees the student. So think about this for a minute. I want to get into skiing. Okay? Think about the Aspen ski Corporation, okay, right? There, it’s a corporation, right? What does it involve? Right? What is it involved in? And all of a sudden, what you’re looking at is this mega billion dollar industry, which goes all year, because in South America there’s great skiing during our summer and no and we don’t teach students to see the world this way. Instead, we reduce everything down, tech, finance, data analytics. There is so much more to this, right? And what we found, and what I found over decades, is that if you place students in an environment where you’re saying you’re safe, you can say anything you want to me, everything is fair game. As soon as you had this question and they feel secure enough to actually talk about what they want to do. And you can come back and say, that’s fantastic. It’s real somebody’s doing this. Let’s find out who.

Scott Carlson 23:12
Yeah, I think one thing I would, I would add to that is that I think there is sort of a valid concern. I mean, I agree with Ned that a lot of students have these underlying hidden intellectualism or, you know, sort of vocational callings that they want to answer that go unseen by, you know, some high school counselors or even college advisors, right? But I think we’re also sort of in a situation right now in society where k 12 has been oriented around the test and around jumping through hoops and jumping through hurdles, and it hasn’t been as much about personal exploration. And there’s this growing conversation that K 12 should be more about that personal exploration, which I think is good, and I think that’s but I think that is going to be limited to a certain set of the population. That’s one thing, I think the other thing that is, I think that’s a little bit distressing in some of this is that, you know, with a lot of students on devices, just as Jonathan Haidt has been talking about, you know, a lot of this is living vicariously, right? You’re just sort of experiencing things through the screen and not actually experiencing them. If there’s something to say to parents or something to say to to students that are, that are coming up in high school. Now it’s like, Get off, get away from that. Go out and experience, go out and learn, go out and talk to people, go out and and engage

Lisa Bleich 24:28
life, right? And I think that that’s such an important part. You know, it’s funny, I have a 25 year old, and she’s, I’ve asked her those questions before, she doesn’t always have an answer. She’s getting a little bit closer to the answer, and she’s moving forward. But one of the things that she did a lot of was that research, investigative inquiry, and I would love it if you could walk us through, you know, what exactly is that it’s like. Why is it so important, and how can someone do that in a very effective way? Because, in, you know. Sometimes it’s called an informational interview, but this kind of goes beyond that, I think, than their normal informational interview. So can you talk about that a little bit

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 25:07
for us, the riii, right? The research investigative interview is, it’s a drive mechanism, and the intent behind this drive mechanism is, there’s a variety of intents. The first part of it is, it’s going to challenge what students think they know versus what’s really out there and what people are really looking for when people are coming searching for jobs. The other thing about it is, there is that, oh my god, there’s somebody out there who’s just like me. There’s a whole world out there just like me. And these people want to talk to us. And so one of the things that we and I want to really emphasize this, we’re not talking about somebody following their passion. We’re talking about somebody following their genuine interests, and when they run into people who are doing the same thing, passion is just the emotive expression of finding where their space actually is and talking to people who can actually help them get to where they want to go. And the the other element about it is it really opens up. It just magnificently opens up this whole world of the hidden job market. There is nothing you can think of that somebody isn’t doing, and then you can always contact them, because you go to your best friend Google and do the search. And what if

Lisa Bleich 26:47
they don’t want to respond to you, like, what if, I mean, what if you reach out to somebody,

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 26:51
if you pouch it, right? They always get in to for a conversation. And the crazy thing they ask us is this, why would these people want to talk to us? And I say to them because, because they’re all frustrated parents whose kids don’t listen to them, and they’ve got so much to say and so much to share, and no one ever comes to ask them about them and their interests and how they got to where they’re going. There are. There is a wealth and a myriad of people who will talk with students. It doesn’t have to be people in the Alumni Association, because you’ve seen how those alumni association contacts work. Hi, I’m connecting you with alumni Yeah, but I don’t have any interest in what that person does, and I need, I want to find that space where I I can feel myself, and the whole world is open. Yeah,

Scott Carlson 27:49
I think this is crucial that, and it’s kind of getting at what we were talking about a little bit earlier. But the cultural capital factor is what we argue drives the social capital stuff. So it’s that kid sitting across the table from someone who’s who identify he identifies with, who’s a little bit older, a little bit further along in the career that he aspires to, the person across the table looking, you know, looking across the table at that younger person that reminds him or her of him or herself. Right? I have this kind of mentorship relationship with students that I’ve built with over time. And the ones that last are the ones where that student says, Hey, I’m I really love what you do, and I really want to be a narrative nonfiction writer. And I say, oh my god, narrative nonfiction. That’s what I always wanted to do, right? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know there’s this. Have you read this book? Do you know this? Do you know Joseph Mitchell? Do you know Alec Wilkinson? You know, like, there’s, there’s this thing where we start to have this deep conversation, and that’s where the connection comes from. That’s where the opportunities come from. Not like, Oh, hey, how are you like, what’s your job? Like, oh, what? How many hours a week do you work? What did you major in? In college? Okay, you know, like, these sort of bland questions that are not going to get you anywhere. It’s all about making connections. And even even the people that are writing about like, how do you make mid career moves later on, they’re all talking about like, it’s, you know, Michael Horn’s work, for example. It’s all about like, how do you identify with people who are doing the things that you want to do, and make connections

Abby Power 29:13
with them. From there, following up on that you do, go through some specific questions that you suggest students ask. And we really like those. They’re again, similar to the way we talk to our clients, our students, but the way you specifically just got to the point was really helpful. So one is that what keeps you up at night, if you were to advise someone to get into this area, what would you want to see in their background? And how important is hands on experience, and how can I get that experience with you? And again, as you just had a kid come out of college, I mean, these are exactly the right you know, these are the right questions.

Scott Carlson 29:53
Those are the ending questions. I would point out after you’ve already made that kind of connection with them, on these deeper things that are connected. Your hidden intellectualism and

Abby Power 30:01
vocational purpose fair, you have to form the connection with them for that to be a real conversation versus a transactional experience. I don’t know if you have any specific examples that you’ve heard from kids you’ve worked with, or maybe even kids that you’ve done this with personally, but answers to what keeps you up at night, or, you know, good examples of how kids have gotten unexpected experiences with someone that they were just kind of connecting with.

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 30:28
We have a short paragraph, a very short paragraph, on a student named dua, and she first generation, right? It’s we put that paragraph in because we wanted to show that the process works even with somebody who’s in a discipline, right, that you think has an easy crosswalk jobs to courses to careers, right? She was in computer engineering, and she really loved circuitry and trans in the transmission of of knowledge, right? And when she went to career services, right? When she went to career services, they said, Well, you could get an internship with a cell phone company, okay? But we asked the tough question, how would you make a cell phone call from the moon? And she looked at me. She looked at our office like we were nuts. Okay, now we’re I’m doing this in Chicago at the time, right? So she said, Well, what do you mean? I said, you’re on the moon. How are you going to make the cell phone call? I mean, there’s all these things you got to take into consideration, right? How would you find out about this flick. No one on and this is important, no one on her campus was into that question, except there were people at the Adler Planetarium who were working exactly on that question in a program called the far horizons project. They just weren’t at her university, and this project was being funded by NASA. So she walks over and says, I want to find out how you would make a cell phone call from the moon. And all of a sudden that opened up the door, right? They sit down. They talk to her. Here, we’ve got space for you on the project. All of a sudden, she is doing engineering. She isn’t studying it, she told me, and what one text that she sent me, she said, Oh my God. They walked into my office, they dumped all this stuff on my desk and said, learn all this stuff, because we’re going to work on a new thing that we’re going to send up into a high altitude to test it. I’m doing what real engineers do. These people were at IA. Iit connected with connected with NASA. And as the paragraph goes, she gets into summer camp at NASA, click, click, click. She’s working for Mission Systems. Now, this is a field of study, right? This is even in something which we think is computer science. There is this thing called Computer Science, and then you break it down into the fields of study. It’s incredible. It’s just how we teach students, it’s okay to imagine, it’s okay to ask these crazy questions, because there’s other people out there doing this, and they want to connect with you too.

Abby Power 33:33
Yeah, that’s fantastic. I

Abby Power 33:37
just, I want to bottle up that passion that

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 33:41
you know, I will tell you, I don’t know, gets more excited about this stuff the students, when they pull this stuff off. Or me,

Abby Power 33:47
I want to go to step three and identifying learning opportunities on and off campus for students. So how to advise students to fill in the

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 33:57
gaps. Remember, when you went to college? I do. I still do. Yes, yeah, did anyone ever ask you to identify your faculty by field of study? Oh, thankfully no, yeah. Well, they don’t do that. They don’t do that now either. So that’s right. So they’ll usually say something to you, like, Oh, I think I have an interest in psychology. And of course, we’ll sit down and say, I have no idea what you’re talking about. What do you mean when you say Psych? And then what? But what happens on most campuses? Take an introductory psych course, which will tell you nothing about the field of psychology. What we tell them to do is, here are six senior seminars, or Here are six grad courses. Go sit in on them, I mean, and they can, they can walk in, sit down, and sit in the courses. And what they discover is the person they all, all these faculty had to take inch teach intro. It’s part of penance being a faculty member, but the person who. Teaches developmental Psych is not the person teaching neuro Psych is not the person looking at psychology the workplace or man, man machine interfaces, the that’s where the faculty show off their field of study. So now all of a sudden, they’ve identified one thing that’s about field of study. The next thing is, look at the courses. Don’t look at the majors. Go to the course catalog and just breeze through the courses. And all of a sudden they begin to see don’t look at the titles, look at the descriptions. And all of a sudden they begin to see that there are courses with similar descriptions, but they’re in different parts of the university, which means more faculty come up, because they can find out who are the faculty. So at one school I was at, I had a student who was interested in the commodities exchange, chief will found one faculty member in the business school who was interested in the commodities exchange, and all of a sudden, discovered, here’s somebody in Ag Economics in the ag school on the other side of campus who was doing work on the commodities exchange, and those two faculty didn’t know that they existed on Campus. Wow. So this is very much a walkabout for students. We teach them how to see the resources that exist on campus, how to find the faculty by field of study specialists, and when they find the field of study specialists, it opens up the door for them to create independent study at the upper division when they get there, and the possibilities if they’re working with these people, because they’re moving in the same direction to get involved with their research as they get up to junior and senior level,

Abby Power 36:51
makes so much sense. One thing that I just want to add again, having a kid who was just in college that I had no idea about, but both of my sons did this. They did internships for credit that they found on LinkedIn. Yes, I’ve since, just because, you know, we work with so many kids, I’ve since really paid attention to that. And you can do that at almost any school. Some are hybrid, some are virtual. But, I mean, it’s kind of all over the place. There’s, I just recently had a client in Minneapolis, work with Xcel Energy in an in school internship in their environmental group. She, I mean, it’s kind of a similar example. She’s interested in the environment, you know. I don’t know that she would have necessarily gravitated towards an energy company for that, you know, but it worked out because they are trying to understand policy and drive things forward for them, and she had this amazing experience. So I, you know, I had no idea that that was a thing when I was in college, and I didn’t know it until my sons both did it, and they both loved theirs. So we love the case study about Shay. Can you share that with us and how the four step process helped her find her.

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 38:02
Oh, my God, Shay. Shay is one of my favorite people right now. She’s, she’s just got promoted in her position at Northwestern University, which is interesting because she started at a at a undergraduate school that would admit anybody who could breathe when I when I first met Shay, and I was talking to her, she just talked about spoken word, how spoken word helped her through a just a horrible time in high school, and how she wanted to figure out how to use this right, How to use spoken word to help other kids, right? And there was no poetry courses on our campus that that was important. There was no poetry courses on the campus, let alone spoken word. But the whole world is part of the investigation. And this raises a critical point. When the system works with students, the system looks inward. This process asks them to look outward to find out what’s out there, and then we’re going to pull that back into the campus. So all of a sudden, I pull up this thing Louder Than a Bomb, and he went into spoken word knows Louder Than a Bomb. Shay had never seen it. So I pulled up the clip, and I She literally started tearing up. I mean, I’m not good with that stuff, but she literally started tearing up, because all of a sudden she realized there’s people like me. So I said, Is this what you’re talking about? And she says, yes. So I said, Wait a second, and I dial up young Chicago authors, and I give her the phone, just tell me saw the trailer you. Love to talk to them. This is what you want to do now. But here was the best part, right? I don’t talk about this much because it’s totally well. So there’s this, was this place in Columbia, South Carolina there. It’s still there, called The Art bar every Tuesday poetry slam, right? So I call up people at the Art bar and I say, Look, I’m from Columbia College. I’m going to bring a student in. She’s underage. I will supervise, I promise you, she just wants to connect with the community. He had no idea that this was out there, so I’m said, let’s create a service learning project. We go to a 21st Century middle middle school. Shay goes in, she starts a poetry slam with the kids, wow. And then it just ripples out, right outside and inside. The students integrated. But this is not what we usually sit down and say to students, wait till your junior year to try and get an internship. And we the hacking process says, No, let’s do this right now. Let’s let’s start it right now. You’re coming in with you’re coming in with ideas, you’re coming in with what you want to do, people will work with you, and this changes the game.

Scott Carlson 41:24
I think that’s crucial too, because, as you were just saying, you know, students have, you know, they have the ability to, they have, what? What’s your reference from Casablanca Ned? Oh, yes. Of transit.

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 41:39
Letters of transit, yeah, right, signed by General de Gaulle himself. Question, right? Students can go everywhere on a college campus. They can go everywhere out in the world. All they have to do is go.

Scott Carlson 41:57
And it’s crucial, because so many of these programs have to be tied to credit in some way to be legitimized, right? So students have to go out there, and they have to start creating these things early, because you have a limited amount of time within college, right? So starting to think about this in the early stages, I think, is very important. The other thing that’s interesting about Shea’s story is that, you know, here you have this young black woman from nowhere South Carolina. I mean, cross South Carolina, which is like two dirt roads in the middle of nowhere. And she’s striving for, you know, spoken word, which everyone is telling her, you know, that’s not real. You know you shouldn’t go for that, right? And she ends up making it real. I mean, everyone is pushing her toward you should be a lawyer. You should be a business person. This is what you’re good at, right? Or this you have the brains for that, right? That’s just not going to be motivating. We think, to students in lots of ways. And what’s interesting is that, you know, I told the story of Shay to to a fellow who had written a book about college to career, and I said, Yeah, you know, I said, like, you’ve got to, you’ve got to allow the students to think more broadly about this stuff, like we cover a student in the book who turns spoken word into a career, and he sort of laughs, and he goes spoken word, you know. So that’s, that’s the attitude held by some of the people who advise students on this stuff. One of the other things I would say is, is that Shay is now at Northwestern and so Shay coming out of this, this impoverished background and striving for spoken word. Part of what this, part of what happens with a lot of those students that we notice is that when the students come from more humble backgrounds and you say, Look, this is real, you could actually go for this. Here’s the world that this opens, they’re like, Wow, this could be great. You know, I You’re asking me to dream that’s wonderful, right? Shea works at Northwestern, and we’ve had this experience with students at other elite schools, where the students who get into the elite schools are so set on what they’ve had to do to get into Johns Hopkins or Stanford or Northwestern or some other, you know, name school that they’re now set on, no, I’m going to be an engineer. I’m going to be a doctor. I’m going to, you know, stick to the whatever the social norming is that that is, you know, pushing me to achieve.

Lisa Bleich 44:10
I think that’s really true. I almost feel like it’s harder for those students to imagine a world where they could just do whatever the heck they wanted to do and find a path towards it, because they have been programmed from so such a young age, and their parents have really tried to create this pathway for them so that they can have a good life, a financial success. And I think it’s really hard for parents, many parents of those students at those elite schools, to get their heads around that and to allow students the opportunities to follow a different

Scott Carlson 44:45
path. But we would argue that that personal development now is more crucial than ever. I mean, especially given the the emergence of AI and what AI may possibly take over that you know your world, that you know. The things that really drive you and motivate you, that’s what’s going to allow you to be able to see the different pathways forward into those worlds that continue to let you up, right? I as a journalist, yeah. I mean, I as a journalist, you know, my world is basically evaporating. Newspapers are going out of business like crazy, right? And I’m going to stick with it as long as I can. You know, I’m realistic about what the options are, you know, at this stage, but I also given, given that I’m tied to the field, given that I’ve spent some time in the field, and given that I I sort of understand it from that skills perspective, and understand what I’m actually going for, I can see where, how I can transition what I have into other worlds that interests me, be that in education or the environment or sort of combat sports, which is another thing that I’m interested in. I mean, these are all sort of my hidden intellectuals and things, and I could see how I could enter those worlds from there, basically.

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 45:52
But Scott raised another point which is really important. So I hired Shay to work at the Center for Engaged learning. And I had under my, under me, right? I brought together general education, the contractual studies program, where students could design their own major, Gen, Ed and service learning. Now, one of the things and Career Services were under me, under me, they weren’t in their own operation. So one of the things that the career service director wanted to do was give everybody Career Service inventories. So Shea takes the Career Service Inventory and everything says that, well, you have great organizational and management skills. So the first thing the Career Services person says, You should go into business, right? And she just, she comes in depressed, is, hell, this is not what I want to do. Then I said, and this is important, so I said, Shay, calm down. Everything’s cool. Let me ask you this question, what would you need to be able to have in your toolkit to put together a poetry slam. Right, that step is missing completely. We leave it at, oh, you have a disposition towards management and organization. Here’s the list of majors. It doesn’t sit down and say, Yeah, you would be a great hockey coach. It doesn’t say that, right? It doesn’t, it doesn’t sit down and say, oh my gosh, you can sit down and take over this whole aspect of Juilliard. It doesn’t say that. It just says you have the skills. Well, skills, without anything connected to them are empty.

Lisa Bleich 48:04
And putting together a slow a poetry slam is essentially entrepreneurship. It’s building a business organizing. It’s pulling things together. So it doesn’t matter that it’s not very much like when people say, I want to go into business. Well, what do you mean? Like? What like? You know, there’s so many different elements of what business is. I mean, Abby and I both have our MBAs, and so, you know, we were in business, right? But it’s a very different type of business, and it’s really very different way of what, what things are

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 48:30
going and everything is a business, right? Everything is a

Lisa Bleich 48:33
business. Even if you’re a doctor, you have to be in a business mindset. If you’re a journalist, you have to have a business mindset. You know, launching a book, it’s a business, you know, you’ve got to market it. You’ve got to get yourself out there. So there’s lots of different exactly defined business.

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 48:47
And we don’t have that conversation with students. We give them a career interest inventory, and then we link the career interest inventory to to what appears, what appears to be the majors associated with that. And the best example in the book is Sarah Dupree when they ask her, Well, are you in business or stats? No, I was a French major, right?

Lisa Bleich 49:15
And that was actually one of the ones that we loved, because, you know, Abby and I both were, I was a French minor in European cultural studies, and Gabby and Abby was French major in economics, right? You were a double major, yeah. So can you just quickly highlight her, like, made her case study, because I thought that one really interesting. The long

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 49:34
part of the story was she was in my Sophomore Seminar, right? Because everyone had to take the Sophomore Seminar. So she comes in and she asks me, well, what can you do with a French major anyway,

Lisa Bleich 49:45
right? Combative, like that, like, like, challenging you to come up with an idea,

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 49:51
right? And I said, well, but see, here’s the other part of the problem. Do the asset map of. Where you’re at. Okay, so I’m not going to tell you South Carolina is an interesting state. This is where I met Sarah. I was testing the model down there. I sit down and I say to her, Do you know what’s coming to Hilton Head Island? And she looks at me like I’m crazy. The Michelin sponsored golf tournament, and then BMW is sponsoring another golf tournament. What does that tell you? See, that’s the thing. Challenging questions to break down right to break down traditional assumptions. Who sells South Carolina? Why is Michelin here? Why are all these international companies here? Why is BMW here? Somebody selling let’s find out. It doesn’t take long, right? A little Google search, she connects, and all of a sudden she finds this whole world is out there. The best part of the story, the best part of the story was she wanted to do something over the summer, so I said, I have a great idea how good is your French? It was excellent. Go write the Cultural Affairs attache in New York about your interest in what you want to do in French. So she sends the email, but it it goes to her Gmail. It doesn’t go to the the colleges, right? So she, she sends the email off, and then she gets this email back, and it says, Oh, I’d love to talk to you. Can you come by Thursday? And she comes running in in a panic, and I said, What’s wrong? He wants me to come Thursday. I can’t go to New York tonight. And I said he thinks you’re Columbia University

Lisa Bleich 51:49
instead of Columbia College right

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 51:51
now, send an email back. Tell him where you are, and this is going to date me. Set up a Skype call, right? Oh, wow. All of a sudden, uses the same six questions, the same six questions, and all of a sudden she’s going to New York City for an internship at the French Consulate. I mean, how, how can you not get excited for this student? I mean, this is so and that opened up everything. And the age, her sense of agency, her sense of belief, this is real. I can really do this stuff, and I can make these connections. That’s the most powerful, transformative experience of this, of this, this is as much developmental, developmental growth and the development of agency as it is anything else.

Scott Carlson 52:51
I mean, for me, what sticks out about that story is, or about that chapter in particular, is how the humanities in particular and the arts have just been let down by the college advising process. Like, what do you do with a French major? What do you do with a philosophy major or a major in anthropology? It’s like, there’s lots you can do with those things, right? But no one’s having the conversations with students that allows them to open up those worlds. And the result of that is that all of these colleges out there are cutting these programs. They’re cutting French, they’re cutting philosophy, they’re cutting anthropology, and they’re making that metaphor of the kaleidoscope that we use in the book. College is a kaleidoscope. It’s a series of pieces, and as you turn the kaleidoscope, it creates different patterns, and students are creating different patterns with the different pieces that fall in there, you know, with fewer pieces in the college atmosphere, there’s fewer opportunities to make patterns. And this is, I mean, I think this is a huge underlying crisis. It’s, it applies not just to the programs at colleges, but to small colleges themselves. You know, I’ve written about places like Northland or, you know, Green Mountain College, or, you know, Hampshire is a place that is has been on the rocks. You know, sweet Briar. You know, there are these places that are small, but that have these missions that are unique, that attract a certain type of student, that provide a home a place, and that are also economic drivers for rural communities. So as we, as we limit our conversation about what’s possible in college, we’re also having these real financial effects and these real effects on sort of the diversity of thought for the future. I

Lisa Bleich 54:31
mean, that’s so true. And even in the even in schools that are like, you know, powerhouse schools like my, my daughter went to WashU, and she was a film studies major. And, you know, film major, Film and Media Studies major and a business minor. But there wasn’t really, there was no career advising for the Film and Media Studies. And if she wanted to get any advising through the business school, she had to be in the business school like she even as a minor, she couldn’t get any advising. So she was really left to her own device in terms of how. To navigate it and and it was during COVID. So, I mean, there was all these other things, and I feel like there was, there’s a lot left to be desired for how do you do that? And like taking all those transferable skills and being able to communicate why and what you’ve done, and it was really all through her, her own field study outside of school, those were the things that that made her stand out. You know, when she when she was going through and doing her career search,

Abby Power 55:24
on top of because my son did a business minor at USC, also did not have access to the USC business school resources. That’s different at different schools, like I know at Michigan, the business miners can. So it’s not that’s not, you know, a uni a universal rule. But another thing I think that goes on at the colleges is when there’s a really strong business program, it’s kind of the kids who are in the liberal arts program feel like, you know, yeah, the stepchild, right, right, second class citizen and and I have seen that, so I’ve personally seen that, and then I’ve had clients who see that. So I don’t want to sort of dime on the different schools that I’ve seen that at, but you can imagine schools with a very strong business program, the kids who are in Arts and Sciences feel like they’re not getting any attention, any resources, any recruiting help, any anything. And it’s, it’s cultural and almost like they feel bad about it, you know? They feel like, oh, you know, I’m a, I am a second class citizen in my own university. It’s unexpected and strange,

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 56:23
but that’s the point of hacking college. It’s like, if you don’t like the rules to the game, let’s just break the rules for the game and make it work for you. So here’s an example. USC is this massive corporate structure which most students have no idea that it exists, but they can walk into almost any office on actually, they can walk into any office on campus, and people will talk to them. So all of a sudden, what is open to these students, everything, everything from I’m working on government affairs, I’m handling the endowment. I’m trying to court people to give us money to I’m working on the logistics of how I move the USC football team over all across the United States so they can play Notre Dame. All of this is there, and most students never see this. They’re never introduced to this. You never even hear about this stuff in career services, but all of this, so on some campuses right, there are producing NPR operations going on. So all of a sudden, a student in film studies can get involved with this whole side of campus, which doesn’t teach, it’s just producing films and making films. Right? The Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois is a massive business arts organization, and all a student has to do is walk in, ask the same questions, and all of a sudden they’re getting involved in this whole world, which is part of the hidden job market, and we don’t tell students about this at all, that

Lisa Bleich 58:09
we need to clone you and your energy and like, have, like, a little, a little avatar, right, with an AI induced to ask the questions and go through it, right? It gets it’s like, everybody needs a everybody needs a net.

Abby Power 58:23
Oh yes, yeah. And I think when Lisa, like came to the two of us with like, so excited about your book, I real and she mentioned this. I really think we need to make this required reading for our families.

Abby Power 58:39
I absolutely agree. I mean, I think my son had read it because I again, cultural capital wise, like I, I encouraged him to go talk to one of his he took this economic consulting class. This never would have been something that I could have taken, but the guy who was teaching it was actually working on the court case of the the the defamation court case with Donald Trump. I don’t need to get too much in the details, but he was valuing, you know, the the the victim’s reputation. And I said, You love this class. Go, go ask, tell him you want to help him. And he’s like, he’s not going to listen to me. I’m like, walk into his office and just ask. They need people to crunch numbers. They he needs someone to organize his office and get him coffee. Who cares? You’ll leave up stuff just listening to him. And he did, he did research to him. He had to, he had to teach himself some math, which was crazy. Thank goodness for AI. And it was really amazing. But, you know, he was really resistant to that idea. If he’d read the book, I think he would have, you know, been more confident about the whole thing. But there are amazing opportunities all over the these campuses for kids that they’re afraid to try because they’re insecure about it, but also nobody tells them about it. And my son just got lucky, you know? I mean, which is crazy, because if he hadn’t gotten lucky, his whole trajectory would have been different,

Scott Carlson 59:53
right? And that’s a that’s a huge thing that we bring up in the book, that luck should be manufactured. It shouldn’t be just. Something that you sort of come across, right? And that is, that is the defining feature of a lot of successful stories coming out of college. It’s like, I just happened to run into the right person. I just happened to run into a professor who showed open this door for me, or I had somebody in my family. I mean, that’s my story. I mean, I had, I was sort of bumbling through an English literature major at the University of Minnesota, and then I had this uncle who worked for colleges. Neither of my parents went to college, really. My uncle who worked for colleges, said, Hey, kid, you know, you need an internship. Let me help you out and get this figured out for you, right? And that was sort of the first door that opened that led me to say, oh, from here I can see how I can navigate to different things, or I would talk to people within once that door was opened, you talk to people within that world, and they’re like, Oh, hey, you know you could apply for this over here, and that’ll help, that’ll lead to this, and that’ll lead to that. And that’s how you sort of navigate the career tree, so to speak.

Lisa Bleich 1:00:52
So it really comes down to talking to people which so many Gen Zers do not like to talk to people they like to text or do other things. So I think that’s one of

Dr. Ned Scott Laff 1:01:06
the but Scott raises a critical point when he says, you can manufacture this. So when I talk to students, I ask them this question, are there any blind passes in basketball, right when you’re sitting in the stands, right? It really looks like it’s a blind pass, right? But those players have been working on it and working on it and working on it and working on it, right? And so classical education Seneca said, luck is found on the road where preparation meets opportunity. What hacking college says is you create your preparation and you create your opportunity. It just looks like luck from somebody who’s looking at you from the outside. And that’s a key thing. That’s a key prop point about agency.

Abby Power 1:02:02
Yes,

Lisa Bleich 1:02:04
well, I think on that note, I mean, I think that’s a really like you, like we usually ask, like, what are some Myths and Truths? But I think you just kind of gave us the both a myth and a truth. Is there anything else that you would want to, like, some practical or actual advice that you would suggest we give to our clients as they head off to college? Like, one piece of advice,

Scott Carlson 1:02:22
be curious. I mean, I think that’s the big part. Like, right? Be curious, or try to cultivate that curiosity within yourself. You know, you’re going to a place that opens up tremendous opportunities. I mean, I remember going off to college, my first semester at the University of Minnesota, just what an eye opening experience it was. And being open to that experience is super important.

Lisa Bleich 1:02:43
Love that that’s great. All right. Well, thank you, cdmmers for tuning in. Thank you Scott and Ned for your invaluable tips on Hacking College. We’ll have links to purchase your fabulous book on our site and to catch more episodes of College Bound Mentor, make sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and tell a fellow parent or student about the podcast. To learn more, visit CollegeBoundMentor.com Until next time, you got this!