Powerful Conversations

The Bureau of Study Counsel (BSC) has long offered students safe space for thoughtful career consideration, through weekly discussion groups such as “What Are You Doing With Your Life?” and “Roots: Where Are You Coming From and Where Are You Going?” and single-session discussions on the topic “Insanely Busy: What Would Happen If I Slowed Down?” The bureau also aims to sensitize teaching staff (with a seminar titled “Grades and Beyond: Perfectionism, Risk-taking, and Learning from Failure”) and parents (with annual panel discussions during Freshman Parents’ Weekend) to these issues.

These disparate efforts come together under the umbrella of the Success-Failure Project (http://bsc.harvard.edu/successfailure), headed by BSC director Abigail Lipson and BSC counselor Ariel Phillips, Ed.D. ’89. The driving principle is not to get students to consider one specific career or another, but to envision their career choice broadly and consider it carefully—even if that means setting aside a career chosen before college in favor of pursuing a new passion. “We’re not really advocating that people take up a particular definition” of what it means to succeed, Phillips adds. “It’s the power of having the conversation.”

Dean of Harvard College Evelynn M. Hammonds says these goals line up with her own for undergraduates. Even though Harvard must acknowledge the realities of the world—for instance, that certain fields strongly prefer graduates who have already completed three internships—Hammonds says that college, as much as possible, “should be the time when students feel the least amount of constraints around exploring what they want to do next.”

Lipson and Phillips are delighted that their program’s themes are getting such widespread attention—organizations such as the Office of Career Services and the student Career Diversity Awareness Group have come knocking, hoping to collaborate, with increasing frequency. It is, says Phillips, “a moment in time when a lot of forces are crossing.”

Sub topics

You might also like

Harvard College Admits Class of 2028

A smaller undergraduate applicant cohort—the first since Supreme Court ended affirmative action 

Studying ChatGPT Like a Psychologist

Cognitive science helps penetrate the AI “black box”

Reparations as Public Health

A Harvard forum on the racial health gap

Most popular

Harvard College Admits Class of 2028

A smaller undergraduate applicant cohort—the first since Supreme Court ended affirmative action 

Diagnosis by Fiction

The “Healing Quartet,” by “Samuel Shem,” probes medicine—and life.

AWOL from Academics

Behind students' increasing pull toward extracurriculars

More to explore

Darker Days

The current disquiets compared to Harvard’s Vietnam-era traumas

Making Space

The natural history of Junko Yamamoto’s art and architecture

Spellbound on Stage

Actor and young adult novelist Aislinn Brophy