Welcome to the ACUM Advising Blog. Here, contributing authors share their thoughts on best practices, advising philosophy, advisor self-care, and more. We’ll also look at how to talk with students about a variety of issues, including specific areas such as STEM, pre-professional, wellness, as well as areas of broad interest. You’ll find these announced in the ACUM newsletter (register here) and bookmark this page to check in regularly.

Paula Wishart, the former director of the LSA Opportunity Hub, once commented to me, “A summer internship is a great way to confirm interest in a career path. It may not be the best way to explore an interest.” What did she mean? 

Summers have become valuable parts of an undergraduate education. In a four-year education plan there are three undergraduate summers, so each summer activity comes with a considerable opportunity cost of other possibilities that were not pursued. Suppose that a student agrees to a 10-week summer internship to explore a particular career path and decides within the first couple of weeks that she is not interested after all. This sometimes happens; risk in the pursuit of opportunities is inevitable. She now has a good chance to cultivate resilience and creativity in an attempt to make the best use of this situation. Still, it is a situation she’d ideally like to avoid by more fully exploring and researching this career path with lower cost activities first before investing a whole summer in this endeavor. This is all the more true with major investments of time and money such as pursuing a graduate degree. I’ve often paraphrased Paula Wishart’s advice when talking to potential law school applicants: “Law school is a necessary investment for pursuing a legal career, but what are some ways we can explore this interest more fully before making that decision?”

This is, essentially, the concept of prototyping - a metaphor from the world of design that I first learned from Burnett and Evans’ book, Designing Your Life (Knopf, 2016). The term gives a name to something that advisors will find immediately familiar. It’s a concept that I’ve found to be indispensable in talking with students about their educational and career plans. A prototype is a lower-cost activity that bears a certain similarity to the thing that we want to explore. It allows us to gain experience and learn more information before fully investing our time, effort, and money in a larger endeavor. It also allows us to “fail” in ways that are instructive, but that have minimal consequences. With a little prompting, most students can easily find examples of prototype activities intuitively undertaken. An introductory course is a way of prototyping a larger academic investment like a major or minor. Informational interviews and job-shadowing are low-cost ways of prototyping a career track. From that initial foray one might want to further explore, refine, and confirm interests with a medium-cost investment such as an internship or postgraduate position.

One way to use the concept of prototyping more intentionally in our advising is to ask students, “What are the major investments of time, effort, and money that you will make in your education and career development? What are some prototype activities that you can seek out to explore those decisions?”

A second way to use the concept is to help students think about their activities as prototypes - in other words, as experiments designed to provide additional information. I often advise students to think of their career exploration as research, utilizing the skills that they have developed in their academic research projects. For example, thinking of an introductory course as a prototype for a major, we might ask them to analyze more precisely what they liked or disliked about the course. “Was it the topic? The instructor or GSI? The class format?” We can help them to imaginatively isolate each of these variables and think about them in terms of the information they provide about the larger endeavor in question. “To what degree does the course resemble those that you’ll take if you major in this department?” 

A student who wants to pursue a STEM research career has ample opportunity to be involved in academic research on campus. What about industry research or a national lab? Should they explore these avenues with a summer internship in industry rather than a summer research project at U-M or at another university? The industry internship would itself be a prototype activity for this career track. However, the student may also wish to prototype the decision about their summer choices by talking with some industry researchers ahead of time about what they do/don’t like about their positions, comparing these with conversations with academic research mentors on campus. In doing so, they should be aware of the fact that in prototyping - unlike in more formal research - they’re always extrapolating from small sample sets. While a conversation with an individual may provide valuable insight into that career track, it will inevitably be colored by that person’s individual personality and unique life circumstances in ways that make drawing general conclusions tricky.

There’s one more way that I find the concept of prototype activities very useful in advising conversations, and that is in the application phase. Our strategy in any application is to demonstrate to the reader that we have the knowledge, skills, and character-traits to flourish in that position (whether the “position” in question is a job, internship, graduate program, etc.). Ideally, applicants want to do so by appealing to previous experiences that are either directly or indirectly analogous to the position to which they’re applying - in other words, to previous prototype experiences. 

For example, if a student is applying to be a research assistant at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), they’ll want to highlight previous experiences in which they’ve developed knowledge and skills for this position. Ideally, they can talk about their previous experience serving as a research assistant during an internship at a think tank or for a professor on campus. If not one of these direct prototypes, perhaps an analogous academic experience such as an Honors thesis or a research term paper written in an upper-level course related to the work they’d do at CEIP. Or perhaps their experience as a writer or editor for the Michigan Journal of International Affairs. Finally, any job in which they’ve demonstrated professionalism and performed the required tasks at a high level is a prototype of successful employment. Various prototypes may fit with certain aspects of the position descriptions in part if not in full.  

If students have been intentional in selecting prototype activities along the way, they’ll be in an excellent position to make a solid argument based on experience in their postgraduate applications. If, on the other hand, they’ve explored broadly in their undergraduate career and engaged in a wide variety of experiences, they’ll have ample material for the creative use of imagination in thinking about these activities as prototypes for future endeavors in one way or another. As advisors, we can help them in this exploration by using the concept of prototype activities to discuss the transferable skills they’ve developed in their educational career in relation to particular career tracks or applications. “What are the knowledge, skills, and experience necessary to flourish in this position? What are some curricular and co-curricular activities in which you’ve developed these or analogous knowledge and skills? Begin with the prototypes that are most similar, then proceed to those that require more abstract connections.”

Thoughts, comments, or suggestions?  Please contact Henry Dyson directly at hdyson@umich.edu.

Want more? Check out this amazing  4-year planning tool that Denise Guillot created using the concept of prototyping for students in the LSA Honors program. When you click on the link, you can make your own copy and adapt the instructions for students in your academic unit.

In Tara Westover’s eloquent and heartbreaking memoir, Educated, there’s a brief passage that has shaped the way I talk with students about letters of recommendation.  Tara comes from a self-isolating family in rural Idaho where she is homeschooled, or perhaps more precisely, unschooled.  She studies for the GED and gains admission to Brigham Young University.  While on a study abroad program to Cambridge, she distinguishes herself in her studies and a faculty-mentor encourages her to apply for the Gates Cambridge Scholarship to return for a postgraduate degree.  Needless to say, Tara is overwhelmed by the task of articulating such a vision of the future, much less presenting herself as a competitive applicant for such a prestigious award.  Don’t worry, he tells her.  You just apply and leave the rest to me.  I am by no means spoiling the memoir to tell you that she wins the Gates Cambridge Scholarship - largely on the basis of this letter of recommendation, we are left to assume.

Here’s what I take away from this passage.  It is absolutely not the grandiosity to believe that my letter of recommendation can single-handedly win a prestigious scholarship for my students.  Sadly, I have far too much disconfirming evidence to hold that belief.  Rather, it’s that an essential task of a letter writer is to see and articulate for the reader potential that an applicant might not be in a position to see in themselves. Or, at least, to make the case for their potential future in a way that the applicant cannot.  

There’s a chart that I like to draw on the glass board in my office at this point in the conversation.  It’s a simple line graph with the y-axis labeled “Leadership/Impact” and the x-axis labeled “Career” in 5-year increments.  Most prestigious scholarships like the Gates-Cambridge are looking for applicants who will realistically end up on the top right side of this graph - in other words, who in twenty years will be leaders in their fields doing work of significance.  The purpose of the application essays to define the field and the applicant’s vision of this future work. The purpose of the transcript and resume is to provide the data points for the first five years.  The purpose of the letters of recommendation is to draw the line - in other words, to make the applicant’s future trajectory tangible, credible, even seemingly inevitable for the reader.  The letter writer does this by contextualizing the applicant’s accomplishments so far, pulling out the skills, knowledge, and character-traits that form the basis of the applicant’s future potential.  Each of these elements should be illustrated by specific examples, preferably from first-hand experience.  As letter writers we must also make the case credible by communicating the basis for our confidence in these predictions.  This can be done by demonstrating direct knowledge of the applicant’s future career field or by comparison to similar students who have gone on to realize similar potential in significant ways.

I’ve used national scholarship letters as my example thus far, but the same lessons apply to other recommendations that we write as advisors - or, more likely, that we coach students to seek from their faculty, research, or co-curricular mentors.  The purpose of letters is to predict future flourishing - whether that is in a graduate program, an internship, or study abroad experience - and to explain specifically how the experience will propel the student forward in their educational and career path.  When helping students select their letter writers, I use this understanding of recommendations in contrast to two common, but typically unspoken beliefs.  The first is that recommendation writers are “people who like me.”  Personally, I know that I’ve sometimes overreached in agreeing to write a letter for a student I liked only to discover that I can’t make a credible case along the lines above.  Recognizing this has allowed me to explain my rationale more compassionately when I say no to letter requests, usually followed by an offer to help them brainstorm a better person to ask.  As an advisor, I always coach students to ask if a potential writer can write a “strong letter” because this leaves open the very reasonable response, “Although I like you and support your application, I don’t think I’m the best person to write a letter for the following reasons…” (typically because I lack first-hand knowledge of the applicant’s activities or future educational or career field).  The second unspoken belief is that letter writers are “corroborating witnesses,” confirming that students actually did what they say they did in their essays or resumes.  Sadly, I read a lot of letters that do just that: they are simple reports of a student’s performance in a class or activity.  Such letters are missed opportunities and unlikely to be effective recommendations.

Tara Westover’s story is obviously an exceptional case.  When asking for a letter, applicants will typically be the ones to articulate their vision for the future.  They should also be able to articulate their reasons for asking this particular letter writer for a recommendation by explaining how they see their interactions together as a predictor of future success.  Part of my job as an advisor is to provide students with the opportunity to explore and rehearse this conversation.  When requesting the letter, I coach them to ask, “Do you think that you can write a strong letter along these lines based on our work together?”  The applicant needs to supply the writer with all the materials that they’ll need to write a strong letter, including essay drafts, feedback on previous work, or perhaps even a summary of some of the details of their interaction.  However, I strongly warn applicants against providing a self-written draft of a letter to be signed.  First and foremost, this is a violation of academic integrity that could disqualify a candidate.  But it also violates what I think is the essential purpose of a letter, which is to say something about the candidate’s future potential that she cannot say about herself. 

Ideally, if the letter writer is already an expert in the field, there should be a dialogue about the applicant’s vision for the future.  “Does this sound realistic? What advice do you have for making it more concrete? For next steps? etc.”  In short, asking for a letter is not simply asking for a favor, but an opportunity for mentorship. I often include reference to these mentoring conversations in my own letters as evidence of the applicant’s future potential success through the ability to identify and benefit from mentorship.

Thoughts, comments, or suggestions?  Please contact Henry Dyson directly at hdyson@umich.edu.