Many students who enroll at Tuck explore a broad range of career options and find their admission to Tuck to be a valuable time of self-reflection and transformation.
Career Services offers a number of opportunities and tools to help you with this journey. We encourage you to reflect on your interests from the time you are admitted so that you can best target your career-related education and experiences.
Exploring which career options are best for you is a two-step process. First, you should have a good understanding of your skills and interests so that you can answer questions such as: What motivated you to change direction in your career? What did you like about your previous job? What were the things that made you happy in the past?
Once you have that piece of the puzzle, you can focus on career paths that are available to you, and find the right intersection of your skills, your interests, and jobs that are available.
Self-Reflection on Your Skills and Interests
For most of you, thinking about your future career is part of the decision to apply to business school, and most of you have already done a fair level of introspection to complete the following sentences:
I want to become a [role] in [industry]
I think I would be good at it because I have [list of relevant skills]
I would enjoy this position because I [my interests]
What I am missing/need to develop is [missing skills]
Tuck’s career advisers, second-year students, and alumni are great resources to explore opportunities once you have reflected upon what is important to you.
Career Ingredients
As you explore which career options are best for you, we encourage you to start considering what your career ingredients are. Career Ingredients are components of a job that need to be present for you to consider it fulfilling and rewarding.
These components can be hygiene factors like ‘base pay of more than $xx’ or ‘opportunities for growth,’ as well as intrinsic motivators. Intrinsic motivators can be grouped into four categories:
- Belonging
- Autonomy
- Purpose
- Achievement (in the form of challenge, learning, and authorship)
For instance, a career ingredient might be:
- A job where I can be responsible for my own output, without having to rely on a team.
Another career ingredient might be:
- A job where I can develop, and be recognized for having expertise.
There are no right or wrong answers here—Career Ingredients are personal to you. As you go through your time at Tuck, and through your life, your career ingredients may evolve, and you may try a job and realize that you were wrong about a particular ingredient. More often than not, though, you will find yourself converging on ‘the right job for you’ that actually does satisfy the ingredients that are personal to you, and brings you happiness and fulfillment.
Once you get to Tuck, you will participate in a Career Services led group activity, called “100 Jobs,” with your new study group to learn more about your interests. However, you may wish to start this reflection early. If you enjoy this exercise and you want to take it a step further, Getting Unstuck by Tim Butler describes this exercise in further depth.
Questions for us? Do not hesitate to reach out to our career team at Tuck.Career.Services@tuck.dartmouth.edu.
