#252 How Career Discovery Helps Students Win Scholarships with Dave Peterson Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa

Lisa Marker-Robbins  00:39

What if the work your team is doing now to discover a career direction could also help them become a stronger candidate for scholarships and college admissions. That’s something my friend and colleague Dave Peterson and I have seen play out over and over again with the families we’re both serving. Dave is a founder of Scholarship GPS. In that program, he helps students and families navigate the world of private scholarships. He’ll share first why he reached out to me many years ago at this point. Then we’ll dive into a conversation from his live October scholarship boot camp for high school students and their parents. The discussion and teaching about scholarships and careers was so valuable that Dave agreed to let me share the recording with you guys, my listeners. Here’s a double win we explore together in this episode, and that I did with his students. When students intentionally discover and validate career interests, they’re also building the experiences, skills, and personal narrative that can make their scholarship applications much more compelling. At the same time, preparing strong scholarship applications helps them recognize their strengths, reflect on their experiences, and communicate where they’re headed. You’ll hear a real example of how these two processes reinforce one another, including why discovering a career isn’t the right fit can be just as valuable as finding out that one is. Instead of treating scholarship applications, college planning, and career discovery as separate tasks competing for your family’s limited time, I hope you’ll see how the right work can move your young person forward in all three concurrently. I’m Lisa Marco Robbins, and I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity, a Flourish Coaching production. Let’s dive right into a great conversation.

Dave Peterson  02:32

I wanted to bring my friend and colleague Lisa Marco Robbins in. Let me should I just stop sharing so we can see you better. There he is. There she is. Lisa is somebody who I heard on a podcast. I think it’s probably been three, maybe even four years ago, and she started talking about reverse engineering the process of college admissions. But her framework for that is very similar to my framework with the the personal narrative and the five pillars, and so I reached out and I said, Lisa, I loved what you had to say on this on the on the podcast. Would love to to chat with you. And over the the course of I don’t know three or four years, have become friends, and lots of the students I work with have ended up working with Lisa, and and vice versa. So Lisa, with that, why don’t you introduce yourself?

Lisa Marker-Robbins  03:24

Sure. So, my background was a college counselor, and a long time ago, almost it was all the way back in 2008. I received an email from one of my favorite college counseling clients ever, and I knew they had a younger son, and I’m like, oh, good. Here we go, kiddo number two, right? And I opened the email, and mom said, “Hey,” and it was more like just sort of a, “You should know this. We’re gonna have to transfer.” And like I had thought this family is one of my greatest successes, and I come to find out that once she got to college and established some career direction, her college wasn’t going to be able to support that path for a variety of reasons. Family was surprised. I was not surprised because I know that that happens sometimes, and it just really made me question how we were doing college counseling. So, I started experimenting with what I knew, I really probably had to do to help families, and out of that emerged this reliable, repeatable process that I’ve done with over 4000 families since 2008, and it really is rooted, Dave. Like know yourself, have some sense of direction that you can communicate, and it’s not a forever direction. But I went so all in on this that I sold my other company. I quit college counseling, and I help kids discover careers now. And it’s the most rewarding work I’ve done in my entire professional career.

Dave Peterson  04:56

That’s awesome. Well, I know from the families that we’ve worked with. Just how beneficial it’s been for them, and I’ve seen inside your program, and I know you know just how professional you are, and and the just the expertise that you bring to to working with families. So

Lisa Marker-Robbins  05:14

thank you, thanks.

Dave Peterson  05:16

So this week, Lisa, we’ve been talking about two weeks ago. We started with the concept of the personal narrative and my five pillars: academics, extracurriculars, volunteering, leadership, and work experience. This week, we’re plugging that concept into answering the common scholarship essay prompt: Why do you deserve to win this scholarship? And in both of those weeks, I’m sure that I have said somewhere in one of the daily videos that while it is theoretically possible for a student to have a compelling personal narrative that’ll resonate with scholarship judges that does not involve career, I personally have never seen it. So that’s why I wanted to have you on because I’m sure that some of the students over the course of these two weeks, when we’re talking about the personal narrative, have said to themselves, “I have no idea what I want to do, and therefore, how do I write a personal narrative essay?” So, if you’re okay, I probably can just pepper you with questions. Would that work? Yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins  06:14

I mean, the first thing that I I just want to say to all of your families that are in for the Q and A, whether they’re here live with us, and those of you that are live, if you have questions for me, just drop them in the chat. I’ll absolutely take questions from you guys. But you know, you have to be living under a rock right now if you don’t know that the hiring landscape is changing. If you’re not seeing, it’s not just an AI AI impact. It’s a craving for humanness because of that, but there’s economic and political factors as well, and the hardest hit are these 20 somethings, right?

Dave Peterson  06:54

Yeah.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  06:55

And so it’s interesting when I was actually I tagged you on an Instagram story today saying, and I said the same thing. I’m like, this guy reached out to me years ago, and I can’t wait to go hang out with his his people today. But same kind of thing. But one of the things that is the underpinning of these conversations we’re having, and and I would be curious as to what you would say to this is, everybody, whether it’s a future employer, whether it’s a college, I know one of your students that’s on right now, Emma. She’s a senior. I would, Bobby. I’d love to hear from you in the chat what grade you’re in. But whether it’s the college, whether it’s the future employer, or maybe the employer you want to secure an internship with, or I’ve learned from you. Did not know this before. Scholarships. They’re all going to ask what’s in it for us. Yeah. Yep. And so they’re looking for some sense, not a forever sense of direction, but some sense of direction that you’ve been intentional.

Dave Peterson  07:59

Yeah. Yep. And and that that’s a good way to put it. And that that does seem strange with scholarships because they’re not earning money from you. You’re not doing a job for them. But what they are getting out of it is sometimes a little bit of publicity. They might point to you. They’ll probably point to you right after winning and saying, “Hey, congratulate our winner. You know, Billy or Bobby.” But you know there are some scholarships that 510 years down the road might, as part of a marketing campaign, say, “Hey, we helped Billy to get this degree, and and he just did this really amazing thing, and we’re part of that story.” So it’s it’s a very soft ROI for the scholarship, and even if you don’t want to look at it that way, even if you just want to look at it from their perspective of we’re this scholarship and we have money, we want to make sure it goes to whoever best aligns with our mission. If if you don’t know what your mission is, how would you align with their mission, right?

Lisa Marker-Robbins  08:56

Yeah, 100. I mean, once I learned this from you, it made so much sense,

Dave Peterson  09:02

right? Yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins  09:03

and it’s. I would say to your young people who, first of all, I want to congratulate them for digging in and doing this work with you because as they develop their personal scholarship narrative, it they’re helping build something that is. I always say career starts with discovery, right? It’s low stakes early on, particularly if you have a high schooler. We’re not even at the design process yet, probably, but some are. There’s not like a certain stage of career development that you should be in depending on your age. It’s really about what you’re discovering and learning about yourself and careers, right? But if we go back in time, you know, Dave, we’re in our 50s. We’ll just admit to it here. Yeah. But when we were applying for our first jobs or second jobs, even we led our resumes with, and I don’t even know when LinkedIn came on the scene, but certainly not when I was. Graduating from college, but we led our resumes with our experiences and our GPAs. So we led with where I had attended, where I had worked, where the name of the company. Now everything leads with skills. What do you have to offer us, and and how can you prove that you have that? And I, as I have seen this pivot, I think it probably resonates with the scholarship process as well.

Dave Peterson  10:30

Yeah, I would say so. I think there might be what you what you’re talking about previously. You might call like credentialism. I think there’s still a little bit of that. I don’t think it’s it’s quite as pronounced as you’re seeing in the the job market, the

Lisa Marker-Robbins  10:46

hiring. Yeah, yeah,

Dave Peterson  10:47

yeah. But I think it’s there, and certainly scholarships love to hear about student experiences and what they learn from those experiences and how they inform what the student’s going to do in the future.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  11:00

Gotcha. So, I have a question for you. When the students come in with you and they’ve not started this career discovery process, because it can feel big. I actually just recorded a solo episode for my own podcast this morning, and I talked about how, like, when we say to a young person, “Oh, we’re going to work on career development. It sounds so big. That phrase feels big. It feels permanent. It feels like oh, I have to be ready to apply, and so I’m really working on lowering the stakes emotionally, without giving up the intention of the process, and that’s why I like this word discovery. So, what do you guys do if somebody wants to start applying to to all these different scholarships and they haven’t started career discovery at all?

Dave Peterson  11:55

Yeah. So, well, first of all, it will depend. Are we talking about a high school freshman or a high school senior, because you know, while you said age and discovery are not the same, there there’s there’s some correlation there.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  12:10

Yeah,

Dave Peterson  12:10

but from the scholarship perspective, for seniors, there is massive urgency, and so we gotta we gotta work with what we have. Now, you know somebody who’s working with me today in October. They still have some time to to do some of that discovery and to hopefully, you know, get a little bit more solid on that future direction, so that you know late winter and and spring scholarships they can they have something a little bit more to work with, but younger students. This is the advantage of starting the scholarship process as a freshman or sophomore or even junior. Is that of course you want to win scholarships, you know, as a freshman or sophomore or junior, but that urgency is not quite there like it is for a senior because that’s it’s crunch time.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  12:58

Well, I do. You know, one of the things that I said when I was recording this episode of my podcast is my october 27 episode because November is actually National Career Development Month.

Dave Peterson  13:11

Oh, it’s National Scholarship Month too.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  13:13

It is. You’re lined again. Something I had no idea.

Dave Peterson  13:18

That’s that’s perfect because you’re going to come back on my podcast. I know. So you

Lisa Marker-Robbins  13:23

mean careers don’t get to own November all by themselves? Come on. Sorry, we’re stealing your. Okay, we’ll share. That’s so funny. So when I was recording this to kind of tee up National Career Development Month, I was talking about like yes, there’s stages and there’s no shame in the fact that like if you’re 23 and you’re you graduated and you you got the degree but you never even thought what you might do with it. And by the way, those are the kids that I’m seeing floundering the most in their 20s. And I can’t imagine that it would be the students that are working with you because they’re being very intentional. Right. Um. But it happens all the time, right? And so there is this. I always say we cannot ignore deadlines. So going back to what you said, I don’t think it serves everybody well to say like, okay, well, you are 18, so you should be at the you know design or development stage, right? However, we can’t put our head in the sand and ignore very real deadlines. So, I have found, and you brought up a great point, that young people who, so those of you that are here with us live or will watch this recording, there’s there. It can be too early. I don’t want to do career development with an eighth grader, but there are things they can be doing to just like start to learn on their own. I just don’t want to formalize it yet. But it’s also it’s not too late, right? You can always do something, and I’ve seen numerous. Young people that seniors that come into our launch career clarity course in our community, where they can very quickly by starting with the assessment piece get some sense of aligned direction, and then you’ve got to continue the process, right? So some something to start at least filtering the possibilities to point them in the right direction. So, seniors, hear me. Yes, there’s a sense of urgency here, and I don’t want you to lose that sense of urgency after you’ve hit submit on your applications. Because I do see this, and I know this is something that is very similar. I’ve learned from you over the years between scholarships and career design and discovery and all the things that you hit submit a lot of times by november 1 in a lot of these college applications. Right? You got a lot of time left in your senior year. You got a lot of time left before your feet land on campus. You got about nine months left, and to make good use of that time, keep applying to scholarships and continue the career discovery and design process as well, so you can get some early sense of direction starting with an assessment. I always say the assessment is a starting point, not a solution, and that’s a mistake that I see most schools making. Actually, is we’re going to give you an assessment, but we’re treating it as a solution, and then it just kind of falls flat because you’ve actually got to then do something with that information. You know, information is just data that’s decoration if you don’t do something with it.

Dave Peterson  16:36

Yeah, absolutely. So we do have a question, and I’m gonna get to that in a roundabout way, but Lisa, earlier you mentioned that you’re I don’t know if you said you started, but earlier in your your work life you were doing college admissions,

Lisa Marker-Robbins  16:52

yes,

Dave Peterson  16:53

and now you’ve pivoted to the the college and career clarity piece. I

Lisa Marker-Robbins  16:56

mean, if we’re honest, I did a at least even a little bit of it all the way up till last year because I was still helping friends. Okay,

Dave Peterson  17:03

okay, all right. But where I’m going with that is that you know some students, especially younger students, but even some seniors will hear if I don’t pick a career today, I’m done for the rest of my life. Or if I don’t pick a career, or I have to pick a career today, and I’m locked into it until I die, and that’s that’s not right, right?

Lisa Marker-Robbins  17:25

Neither of those mindsets will serve you. So yeah, yeah. Let’s hold space for that. What I will say, even in my own story, I’ve had what I call eight micro pivots in my life. Okay, there are some through lines that have been there since the very beginning. I even look at like extracurriculars that I did and what I got involved in in college with my free time, and there are some through lines that come all the way through that process, right? Because I knew I took the time to really build the self awareness and know myself deeply. So what I what I will say is you’re not locking in. I mean, my career looks very different today. It should because the internet barely existed. Exactly. I don’t. I mean, maybe it didn’t really exist when I graduated from college. I didn’t own a computer when I graduated from college, and here I am with an online course, and a podcast, and an online community where we’re helping people. Right. So career development, if we if we go into the go into it with the attitude that it’s going to be lifelong, it shouldn’t be locked in. Yeah. But if you know yourself well, you’re not going to go from like I’m majoring in engineering too. I’m suddenly majoring in social work. Yeah, like you’re able to say you’ve never seen somebody be successful at really a great private scholarship strategy if they didn’t have some sense of direction to career exactly right.

Dave Peterson  18:57

Yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins  18:58

I can say that I’ve never we’ve helped over 4000 families with my career confidence framework. I have never seen a swing that big if someone puts some intention into building the self awareness, and then is serious about doing some exploration and validation.

Dave Peterson  19:18

Yeah, yep, yeah. The really great point about this is not a lifelong decision or commitment.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  19:26

No,

Dave Peterson  19:27

it’s a direction. It’s a direction.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  19:30

Well, and I think if we go back to those words of like, start with discovery, lower stakes, right, and then when you get a sense of like, ooh, there’s some things worth doing here, like when we we live in an older home, it’s 40 years old, and so we had to tear our kitchen down to the studs because when we bought this house, it was a 1980s kitchen still, and so I studied things and I did my Pinterest boards and. We did a blueprint, and then we discovered some things along the way that made us go back and revise our blueprint.

Dave Peterson  20:06

Yeah. And

Lisa Marker-Robbins  20:07

so you, I want you to think of like this is not a linear process: discover, design, develop. This is an ecosystem where you’re going to move among them at different stages. So even if you’ve been in a job for a while, so I think that will help serve how you approach this and make it not so overwhelming.

Dave Peterson  20:30

Yep. So this this does go to the question that Emma asks. She says, “My plan is elementary education, and I’ll do an internship soon. But my primary work experience so far has been babysitting and pet sitting. Will that hurt me from a work experience for scholarships? And no, I don’t think so at all. In fact, I I can’t think off the top of my head. I can’t think of really too many better experiences for somebody going into education, especially the babysitting. But I think the pet sitting kind of feeds into probably the same same values and same wiring that is going to inform being an elementary teacher. Yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins  21:08

when I see anybody, like I’ll have even students that are interested in healthcare fields. I’d be like, “Can you go work at a camp?” Or somebody wants to be a pediatrician. I mean a medical doctor, and like go work at a camp for developmentally disabled young people, right? Yep. I actually on my podcast next Tuesday, so it’s called College and Career Clarity, kiddos that are in the room right now. I have Julia Lapan, she’s from the University of Virginia. She is head of career discovery for the Arts and Sciences College, and she used to be with career development over in their engineering school. So she knows her stuff when it comes to this, and she’s you know working with the the college students and we we talk internships. I’ve had her on twice now, but next week we talk about internships. And I said, well, you know, Julia, I know you’re with all these college kids, but what advice would you have for a high schooler? Like, what could you be doing now that will make you ready for internships when they exist, and she said, “Just get a paid job.” And Emma, I think if you listen to that episode, I mean, University of Virginia, you know, great school, selective university. She’s like, we underestimate the value of paid work because it’s far beyond the skills that you need to be a you know teacher in Emma’s case or whatever the career is, but it’s also the the professionalism. A lot of it is that you’re learning.

Dave Peterson  22:56

Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. You know whether the experience aligns like in a job silo for a high schooler into their their college major and career is less important than than the skills and the values and the lessons from from that experience.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  23:15

Yeah.

Dave Peterson  23:16

Now, you know there there are better and and and best situations, right? Like I think back to one of the first years I was doing doing this, helping students with scholarships, and I was working with somebody who she wanted to be a vet tech, and she was working at I don’t know a fast food joint, and I said, “Hey, could you find a job at like a Petco or PetSmart? It’s a lateral move, money wise, but you’re going to enjoy it more, and it shows that you really love animals, and that’s really what you’re trying to show in your personal narrative. And she did, and like three months later, she ended up winning a scholarship that was specifically related to love of animals. So it’s not like I don’t want to say that that’s one suggestion made her win the scholarship, but it it put another rock on the scale in her favor, right?

Lisa Marker-Robbins  24:09

Absolutely.

Dave Peterson  24:10

So could she have still won that scholarship by working at the fast food joint? Maybe because she had other things that that demonstrated it. So you know, it’s it’s not like every single thing has to fit in that one silo that is completely obvious, but you know it doesn’t hurt either.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  24:29

Well, and I would also say because we were talking about like pivots and locking in, that was a great suggestion you had for her because there’s some kids would go do that exact same thing, and they’d be like, “I don’t think this is for me.” Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. So, what is the best use of your time is things that you can go out and actually validate them in the real world. Get out from your, you know, watching YouTube videos or do. Doing online research, and by the way, ChatGPT is going to present you the bottom 2% of quality research along with the top 2%. Yeah, and it’s hard for a family to know. Like that’s why we go out and we vet the resources that we know we can trust for information. But you got to go out and you got to do something. There is no substitute for doing. And I want us. This is part of the mindset work. We every time we have a monthly Q and A for the first 12 months that people are in our course, and I do a little bit of mindset work at the beginning of every single one because that is the hardest piece, I think. Yeah. Not just for teenagers, for all of them, and actually for some of the 20 somethings, it’s even harder. But let’s celebrate getting to an answer of no.

Dave Peterson  25:44

100%. I mean, my first job out of college was in sales, and one of the first things they told us, and I soon realized was correct, was that no is the second best things that you’re trying somebody you’re trying to sell to tells you.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  25:58

That’s right. Because

Dave Peterson  25:59

you can move on to somebody who will say yes later, and it’s the same thing with with a job discovery, right? Like,

Lisa Marker-Robbins  26:05

yeah,

Dave Peterson  26:05

finding out that you hate whatever it is you thought you loved, finding that out early is much better than spending the first 10 to 20 years of your life in the career of doing that.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  26:18

Well, kids get blown away, and we don’t have time to make it a quiz today. But when I when I tell young people or their parents, even in this, I think this speaks to the intention with which we need to do this work. You’re going to go to school for 16,000 hours from kindergarten up through high school graduation, so if anybody wants to drop an emoji or anything about what you feel in your body or think in your mind when I say 16,000 hours, a lot of times by senior year they’re like, “Yeah, Lisa, I’m feeling every one of those hours right now.” Yeah, but guess what? The average adult in their lifetime is going to work 95,000 hours, so we got to get serious and we got to get some no’s along the way. And I’ll tell you this: when you go into an interview for an internship or a job, if you have a well developed personal narrative and professional identity, that’s going to be a lot easier for you. So your students who are writing these essays for these scholarships that are deeply rooted in their personal narrative, that’s rooted in their career aspirations as they know them right now. If you get some knows along the way from how you’re out there validating experiences, and we teach six different types of career validation exercises that we support them with the resources to go out and do because I know you hear me say that you guys are like totally overwhelming. Yes, it can be, but if you get to some no’s and then somebody’s saying like, “Well, why are you a good fit here?” or “How do you know you want to do this?” the no becomes part of your personal narrative. Yeah, for what you’re saying yes to,

Dave Peterson  28:02

for sure, absolutely. Yeah, I think one

Lisa Marker-Robbins  28:04

of our students, Nate, he he was like a like a lot of young men. He was a a gamer. He was a computer guy. He loved it. His assessment that we give in our course, the Berkman, did say you know computers were one of his filtered fits, right among some others. He was one of the fortunate ones that was able to land a high school internship with Kroger, and he got to go downtown every week. And about three weeks in, I heard from him, and he hated it. And this is back when I was doing college counseling and the career development. Okay, and he’s like, I I need to quit. I said, You can’t quit. This is part of your story, and you’re learning professionalism and a lot of other things as well. So let’s that’s good. And then we came back. We’re like, Okay, this is great. You got to know. Let’s go test something else. So we tested finance, validated in the real world. Okay, got into University of Michigan. Ross now works on Wall Street, so that no became part of his story, and he was able to use that in college essays, scholarship essays, and work interviews and things like that.

Dave Peterson  29:16

Yeah, absolutely, and it’s part of that self-discovery process.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  29:18

Yes. Yeah, because he he started designing, right? He got to the design stage when he when he was able to secure the IT internship with Kroger. At I mean, I live in Cincinnati. This is where Kroger is headquartered. So it was at like the mothership, right? Yeah, big deal. Got to go downtown every day. So that was part of the design process. And then he realized, oh, this is out of alignment for me. So he went back to discovery, and that wasn’t failure. That was a win.

Dave Peterson  29:47

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do want to pick up on one thing that you said, and then maybe shift directions a little bit. But

Lisa Marker-Robbins  29:53

yeah,

Dave Peterson  29:54

you, I don’t know the exact words, but it was basically like,

Lisa Marker-Robbins  29:57

uh oh,

Dave Peterson  29:58

get out and do stuff. Do stuff, right?

Lisa Marker-Robbins  30:01

Go do something. Yeah.

Dave Peterson  30:02

Yep. As you were saying that, I thought back to a student I worked with a couple years ago who had essentially a perfect GPA and 1500 something SAT scores, and that was all he had. He was not involved in anything else, and unfortunately, he did not win any scholarships. He did get some merit aid because, yeah, those the GPA and the disclosure

Lisa Marker-Robbins  30:25

they’re they’re awarding the the grades exactly, yep,

Dave Peterson  30:28

yep. But he just did not have success with scholarships, and you know when I start working with students and I see that profile come in with their intake, I’ll tell them you’re gonna have a hard time with scholarships. You might be better off going out and do doing something and come back to me in six months. Yeah, I think that’s

Lisa Marker-Robbins  30:50

I actually and Dave is part of why I love sending our launch career clarity families to you and saying like go work with Dave. Yeah, because you’ll give good advice. I always say, I feel like my job is to give good advice, not popular advice. I’m not always going to tell you what you want to hear, and and that’s what you did for that family, and that was really good advice. I would say this: he might have gotten some institutional scholarships, but I call that type of an applicant, and and you can say it for scholarships, for jobs, or for even the the colleges, that is a flat or a one dimensional applicant, and so instead of being a 3d applicant, right? Yeah, and so he probably was not applying to highly selective schools or more selective programs.

Dave Peterson  31:40

Yeah, not certainly not like Ivy League or T 20.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  31:45

Yeah,

Dave Peterson  31:46

you know, he got into a perfectly perfectly respectable school.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  31:49

There’s there’s a lot of, I mean, a lot of those kids would get into a perfectly respectable school if you have, if you’re aiming for a highly selective school, that’s where the flat, the one-dimensional applicants are not going to succeed because they are also not just looking for you can handle the academics.

Dave Peterson  32:11

Yep, that actually segued better to what I wanted to talk about next than I expected, and that is the relationship between college major and career clarity and admissions. Now, obviously, our seniors are in the thick of the admissions process, but we do have younger students as well. So,

Lisa Marker-Robbins  32:29

yeah,

Dave Peterson  32:30

can you talk just a little bit about that?

Lisa Marker-Robbins  32:32

Sure. So, 70. It always varies a little bit, but like low 70, 73% or so of teens headed to college will go to a research university, as compared to a liberal arts college. So first of all, you got to like start with the understanding of the those two animals are a little bit different. So the vast majority of our kids are going to go to university. Universities tend to admit students by major, and so we did a study on this. And I can I’ll grab the link and drop it in. I almost said drop it into the show notes. Ha ha ha! Drop it into the chat, and I’ll find it here in a sec as I’m looking through, but oh, here it is. I got it. So we did a study of the 50 state flagship universities. So when I say that, like for Ohio, that’s Ohio State, right? For Indiana, it’s Indiana University, and so we contacted. We actually spoke with admissions on the phone, sent emails, looked at their websites, verified in a number of ways. There were really only four of the 50 state universities, state flagship universities, that truly just weren’t considering what major you might want to study, and they tended to be non, like they were admitting almost all their students, they were admitting 80, 90% of their applicants. Right. When we looked at everybody else, they fell into two categories, and and this really tends to be. I think the ratios hold true when you look at universities as a whole. So the the biggest group was it’s complicated, and so for the group that we classified as it’s complicated, we found that those students applying there. If you were doing to a capacity capped major, nursing would be a great example of that. Emma, education can sometimes be that because anything where you have to have like field experience, labs. So, student teaching would be like a lab experience, right? A field experience, right? Anything that’s highly competitive, like business engineering, computer science, things like that. That’s where the it’s complicated, and so what we found was, but you know, you’ve got other like social work or anthropology, a lot of the humanities, not so much so. They you know they weren’t admitting directly to majors, and they weren’t super competitive, and so when we saw that the schools that for those majors were looking for a true sense of direction, like how do you know? You know, one time one of and then the third category was like everybody that applies to our university will be admitted to a major.

Dave Peterson  35:37

Okay.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  35:37

Or maybe you’re admitted to at least like the business college, the engineering college of engineering, so that you then pick your lane after that. But it’s direct admit to major. It’s complicated, and the it’s complicated ones where there’s a lot of kids wanting those majors. That’s where that played in. There’s very few that are just very very open ended, very easy to change. So they’re looking for you to demonstrate that you’ve done something to know where you’re going. A few years back, I was had a conversation with somebody at Ohio State because we had a student that was applying there. It was for engineering, and they just said we’re not going to give our scholarship money. And this was this was institutional money, but it was engineering specific.

Dave Peterson  36:26

Right.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  36:27

So I think it it really dovetails more with like the work that you do, Dave. Yeah.

Dave Peterson  36:32

And they said over the years when we have given money to kids who are good at math and science, but don’t really understand what engineering is from some real world experience, not just reading about it online. We found that they switched majors later. It’s a hard major. They switch majors later, and then we wasted our our money on them. And so we are looking for a sense of direction to mitigate the risk of investing in them. Yeah. Probably just one more thing, and then I’m going to ask you to to talk a little bit about how you work with families. But you mentioned business as being one major that is sometimes selective or capacity capped. I’ve also heard you mention that sometimes students who apply as business majors that can be a bit of a signal. Yes. Do you know what I’m referring to there? Okay. All right. So

Lisa Marker-Robbins  37:29

yeah. Every time you go, I’ve heard you say. I’m like, oh gosh, what did I say? What did I say? I got to be careful.

Dave Peterson  37:35

Yeah, I listen to every every episode of your podcast. Thank

Lisa Marker-Robbins  37:39

you. So business is, I have found, for some students, signaling undecided, and here’s why. And I’m not the only one that thinks this. I’ve talked to school counselors, college counselors at work in high schools, and they say the same thing. It’s known. We all know what it means to, you know, be in business to whatever degree, right? It feels safe. It feels like there’s probably going to be a job waiting for me on the other side of graduation. It, for most of the areas, feels somewhat lucrative that there’s an opportunity to make good money, and so when we don’t know what we want to do, and everybody’s oh, what are you going to major in? What are you going to major in? What are you going to major in? What are you going to do with your life? Like I hate those questions, right? But it’s because it’s so intense. They sometimes just grasp for something that’s familiar and safe to answer the question. So I would say, if parents or young people who are listening to me stop if you hear business and ask the deeper questions. It’s not to say like, oh, well, you is that undecided? Don’t ask that question. Get curious about why. You know, the thing about business too that a lot of kids don’t realize, and sometimes their parents don’t even stop to think about it. Business is really like an umbrella term, if you will, right? Right? Yeah. And so marketing and finance could not be more different from economics or finance, right? And even when we look at personality assessments, and we look at how the U.S. Department of Labor organizes the job families based on the clusters of the types of work that you do. Business exists across several job families because the work is not the same. Yeah. So even if you say business, that’s not a validated direction until you’re able to really say specifically what focus with business.

Dave Peterson  39:46

Yeah. So

Lisa Marker-Robbins  39:47

like, get curious. We, you know, when we as parents make statements, we shut down the conversation. And so if you if your kid says business and you’re like, hmm, I. Wonder if we’re one of those that that’s code for undecided. Yeah, get curious and ask some questions about. Oh, really? Have you thought about? Don’t make a statement.

Dave Peterson  40:10

Yeah, yep. And for those who are watching this and are actually truly interested in going into a business major, that’s not to say that that is a bad decision, or that college is going to to say that you know we don’t think you know what you’re doing, but it goes back to what we’ve been saying all night: is you need to have some things on your resume and your experiences. It’s the evidence, yeah, yep. So yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins  40:37

yeah, they’re gonna kind of, I would say, like they interrogate more closely on these competitive majors. Yeah, am I interrogate? It sounds like a it’s a strong word, but I think it’s helpful because we’re gonna interrogate the evidence, interrogate the application to make sure that we’re validating you for what fits, and that you’ve gone out and you’ve done the validation.

Dave Peterson  41:03

Yep. Well, speaking of validation, I know that that is a big chunk of of what you you do. But could you just talk a little bit about you know what you do, how you work with families, and you know for those who who would like to, how how they can work with you?

Lisa Marker-Robbins  41:18

Sure. So we have a course called Launch Career Clarity, and it’s online, but we’re a live community behind it, and that’s my favorite part of the month is getting being able to interact and do give questions and collaborate and give ideas, and so our career confidence framework really is rooted in self awareness, then building career awareness. But instead of telling kids like you can be anything, which I firmly believe is a lie. So if you believe they can, then we’re probably not for you. I know I can’t be anything. Yeah. So we want to filter based on personality, academic aptitudes, work motivations to a more realistic list, and that helps right away remove some of the overwhelm from this process. And then we give them the tools to start safely behind their device, exploring and researching. And then if they’re still getting nods that like yes, you’re discovering that there’s still alignment here. We teach them how to go out and validate in the real world, and the cool thing is, and I mean this has kind of been sprinkled across it. As you go out and you start validating, you actually are also building the same resume that colleges, those offering internships and those later offering jobs are looking for, so the process helps build the evidence and the resume. And so, this going back to the original podcast that you heard from me, Dave, many years ago, and I agree. I think it was probably four years ago. We’ve only met once in person at a Panera in Ohio, when we went all the way back there, and I was talking about like let’s reverse engineer. That’s what we start at. You know, I think we get so focused on that nearest milestone right in front of us, whether it be submitting the applications or high school graduation, or getting you know Emma started by saying like I got my first acceptance, and I said there’s nothing like that feeling, right? All that celebrating, and we should celebrate those milestones. And it goes back to the story I told of the client who kind of pivoted my job, you know, back in 2008. When we’re focused too much on the nearest milestone, and we lose sight of what we actually want. What I know as a mom of adult children, having worked since 1991 supporting families at this stage of it’s a wonky stage to parent from. I’ll say that is that ultimately we all just want a happy, thriving family that’s still positively connected, and our kids to go out in the world and do something that they love, and that they can stand on their own two feet because they will be proud when they’re you’re not paying all the money for you’re not their financial and emotional backstop. And I know kiddos, some of you will listen and go like, oh no! I like that they’re still paying my cell phone. There’s a sense of pride that comes when you’re on your own two feet, and so that’s what we all really want, and we’re trying to support that bigger finish line and move it not from high school graduation or college graduation, but the real launch out into the real world.

Dave Peterson  44:41

That’s fantastic.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  44:44

I can put the link if anybody’s interested. I’ll I’ll drop the link here. Grab that.

Dave Peterson  44:53

And for those who are watching the recording, I will put the links with the video, so you will have them. And

Lisa Marker-Robbins  44:59

on that other link, I. Put in about our study that we did on the majors. If you go and you want to download that, we give you the spreadsheet of the results of the study, all 50 schools. So we identify where it’s complicated, where it’s you know kind of open to change, and where you’re locked into a major. And but we also give you the emails that we sent to to so that you can take them. And if your school is not listed there, you can send those same questions to get the same information from any university.

Dave Peterson  45:36

That’s awesome. Who who would they email that to?

Lisa Marker-Robbins  45:40

Admission. Here’s the thing: admissions is who you start with.

Dave Peterson  45:43

Okay. Now,

Lisa Marker-Robbins  45:43

at a university, because that’s where this matters. If you’re going to attend a university instead of a liberal arts college, the College of Engineering typically has somebody. The College of Education, the College of Health Sciences, they will typically have an admissions type person that you can contact with information as well. It is harder to get information at that level. It’s easier to get it from admissions. But I mean, there were some schools that we’d get one email and I’d be like, “Yeah, I don’t think that answers quite right.” So we’d pick up the phone and we we talk to somebody different, but a lot of them first try we got really good information.

Dave Peterson  46:26

Okay, good, fantastic. I I um I forgot that you actually share the the data in that. Yeah, well, yeah. We

Lisa Marker-Robbins  46:33

I mean that’s just I’m on a mission to support people to be able to make informed decisions to help launch our kids out into the world, you know. My kids are 2525, and 28. Everybody’s launched. Everybody’s thriving. No, I’m not paying anybody’s bills. Driving to visit the one kid out of state tomorrow, and it’s a great, it’s a great stage. We’re all thriving, and I just want to see more families get to that point, so we give a lot of this information away for free. That’s why we do the podcast, so we can just help support people.

Dave Peterson  47:08

Yeah, yeah, I love it, Lisa. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for doing this,

Lisa Marker-Robbins  47:13

Dave. A big thank you to Dave for inviting me to his scholarship boot camp and allowing me to share this conversation with you. If your family is ready to get more intentional about finding and winning private scholarships, I highly recommend checking out Dave’s Scholarship GPS. I’ve seen firsthand with my own clients the value he brings to the families we both serve. To learn more about scholarship GPS. Go to flourishcoachingco.com/scholarshipgps, or you’ll find the link in my show notes. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you again next week.