Tucked away in a corner on the first floor of Jester, it’s easy to miss the Vick Center for Strategic Advising and Career Counseling. But students with anxieties about future career prospects or doubts about the practicality of different career paths shouldn’t be so quick to glance it over. Students should use the variety of resources available to them through the Vick Center so they can feel confident about their post-graduation plans.
Molly Gully, director of the Vick Center, understands that anxiety about the future runs amok on every college campus. Gully emphasizes the impact career counselors at the Vick Center can have on students, especially those facing trepidation concerning their future plans.
”Exploration at this time in your life is normal — it’s what’s supposed to be happening,” Gully says. “The career counselors can help normalize that exploration behavior, and then they can help provide students with insight into themselves as to what’s going to be a good fit.”
Figuring out the future is daunting, but the Vick Center proves that students have allies in their struggles and that there are resources available to help.
“The main goal of the Vick Center is to help students make informed decisions about their career and academic choices,” Gully says. “We really put that emphasis on ‘informed,’ because we want it to be intentional. We want a student to have thought through things like their values, interests, personality and skills when making a long-term choice of a career.”
The career resource library, another resource within the Vick Center, offers the most basic yet critically important part of figuring out your future — the opportunity to know what’s out there. The library is a collection of literature organized by job type. The books can’t be checked out, so they’ll always be available in the waiting room for perusal. For instance, if you were looking for a career in the outdoors you could start your exploration at the “Outdoors” section in the library.
“Just browsing through some of the books can oftentimes help generate ideas, and generating ideas is one of the first parts of the exploration process, just figuring out what is out there,” Gully says.
The Vick Center offers appointment scheduling online and holds drop-in career advising Monday through Friday, 1–3 p.m. in JES A115.
You wouldn’t be a college student if you didn’t feel at least a slight amount of hesitancy, doubt or confusion about what you want to do after graduation. But you don’t have to face these doubts and anxieties alone. The Vick Center exists for the sole purpose of helping undergraduates figure themselves and their futures out, and more of us should take advantage.
Caldwell is a Latin American studies and journalism sophomore from College Station.
