Design Your Career: Build a Life that Aligns with Your Values
As a Harvard College student, you may be asking yourself: What comes next? What will I do after graduation? Which career paths align with my goals, interests, and identity?
To support you in reflecting on these natural and important questions, MCS encourages you to explore Design Your Career—an initiative developed for Harvard College students and inspired by the design thinking principles discussed in Design Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans at Stanford University.
This approach helps you navigate uncertainty, explore possibilities, and make intentional decisions about your life and career. By combining reflection, creativity, and prototyping, Design Your Career empowers you to design a path that is meaningful, joyful, and uniquely your own.
A useful starting point is the Designing Your Career@Yale Online Tool, which offers guided reflection and planning exercises based on the design thinking principles below:
- Acceptance & Life Vision Creation
- Brainstorming & Ideating
- Growing Your Network
- Testing & Reflecting
- Prototyping
Respective schools at the Mignone Center for Career Success may offer a Designing Your Career session throughout the academic year or during Winter Break in January (Dates and registration are announced well ahead of time.) This program helps you reflect on your unique experiences, clarify your personal and professional goals, and develop strategies for a life of purpose and meaning.
Through this series, you will:
- Make confident decisions on how to approach your exploration and ways to find diverse career possibilities and pathways
- Take active steps to plan and brainstorm possible futures to test and refine your interests through tangible real-world experiences
- Learn how to confidently use the Harvard network and expand your network to prototype possible paths
You can also explore the Stanford Life Design Lab and the Designing Your Life Website to learn more about design thinking and gain access to resources.
