Neel Valeti: Resources I Used to Find My Career Path
- Coffee Chats: Chatting with alums, peers, or professionals working in interesting industries is a terrific way to understand someone else’s career and see if you’d enjoy a similar path. Be curious and genuine in your conversation – use these as a way to get to know the other person better, understand what it means to be in their role, and see if that excites you. This is a great way to essentially envision what it would be like for you to work in that industry or role. Coffee chatting with a new person may feel uncomfortable or nerve-wracking at first, but as you do more and more, they begin to feel more natural and you start to enjoy them!
- Campus Clubs: There are a number of professional clubs on campus that you can leverage to explore different career paths. These clubs are not only a great way to meet like-minded peers who are also trying to find their career path but also build experience working in groups and network with alums and different industry professionals. Santa Clara Consulting has been my main club involvement – we work with real companies on problems they are facing. These engagements have been incredibly useful – last year I worked with an AI startup and a company building water recycling products, exposing me to new tech and industries I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Additionally, we host events open to the entire SCU community with different companies. For example, in Fall Quarter we hosted a case competition with Perplexity, earlier this quarter we hosted a recruiting event with FTI Consulting, and we have a few more events planned throughout the year. Get on these clubs mailing lists and follow their Instagrams to stay up to date on what events they’re having!
- Classes: Taking different classes is a great way to explore your curiosity and figure out if you like a certain field. I came into college as an Economics major in the business school. I knew I also really liked math but didn’t think I wanted to pursue a pure math major. I ended up taking a CS class and enjoying it, so I decided to add that as a second major. The double major has actually made it more difficult to add in extra “for fun” classes, but I still have found ways to add these in through the core curriculum (e.g. I took POLI 1 since I wanted to learn more about how the US political system worked and it also satisfied my Civic Engagement requirement). If you think you might have an interest in a field, do your best to fit a class into your schedule! You never know what you might learn or where that may take you along the rest of your career journey (if I hadn’t taken that CS class, I would have never realized how much I enjoy coding).
- Internships: Internships are not only a way to build your resume and get real-world experience but also a way to figure out what you like and don’t like. In each internship you do, you’ll likely be asked to do different types of research or analysis, take part in different types of meetings, or contribute to specific projects. As you do these, keep track of the things you really enjoyed doing and why. That way, you can start formulating what you are looking for in your next internship and work backward from there to build the network and skillset to land that internship.
As you leverage each resource, I want to emphasize the importance of being hypothesis-driven. As you are trying to find new people to coffee chat with or what class to take next you should have a clear hypothesis (e.g. what you may be interested in or what career path you may want to break into). It is completely ok if your hypothesis is wrong or changes over time (in fact, this is expected) – as you leverage these resources you will collect more data and you can refine your hypothesis. Going in without a hypothesis, though, will make it much harder to structure your takeaways and ultimately make it much harder to learn and grow. Finding the right career path for you can feel overwhelming and progress will not be linear, but with continued, intentional effort you will find the path for you!
Mar 4, 2025