Students navigate post-graduation careers and uncertainty
As midterms approach, Willamette’s graduating class is getting progressively closer to the end of their college career. This brings the question: what will happen after graduation? Setting societal standards aside, what is happening in the real world? Do students fail if they do not know what they want to do forever before entering college, or is everyone still trying to figure their lives out?
Willamette University is full of juniors and seniors with a degree end-date around the corner. According to College Factual’s analysis, Willamette has a freshman retention rate at 87%, higher than the national average, at 70.57%. “I think without Willamette, I wouldn't have known I wanted to go specifically into data science,” said Isabel Long-McGie (’27), who will be finishing her undergraduate program next May.
The on-time four-year graduation rate is around 72%. Among Willamette College’s students, following a study made by Willamette University on the class of 2022, Willamette’s post-graduation success rate sits at around 87%, with 87% of graduates being employed or enrolled in graduate school within one year of graduation. Following the Employment Summary for 2022 Graduates from the American Bar Association, Willamette’s law employment rate went as high as 93%, with graduates securing a job position within ten months of graduation.
With all of these statistics, it looks like the students from the first university founded in the West are doing just fine. However, how are juniors and seniors at Willamette responding to the classic “What do you want to do when you finish college?”
“I think I figured this out pretty much last semester, so pretty new,” Cassie Thomas (’27) admitted. After completing a few informational interviews and taking a “career-ish type class” in her sophomore year, she realized that: “I was like, oh, I think I’d like to do that.”
With that in mind, she is now looking for new opportunities. “My plan is to move away from Salem, probably to a bigger city like Seattle or Chicago, and I’m hoping to get a job working for a Public health department doing communication stuff.”
Long-McGie is in the same boat. “I’m hoping to get a role at a company doing data analytics,” she said. Even though she is a senior and an accelerated 3+1 student for the Data Science master’s program, she did not come with an outlined plan for college. “It’s something that I did not think of before coming to college, but when I came to college and I entered the Data Science program, it’s a career that I realized I wanted to go into.”
For Kendall Hall (’27), it was not until her senior year of high school that she decided she wanted to pursue law school. “I hope to be like in-house counsel for local government or go into administrative law,” she said. She highlighted that the Career Center “has actually pulled through a lot,” as it has been a key tool to help her work her way through this path.
“I've had pretty supportive professors who know a lot or enough about [the] kind of the system and helping me navigate through what kind of law I want to practice,” she said. “But mostly overall, the Career Center has helped me.”
For Samara Linzie Sethiono (’28), the post-graduation question remains largely unanswered. “Actually, I don’t know,” she admitted. “I feel like that’s the question I should be thinking of since I’m a junior right now, but I really don’t know.”
She is still skeptical that a thought-through trajectory will help her overcome her uncertainty. “Even if I did make a plan, I’m scared it won’t go the way that I want it to,” she said. While her faith is helping her navigate the highs and lows that accompany choosing a career path, she stated that “because I’m just a human, there is also this part of me that's scared [of] what I’m gonna be in the future.”
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