HOW TO PROFESSIONALIZE IN COLLEGE

(WITHOUT LOSING YOUR SOUL)

UNDERGRADUATE WORKING GROUP

facilitated by Dr. Chad Hegelmeyer and Dr. Nuri Hegelmeyer

An increasingly prevalent assumption of university education is that it should prepare students for life and work in the contemporary labor market. Pre-professional programs and majors have grown on college campuses; students increasingly feel pressure to devote their university life to improving their eventual competitiveness in the labor market. But universities also still claim to maintain their traditional purposes of furthering human knowledge and educating students in the humanizing arts and sciences. Can universities both educate and professionalize? Should they?

How to Professionalize in College (Without Losing Your Soul) is a two-day program that will help students and recent graduates explore these questions and navigate the possible complements and contradictions between their intellectual and professional lives.

This program is free and open to undergraduate students and recent graduates (≤1 year) who are not currently enrolled in a graduate program. Participants are required to attend the retreat in its entirety, which will take place at the Berkeley Institute. See below for descriptions of each session and a general schedule of events.

Apply by end of day Friday, September 26. Space is limited.

Session 1: Professions, Professionalization, and Deformation professionnelle

Professions: what are they; where did they come from; what are they good for; and what do they do to the people who join them? Students will evaluate how and to what extent the process of being professionalized has already begun for them and think about its effects on their education in the present and on their possible ways of life into the future.

Session 2: The University, the Economy, and the Labor Market

What does the university have to do with any of this? What historically has been the university’s relationship to the labor market and the economy at large? And what is it currently? Students will think critically about this arrangement. In their experience, is college necessary for professional life? Is it the right institution for preparing/forming professional people? Are students missing anything about university education/life if it is wholly geared toward professional preparation? What are professions for; what are universities for; and where do these ends overlap or conflict?

Session 3: Specialization and Generalization

All professions shape their professionals into  specialized forms of knowledge, labor, and thinking. Professions also have a tendency to beget more and more specialized and bureaucratized forms of work. How do we deal with this narrowing and siloing tendency--both for our own sake and for the sake of our professions themselves? Should we resist specialization to some extent or try to cultivate a generalist’s approach?