Linking students to meaningful work has been important at Stanford since its founding
Students on the Farm talk about a “Stanford bubble” that they leave for the workplace. Yet they don’t do so alone or unguided, thanks to Stanford Career Education, known as BEAM (Bridging Education, Ambition, and Meaningful Work).
Through BEAM, Stanford students can attend 17 or more specialized career fairs on campus each year. They can join industry treks in the Bay Area and nationwide, network with one of the 3,000 alumni in the Stanford Alumni Mentoring program and meet one-on-one with career educators.
They learn to explore career paths, cultivate personal networks and discover what “meaningful work” means for them while at Stanford, after graduation and over a lifetime.
I originally accepted the common belief that the goal of career counseling was to help clients make career decisions. … Being undecided can be reframed as open-mindedness.
— John Krumboltz, professor emeritus of education
For 125 years, ever since the Founding Grant dictated that Stanford prepare graduates for “direct usefulness in life,” career exploration at Stanford has been integral to student life and has helped shape the entire discipline once called “vocational guidance.”
To learn more, check out this 125th anniversary timeline by BEAM career educators.
Some highlights:
- Stanford held its first vocational conference for women in 1917. Two years later, it produced one of the first vocational handbooks ever published by a university.
- In 1927, Stanford psychologist Edward Kellogg Strong Jr. published the Strong Interest Inventory, an instrument that continued to evolve after his death and is still used today at Stanford and across the globe.
- John Krumboltz, as a professor of education and psychology at Stanford, became a leader in career-counseling theory in the 1960s. Krumboltz’s “happenstance learning theory” is the basis for BEAM’s organizational model today.
- In 2007, Stanford’s Career Development Center, today known as BEAM, funded the first Designing Your Life course, taught by David Evans and Bill Burnett of Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. Still taught by d.school and BEAM educators, Designing Your Life offers a holistic framework for professional journeys.
BEAM’s new name reflects the evolution of career services to focus on providing students with connections and communities that serve them for a working lifetime. BEAM continues Stanford’s legacy as a national leader in innovative career services approaches.
Learn more on the timeline here.
In this video, Marisa Messina, ’16, and Karey Shi, ’19, share how BEAM forges career connections.
Video by Ahmad Wright, assistant dean of career education and associate director of Career Catalysts.