Why College Juniors and Seniors Need Career Counseling Now More Than Ever
Two UConn Stories: The Cost of Waiting — and the Power of Starting Early
Story One: Michael’s Two Lost Years
Michael came to Career Counseling Connecticut on a Tuesday afternoon in late October. He was 24, a UConn graduate with a degree in communications, and he’d been out of school for nearly two years.
In that time, he’d worked a few months at a retail job he found humiliating, spent a summer doing something vaguely described as “helping a friend with a startup,” and had most recently been bartending three nights a week while spending his days sending out résumés that disappeared into silence.
He sat across from me with the particular exhaustion of someone who is tired not from overwork but from uncertainty. Two years of it.
When I asked him to tell me about his time at UConn, something shifted. He lit up talking about a documentary film course he’d taken junior year. He’d produced a short film about a local family business struggling to survive a changing economy — his professor had called it the best student work she’d seen in a decade. He’d written a senior thesis on the intersection of digital media and civic engagement that his advisor had encouraged him to submit for publication.
“Why didn’t you pursue media or content work after graduation?” I asked.
He shrugged in the way that contains an entire story. “I didn’t really know how. Everyone I knew was going into marketing or PR. I applied to some places, but nothing clicked. And then I just… kept not figuring it out.”
There it was. Not a lack of talent. Not a lack of work ethic. A lack of direction at precisely the moment direction was needed most.
What followed in our work together was less about fixing Michael and more about excavating the person who’d always been there. The documentary instinct. The interest in how communities and institutions tell their stories. The writing ability that his professors had recognized and he had somehow talked himself out of believing in.
Within four months, Michael had a portfolio, a focused job search strategy, and a clear narrative about who he was professionally. Within six months, he was hired as a content strategist at a mid-sized firm in Hartford that worked with nonprofit clients — work that engaged everything he actually cared about.
He was good at his job from day one. He would have been good at it two years earlier.
Those two years weren’t catastrophic. Michael recovered, found his footing, and built a career he’s genuinely proud of. But they cost him — financially, professionally, and in ways that are harder to quantify. The confidence erosion of prolonged drift is real. The narrative he’d quietly constructed about himself — that maybe he wasn’t cut out for anything — took time to dismantle.
Michael didn’t need two years of wandering. He needed a good conversation two years earlier.
Story Two: Alicia’s Head Start
Alicia was a UConn junior when her mother called me. She was a psychology major with a minor in human development, a strong GPA, and what her mother described as “absolutely no idea what she wants to do with any of it.”
When Alicia walked in, she was poised and articulate — and genuinely, openly uncertain. To her credit, she said so directly. “I picked psychology because I find people interesting. I don’t want to be a therapist. Beyond that, I honestly don’t know.”
That honesty was the best possible starting point.
We spent our first sessions doing what I consider the most important and most neglected work in career counseling: genuine self-examination. What did Alicia find herself drawn to when no one was telling her what to care about? What had energized her in coursework, in her part-time job, in her campus involvement? Where did she feel most capable, most alive, most like herself?
A picture emerged. Alicia had a natural talent for translating complex ideas into language that ordinary people could understand and act on. She’d been the person in every group project who figured out how to present the findings. She’d spent two summers working with kids in a recreational program and discovered she had a gift for program design — for thinking through how an experience should be structured to produce a particular outcome.
The field that kept surfacing, as we mapped her strengths against a realistic landscape of opportunities, was human resources — specifically, talent development and organizational learning. It was a field she’d never considered, largely because no one had ever connected her natural abilities to it.
We built a strategy. She secured a summer internship between junior and senior year with a mid-size company in the Hartford area that had a serious commitment to employee development. She performed exceptionally. She stayed connected to her supervisor. She asked smart questions about the field and demonstrated, over the course of that summer, exactly the kind of person she was.
Before the end of her senior year’s first semester — while many of her classmates were still figuring out where to start — Alicia had accepted an offer for a talent development associate role at a company that had actively recruited her based on her internship performance and the quality of her professional presence.
She didn’t stumble into it. She built toward it, deliberately, starting in junior year, with enough time to do it right.
What These Two Stories Share
Michael and Alicia were both intelligent, capable, genuinely promising young people. Neither was lacking in talent. Neither was lacking in character.
What separated their experiences after college was timing.
Michael needed guidance at 21 and didn’t get it until 24. The drift in between wasn’t destiny — it was a gap in support at a critical moment.
Alicia got that support at 21. She arrived at graduation not just with a degree but with clarity, experience, relationships, and an offer in hand.
The work I do with college juniors and seniors at Career Counseling Connecticut is built on the conviction that every student deserves the start Alicia got — and that it’s never too late to help a Michael find his way.
The question is simply when you’re willing to start.
The most dangerous assumption in higher education today is that a degree leads naturally to a career.
It doesn’t. Not anymore — if it ever truly did.
As the founder of Career Counseling Connecticut and someone who has spent 25 years guiding students from their first college conversations through their earliest professional steps, I’ve watched a quiet crisis unfold on campuses across the country. Bright, capable young people invest four years and often six figures in a college education, arrive at junior or senior year, and suddenly realize they have no coherent plan for what comes next.
The diploma is nearly in hand. The career is nowhere in sight.
The Gap No One Warned Them About
Here’s what college does exceptionally well: it develops intellect, expands perspective, builds social and communication skills, and provides credentials. Here’s what most colleges do poorly: prepare students for the specific, practical, emotionally complex work of finding and launching a career.
University career centers are chronically underfunded and overwhelmed. The typical college junior has perhaps one or two substantive interactions with their career center across four years — usually to upload a résumé or attend a generic networking event. That is not career counseling. That is a service desk.
Meanwhile, the world those students are about to enter has grown dramatically more complex. The job market has been reshaped by globalization, automation, and now artificial intelligence. Industries that seemed stable are contracting. Fields that barely existed a decade ago are now among the fastest growing. The old roadmap — pick a major, get a degree, find a job in that field — no longer describes reality for most graduates.
College juniors and seniors are navigating this environment largely without guidance. Most are making consequential decisions based on peer pressure, parental expectation, or simply inertia. That’s a recipe for early career frustration — and in many cases, years of drift before finding meaningful direction.
Why Junior Year Is the Critical Inflection Point
If there is a single year in college where professional intervention pays the greatest dividends, it is junior year.
By junior year, students have enough self-knowledge to have a real career conversation. They’ve declared a major. They’ve had internships or meaningful extracurricular experiences. They’ve discovered what energizes them and what drains them. They have genuine data about themselves to work with.
And yet they still have time. Time to pursue a strategic internship. Time to build relationships with professors and professionals in their field of interest. Time to explore a double major, a certificate program, or a career pivot before the window closes. Time to develop the professional skills — networking, interviewing, personal branding — that don’t come naturally to most 20-year-olds and require real practice to master.
Junior year students who engage seriously with career counseling enter senior year with clarity, a plan, and a head start. Those who wait until senior year are behind before they begin.
Why Senior Year Is Still Not Too Late — But Requires Urgency
Senior year career counseling operates under a different set of pressures. The timeline is compressed. Recruiting cycles for many industries — finance, consulting, technology, government — are already underway or completed before second semester even begins. Seniors who haven’t started their professional development by September of their final year are already playing catch-up in competitive fields.
But here’s the important truth: it is never too late to get clear, and clarity arrived at late is still infinitely more valuable than confusion that persists into the workforce.
Senior year counseling at Career Counseling Connecticut focuses on immediate, actionable priorities. Where are you genuinely competitive right now? What opportunities align with your actual strengths and interests, not just your major? How do you present yourself compellingly to employers who will interview dozens of candidates? What does your first two years look like if you pursue path A versus path B?
These are the questions that turn overwhelmed seniors into focused, confident job seekers.
The Hidden Cost of Career Drift
It’s worth being direct about what’s at stake when college juniors and seniors don’t get the guidance they need.
The average college graduate today takes anywhere from three to six months to find their first job — and many of those jobs represent poor fits that lead to early turnover. Studies consistently show that a significant percentage of graduates are underemployed a year after graduation, working in roles that don’t require a degree and don’t leverage their education. Early career misalignment has long-term financial consequences: research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and others suggests that the wage trajectory established in the first few years after graduation has lasting effects that compound over a career.
Beyond the financial dimension, there is a psychological cost that rarely gets discussed. Drift is demoralizing. Young people who spent four years developing genuine skills and knowledge, then spend their mid-twenties unable to find footing in a meaningful career, often internalize a false narrative about their own capabilities. That narrative is difficult to undo.
Good career counseling doesn’t just improve job placement outcomes. It preserves confidence, momentum, and the sense of purpose that makes a career feel like a calling rather than a compromise.
What Career Counseling for College Juniors and Seniors Actually Looks Like
At Career Counseling Connecticut, our work with college-age clients is substantive, individualized, and deeply practical. It is not a one-time résumé review or a personality quiz followed by a list of job titles. It is an ongoing, structured engagement built around the student’s specific situation, strengths, and goals.
Our process typically involves several interconnected areas of work.
Clarifying identity and direction. Many juniors and seniors are operating on assumptions about themselves and their futures that have never been seriously examined. Who are you, really? What energizes you? What environments bring out your best work? What problems do you want to spend your professional life solving? These aren’t soft questions — they’re the foundation of every good career decision, and most young people have never had a real conversation about them.
Mapping the landscape realistically. Understanding what careers genuinely look like from the inside — compensation, culture, daily experience, growth trajectory — requires informed guidance that most students simply don’t have access to. We help students develop an accurate, nuanced picture of the fields they’re considering, including the ones that look glamorous from the outside and the ones that are underestimated.
Building professional skills. Networking feels unnatural to most college students. Interviewing is a learned skill that requires practice and honest feedback. Personal branding — how you present yourself on LinkedIn, in applications, and in professional settings — is something most students have never been taught. We work through all of it, concretely and practically.
Developing and executing a strategy. Clarity without action is just daydreaming. We help students build real timelines, identify specific targets, make warm connections, and follow through on the steps that lead from intention to opportunity.
The AI Factor: Why This Moment Is Different
It would be a disservice to write about career counseling for today’s college students without addressing artificial intelligence directly.
AI is not a distant disruption. It is already reshaping entry-level hiring in ways that affect this year’s graduating class. Automated applicant screening, AI-assisted interviews, and the rapid automation of tasks that once defined entry-level roles in fields like finance, law, marketing, and media are changing what employers actually want from new graduates — and which graduates stand out.
Students who understand how AI is transforming their target industry, who can demonstrate skills that complement rather than compete with automation, and who can articulate a clear value proposition in an AI-augmented workplace will have a significant advantage over those who don’t.
This is new territory, and it requires guidance from someone who is actively tracking it. At Career Counseling Connecticut, AI-era career readiness is now a core component of our work with every college-age client.
A Word to Parents of College Juniors and Seniors
If you’re a parent reading this, you’ve already invested enormously in your child’s education. Tuition. Room and board. Years of support through high school, the college application process, and the transition to campus life.
The return on that investment depends significantly on what happens in the last two years of college and the first two years after graduation. This is not the moment to assume that things will sort themselves out. For some students they do. For many they don’t — not quickly, and not without real cost.
Professional career counseling for your college junior or senior is among the highest-leverage investments you can make at this stage. The cost is modest relative to what’s already been spent. The potential impact — on trajectory, on confidence, on the quality of the life your child builds — is substantial.
Career Counseling Connecticut Is Here to Help
We work with college juniors and seniors throughout Connecticut and the tri-state area, as well as students attending college elsewhere who are from Connecticut families. Our counseling is personal, experienced, and grounded in 25 years of helping young people find their footing.
If your student is approaching junior or senior year without a clear sense of direction, now is the right time to have a different kind of conversation.
Career drift is not inevitable. With the right guidance, it’s entirely avoidable