UVA Launches Career Design Initiative

Career uncertainty is one of the most universal stressors for college students—especially as artificial intelligence, loan debt and an increasingly unpredictable labor market reshape what it means to prepare for work.

In response, the University of Virginia’s College of Arts and Sciences is embedding career design directly into the undergraduate experience.

Building on a redesigned pre-major advising model that raised student satisfaction in its annual survey from 64 percent to 89 percent in under two years, the college is launching the Career Design and Discovery Initiative, a collegewide effort to integrate advising, academics and experiential learning for all students.

Christa Acampora, UVA’s dean of arts and sciences, said the broader goal is to move away from a service model and toward a more blended approach.

“How do we meet the person as a whole learner and not just somebody who needs a set of services?” Acampora said. “We have such a large and beautifully complex, exciting and fascinating set of academic offerings for students, and really our academic advisers needed to be in a position to teach students how to discover what those opportunities are.”

As concerns grow about how AI could disrupt entry-level jobs and reshape early career pathways, Acampora said the initiative is designed to help students better connect their academic interests to hands-on experiences—from internships and research to community engagement.

“As AI becomes more prevalent in the workplace and more capable of performing certain tasks that have traditionally been entry points into the labor market, students who can think through complexity and exercise genuine human judgment, imagination and creativity will stand out,” Acampora said.

Those qualities, she added, are central to a liberal arts education.

“The capacity for judgment, our ability to exercise ethical imagination—these are specifically human characteristics, and they aren’t simply skills that get taught,” she said. “In that respect, I see the future as bringing wisdom back—as old-fashioned as that sounds—because that’s exactly what we’re going to need.”

Inside the rollout: Julia Lapan, the college’s senior assistant dean and inaugural executive director of career design and discovery, said the effort will begin with the first-year experience and expand from there.

“If colleges and universities really believe it is important for students to graduate career ready, then career readiness needs to be integrated into the student and academic experience,” Lapan said. “It really takes a village to support students’ career success—it can’t just be this small but mighty team from the career center.”

Lapan said she will draw on her experience building a similar career design model at UVA’s School of Engineering. The effort began as a two-credit course called Engineering Your Future before expanding into a broader redesign of the school’s first-year curriculum.

“This work is about changing the culture of an institution,” Lapan said. “A lot of what I did in the School of Engineering was building relationships across the ecosystem—with faculty, department chairs, staff in academic departments and those leading co-curricular programs.”

“My aim was to help everyone understand that preparing students for life after graduation is a shared mission,” she added.

Lapan said that—combined with the college’s pre-major advising overhaul—provides the infrastructure to scale a meaningful career design framework.

Acampora agreed, adding that the advising overhaul offered a blueprint for scaling the new initiative across a college that enrolls three-quarters of the university’s undergraduates.

“One of the things that we learned from the advising transformation was the ability to connect to that full-year academic experience—that was our mechanism for getting to scale, really on a dime,” Acampora said. “As I thought about the challenges and opportunities ahead for introducing career support for students, the need to scale was really top of mind.”

Rethinking career readiness: Acampora said what distinguishes the initiative is its commitment to reaching every student—not piloting small programs or adding optional workshops.

“What I think is pretty distinctive, if not entirely unique, about what we’re doing is we’ve built what we’re doing around our capacities for implementation at full scale,” Acampora said. “Incremental is not acceptable to me, one-off is not acceptable to me, and that access piece is so important.”

Lapan echoed that sentiment, describing the initiative as a shift in how students think about their futures—from career planning to career design.

“The reason I like that so much is because designing your career is a human-centered process—it involves understanding who you are, who you want to become and how you want to impact the world,” Lapan said.

Ultimately, she said, the goal is not simply stronger job placement numbers, but a reimagined undergraduate experience.

“What I’m hoping is that we can become a model for other institutions on how to really, truly support students—both in their academic learning and their career preparation—and to do it in a way that reaches everyone,” Lapan said. “It’s a Herculean effort, but it’s possible.”

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