Major decisions: when graduates find work outside their degrees

When Lauri Copenhaver was 18, she never expected her summer job at Michaels, a national chain of craft stores, would end up being her career of nearly 20 years.

At that point in her life, she had different plans.

“I wanted to move across the country and work as a tour manager for a country band,” she said. “I never did find a band to go manage, but it was what I wanted to do. Moving to Nashville seemed very glamorous.”

Copenhaver never made it to Nashville. Instead, wanting more than anything to get out of her small town, she satiated her parents’ wishes and started college at the University of Montana in the fall of 1998.

Enthusiastic and ready to succeed, she dove into a major she knew little about: business administration with an emphasis in management, a degree that steered her toward classes on accounting and entrepreneurship and learning how to run her own business. The major was an open-ended one, “generic” in Copenhaver’s words, but it acted as a solid placeholder for the college experience blooming around her.

The summer before she ever set foot on campus, however, she began working at Michaels, answering a mass hiring announcement at her hometown location. Nearly two decades later, Copenhaver is still working for the chain, running inventory management and buying products for the stores.

While bits and pieces of Copenhaver’s business degree find their way into her work, she said most of it falls by the wayside. However, to her, a career that challenges her and offers her new opportunities is far more valuable than the degree itself.

“It’s a company that lets you try different things. They want to expand your skill set. If you have career aspirations, they’ll help you build a development plan to try out different areas or aspects of the company…” she said. “The degree just filled that void of an 18-year-old pleasing her parents.”

Copenhaver is not unique in this disconnect between major and career. According to a 2013 study by Jaison Abel and Richard Deitz of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, only about 27 percent of American undergraduates go into careers related to their college major.

It’s a trend seen in career services offices across the country. The career departments at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State University all reported seeing a significant amount of students consistently find careers outside of their degree field.

To the departments’ career counselors, such as Mike Cahill, director of career services at Syracuse University, the pattern is familiar and welcome.

“There’re all sorts of reasons why people meander from what they studied in school…” Cahill said. “Basically, for the most part, when most people are between 18 and 22 years old, they don’t really know what they want to do, anyways. They have this image of what certain occupations are like or what people do in certain areas and it’s not always accurate.”

Cahill’s program is incredibly effective, reporting among the best job placement statistics in the country, according to higher education site Online Schools Center. When working with students, he focuses less on the specifics of their major and more on what they enjoy and excel in, what they want to do with those skills, and how they’re going to fulfill those goals.

Jawauna Harding of Oklahoma State University’s career services department takes a similar approach.

“When we’re talking to a student about post-graduation employment, really we’re trying to talk to them about not just the job after college, but the whole career. What are they looking to do in five or ten years from now? What do they see themselves enjoying for the rest of their life? And then hopefully finding a career path that follows that trajectory,” Harding said.

“For students that really are thinking ‘I don’t really want to take a job that I didn’t study for,’ it’s looking at the job by not just focusing on the title, but looking at the job function and what are you doing at that job that could potentially launch you in your career path,” she said.

The tendency is not equal across all majors, Harding said. Majors focusing on science, technology and math tend to be more specialized, propelling students into more specific, professional careers.

In fact, some of these instances are missing from Abel and Deitz’s findings. The census data propelling their study focused on undergraduate students, not graduates who are the future lawyers, doctors, and other specialists. To these careers, the degrees are vital.

Regardless, scientific or math oriented majors are not without their deviants, Cahill said. At his time at Syracuse, he’s seen many engineering undergraduates find interest in intellectual properties and enroll in law school. Others find their way to medical school, or end up in the higher ranks of business and management, he said. The desire to be flexible is not limited to certain majors.

To Cahill, the idea that major titles should be seen as strict guidelines for career paths is a disingenuous one. What students should use for direction is not major classifications, but why they sought that area of study in the first place.

“People get too caught up in the labels of things — names of occupations or the names of majors,” Cahill said. “If you break it down to why people actually pursue the majors that they’re pursuing, it’s more about some smaller parts. Engineers may like working with data and facts, like being able to solve a problem that improves something. It’s not ‘I want to be an engineer.’ It’s ‘I want to do that thing.’”

That’s not to say majors don’t matter, Harding said. Choosing a major sets a possible trajectory for the future, pointing students in the direction of a certain career field. And if they end up sticking to that field, the generally get a leg up, she said, even tending to make more money.

“However, that doesn’t always happen,” Harding said, referring to students finding jobs in their degree field. “So, then it’s (career services’) job to promote, and publish, and educate, and get out there and talk to students, and let them know that there are a lot of options out there … It’s really about who you are, your interests, what you value, and what you’re looking for in a position.”

This instance of flopped trajectory struck Laura Beesley, a musical theater major who moved to New York City to pursue acting after her graduation from the University at Buffalo in 2004. For more than six years, Beesley was the stereotype of the struggling yet determined artist, balancing auditions and improvisational comedy shows with her temp job at a financial company. Over time, however, the fatigue and instability began to wear her down. She began to consider different options.

“I think (the decision to stop auditioning) was gradual,” Beesley said. “When I was younger and in my early 20s, I was really passionate about being an artist. I think I was really young. The unfortunate thing about artistic life is it can be really hard and I don’t think my personality is situated for it. I like stability and I like to know what comes next.”

Beesley began working at her financial job full time, eventually networking her way into a position with the company’s human relations department. The job gave her a steady paycheck and insurance, a group of coworkers she enjoyed working with, and the stability to grow her young family. It quickly became not only a secure life, but also one she genuinely liked. She even performed improv comedy after work for four years. What was hard in the meantime, she said, was accepting that the direction she had taken was both normal and healthy.

“I definitely had a rough time adjusting. I felt like I had given up on what I had worked so hard for. I felt like I was walking away from something and I felt kind of like a failure — like, I went to school for this thing and I was going to make it work and it didn’t work…” Beesley said. “I no longer feel like that. I don’t feel like I failed. I just feel like I took a different path.”

For those that take these different paths, college is still worth the price of tuition. Both Beesley and Copenhaver praise not only the friendships and experiences that defined their time at their universities, but also the skills they learned through their classes.

Beesley credits her theater background for her ability to read a room and react quickly to the unexpected.

“As an actor, you’re walking into audition spaces where there’s always something crazy happening. Once I was singing a song in an audition, and the casting director dropped his breakfast on the floor and I had to keep going,” Beesley said. “Being thrown those curveballs was so common to me as an actor that in the corporate world, nothing really phases me.”

Copenhaver has bounced between a myriad of professions throughout her career at Michaels, moving from her college cashier and sales associate positions to assistant manager, merchandising, inventory management, and fulfillment systems. To her, a degree is less a certificate of lessons learned and more proof of an excellent work ethic.

“It’s not always about the formal education,” Copenhaver said. “I’ve had bosses say, ‘That piece of paper shows us that you committed to something and you followed through with it. We know you can do that.’”

As far as Cahill and Harding have seen, Beesley and Copenhaver’s experiences also reflect what employers are looking for.

“What tends to make people successful in their careers is less about what they know, than about who they are and what they can do very well,” Cahill said. “It really comes down to being able to communicate effectively. Being able to analyze data and information and come up with a conclusion. Critical thinking, being able to break something down and put it back together and understand it a little better or a little differently. It’s problem solving and leadership skills. Those are the skills that make people successful.”

“We hear (praise for those skills) from employers,” he said. “Sure employers want the engineer that has the 4.0, but they also have to be able to talk to people. They have to take initiative. They have to be able to communicate. They have to be able to write. They’re still emphasizing the soft skills.”

As for Beesley and Copenhaver, both are looking toward new opportunities. Beesley is searching for another company — one with a better leadership — but has no plans to leave human relations. Copenhaver, on the other hand, is content with Michaels, where she’ll soon enter her 19th year as an employee. She welcomes the new opportunities in front of her, just as she always has.

“If there’s one thing in life, the only constant is change. There could be an opportunity that presents itself next week … I tend to have an open mind and am not so locked down into only doing one thing,” Copenhaver said. “I truly haven’t decided what I want to do when I grow up.”