Noah Simon, director of UAlbany's Career Center, is not afraid of uncertainty and preaches curiosity. He offers practical advice on beginning your career exploration early, how to stay calm, ask good questions, stack valuable experiences and figure out what you were meant to do, which might surprise you.
We couldn’t interview the director of UAlbany’s Career Center without asking him for his top tips on how to approach career exploration — or re-exploration if you find yourself changing careers.
Here’s Noah’s list of must-dos:
Noah also had an interesting perspective on how the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of in-person professional exposure and experience — and why even people who embrace the comfort and flexibility of hybrid work benefit from being in the office.
He also noted that many people's objections to return-to-work directives may be more about their aversion to commuting than actually working in a traditional office environment.
Here’s what Noah had to say in a part of our conversation that didn’t make the final edit.
With remote or virtual work becoming more widely accepted since COVID, have you seen this shift in students’ or even just young professionals’ understanding an office space or office dynamics or even company dynamics?
NS: There’s a lot of talk that offices are bringing people back five days a week. Meanwhile everyone I talk to is not going back five days a week. What's funny is the biggest complaints I heard during COVID from students was those students who I think we thought would actually enjoy the work from home, they did not want it. The ones I talked to were like, “No, I'm looking for mentorship in the office. I have questions. I'm looking for advice. No one's around.” And I think that was a real struggle because again, you and I being able to sit across the table here from each other, the conversation's very different than if it were through a computer. And so for our students, I talked to a bunch who said, “I'm going into the office, and I'm walking around and it's ghost town.” For a lot of them, that opportunity to be in the office, to connect with a mentor, to ask questions, to get immediate answers has really benefited them.
Don't get me wrong. Once they're situated, they love their hybrid. For most people I find it's not actually going to the office. It's getting to the office. Once I'm at the office all good. It's the act of actually getting to the office, and I commute about 45 minutes. Once I'm here, great. Most people I know are still on a hybrid schedule.
Noah mentioned several other important resources in our conversation. Here’s how you can find them:
UAlbany Career and Professional Development Center
Handshake, a professional networking site that students can access with their UAlbany Single Sign-on
The calendar of upcoming Job & Internship Fairs
Students can make appointments with Career Advisors using EAB/Navigate
Research and interview by Amy Geduldig
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman
Photos by Patrick Dodson
Written and hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
[0:01] Host: Welcome to The Short Version, the UAlbany podcast that tackles big ideas, big questions and big news in less time than it takes to cross the Academic Podium. I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist in UAlbany's Office of Communications and Marketing.
[0:17] Noah Simon: When you say, “I want to help people,” people say, “Oh, you should go into either health care or teach.” So after college I tried substitute teaching. What did I learn? I wasn't a teacher.
[0:30] Host: Many students arrive at college thinking they need to have it all figured out. Choose a major, pick a career, ascend like a rocket. But it doesn't always happen that way in the real world. Some launches are scratched. Some would-be rocket scientists decide that they want to be social workers instead. Changing direction, second-guessing yourself or realizing the path that you thought led to your future was just a colorful detour, these are formative moments as important as anything students learn in the classroom.
Noah Simon, director of UAlbany's Career Center, knows this because he lived it.
In this week's episode, my colleague Amy Geduldig spoke to Noah about how students can embrace uncertainty and turn the anxiousness of the exploration into opportunity. Noah was determined to make it big in the markets, but he quickly realized he was not, in fact, destined to be a Wolf of Wall Street — a turning point that ultimately led him to career counseling.
After 20 years working with thousands of students, he's learned that building a career isn't about having everything figured out. It's about testing ideas, trying new things and learning what fits and what doesn't. Noah has practical advice for students and their families — how to make the job search feel less overwhelming, why your major should be a starting point rather than a destination and how internships and experiential learning help students stand out to employers. Whether you're just beginning college, preparing to graduate, advising an anxious student or in the middle of a career transition yourself, Noah suggests starting early, staying curious and mapping a career that reflects who you are, not who you think you should be.
Here's Amy and Noah's conversation.
[2:24] AG: What did you go to college for?
[2:26] ] Noah Simon: Any guesses? Someone who's been in career work his whole life?
[2:30] AG: I mean, imagining it was something vastly different.
[2:33] Noah Simon: I have an economics degree. Until my senior year of college, I was interviewing for jobs on Wall Street.
[2:39] AG: And what did you want to be when you —
[2:40] Noah Simon: Oh, I thought investment banking. Grew up in Westchester, said I'm going to go off to college. I went way up north, said, “Here, I'm going to come back. I'm going to get this economics degree. I'm going to go down to the city and that's what I'm going to do. And I was interviewing for these jobs, taking the train into the city from my town, and I was like, “This is not what I was meant to do.” And there were students around me who were eating it up. They loved it. This is what they wanted. And I was like, I might not be in the right rooms. But for me, I was like, what am I good at? I'm good at connecting with people. I'm good at helping people. Went full circle, got a master's in counseling, and I was like, this makes sense to me.
[3:19] AG: For those who are sort of struggling and still trying to figure out what paths they're interested in or where they want to go, how should they go about thinking about this their freshman year when they're still sort of figuring out exactly who they are and where they want to go?
[3:25] Noah Simon: We often start students with one of the career assessments. I always tell people I took all those career assessments. Every single one said the exact same thing. It said, you should teach and you should coach. And I was like, oh, that's great, but I can't teach and coach. And why couldn't I teach and coach? Not enough money. Here we are 25 years later, what do I do for a living? I teach and coach. So there's truth in whatever it tells you. And then often I'll take a student who says, “I know I want to study English.” Okay, start to talk about what problems do you want to solve with it. But then you can go into our UAlbany career advisory network or our UCAN system or LinkedIn. I can go into Linkedin and I can say, show me all the UAlbany alums. Show me the ones that studied English.
And now you're starting to explore all these individuals just from a career exploration point to say, “OK, they leveraged an English degree into whatever it might be.” I'm a big sports fan and we have alums in many levels of sports. I get high school students who I know through my son, he’s a senior, and they're like, “I want to study sports management.” And the majority of people working in sports do not have sports management degrees. In today’s day it's data analytics. But we have individuals who worked with the New York Jets. I'm a Jets fan, unfortunately. I'm getting mocked endlessly by whoever's on this listening, but the individual who ran tickets for them was an alum of ours. He had a history degree. We have another individual there who runs all their e-commerce — communications degree. So understanding what spaces do I want to work in? What industries, what interests, what are my passions?
For me, it was I really like colleges. I always knew this. OK, what careers exist? And if you ask a student — and I'll go into classrooms, I'll talk to students — I'll say, who works here at a university? Professors, 99 percent of the time. Who else works at a university? Maintenance and facilities — the three people they see the most on a daily basis. But when you start to peel it back with them and they start to say what they're interested in, you'll hear marketing, you're here legal. You'll hear finance, you'll hear all these careers. And I say, do they exist here? Yes. Starting to get students to understand that most companies are made up of multiple parts of course is a huge piece. Where does that career, where does that function exist? What industries would you like to see and work in is critical. So marrying all that together,
[5:52] AG: What are their first steps in sort of going down that road to getting an internship or an opportunity?
[5:58] Noah Simon: Understanding what they're actually targeting for starters. Where, what am I studying? What are some of the options with this degree? What skills am I building? Do I understand what this organization is? Am I ready to interview? Can I connect with — do we have any alums at that organization? Is there anyone there I can network with to learn firsthand? What does this position look like? And I always tell people, if you were looking to get into the work I'm doing, you could talk to me. I'm going to tell you what it's like to work at UAlbany. You talk to one of my counterparts at a different school, they could be having a very different experience. So understanding what the role looks like in that organization and start early. And I tell students right when they get in as a first-year, take an hour a week, carve out an hour in your schedule.
I know for many of you, you've got the time. Carve out an hour in the week to do career-related [work], whether it's come with an advisor in our office, you're working on your LinkedIn, you're cleaning up your resume, you're applying for jobs, you're doing an informational interview. There's a million things you could be doing in the career space. You're meeting with a professor to learn more about their research, more about their work. Take the time to connect and do the career work so that when we get to the point of I'm ready to go, I'm ready for this opportunity, it's not trying to tackle it all at once.
[7:13] AG: What are the misconceptions that you're finding people have about getting an internship or what an experience might look like?
[7:21] Noah Simon: Even if you have a goal of where you want to be, there's smaller organizations, there's local companies. Everyone seems to target the shiny name brand that they recognize, “oh, I'm using my iPhone or whatever it is.” Good. Incredibly competitive. And do we have alums there? Absolutely. But there's opportunities at many, many organizations to gain experience. And truthfully, some of those smaller ones that you might not think about are going to give you more access, they're going to give you more hands-on opportunity. You're going to get to wear more hats. And we see it with students all the time. They'll go to a smaller organization where they're like, “I got to sit in a marketing meeting. And then I was talking to HR and then I was learning about accounting.” That opportunity, because what a lot of students are going to learn is they're going to get into these opportunities, these experiential opportunities and realize, “Wait a minute, this isn't where I want to be. I thought this was what I wanted to do, but now that I'm seeing it day to day, this isn't where I should be.” And we'd much rather you learn that in your freshman year than senior year say, “OK, this isn't where I thought I was.”
[8:27] AG: So would you say that that's one of the main points of having these opportunities is the ability to not just find out what you want to do, but also find out what you don't want to do before you have to launch into a career?
[8:40] Noah Simon: Absolutely. I make the joke often: You'd be hard pressed to find a student sitting in a classroom here at UAlbany who's sitting there saying, “I can't wait to graduate so I can launch my career towards being the director of a college career center.” I haven't met that student yet. If you're out there, come talk to me. Did I think this is where I would be at this point? No. It's a wonderful opportunity — thrilled to find it — but people don't know what they don't know. When I talk to most of our students when they come in, they're going to be doctors, they're going to be lawyers, they're going to be teachers, they're going to be engineers. And then a few other things. Well, careers are evolving. And I think that's one of the misperceptions is understanding what the nature of work is, what careers are out there, what opportunities are going to present themselves. And we see that changing every day. Obviously the influx of AI into the work we're doing. And I always tell students, when you're doing informational interviews, how has AI changed the nature of your work? How has your work changed since COVID? Understand where that organization is going, where that job is going, because you want to be gaining the relevant skills needed to be successful.
[9:47] AG: And so how has experiential learning evolved over, say, the past several years? It seems to have shifted a bit.
[9:54] Noah Simon: It's really shifted. I graduated in 1999 from college. At that time, you went to your classes, you listened. If one of your friends had an internship, you were shocked. You walked across the stage, you grabbed a piece of paper and you walked into a really good market. That's not what we're doing these days. Now it’s: I need to incorporate what I'm learning in the classroom into hands-on. I need to be able to explore. I need to be able to gain skills because it is a tremendously competitive market, and employers are looking for those students who have those opportunities, and it doesn't just have to be internships. You're at an R1 university. So many of your professors are doing incredible research. Are you connecting with those professors to learn about that? What's your engagement with on the community service side. Did you study abroad? There's so many ways to gain experiences.
Look, and a lot of it you can do just on your own. Are you getting certificates online? There's micro internships. There are so many opportunities. What is a struggle is to think that I'm going to go to four years of classes, get a piece of paper, and there's going to be a job waiting. So much has to go into it before. And what we're seeing, and we've seen the shift here, is really an influx of that experiential learning into the curriculum. And that's where everyone is headed is how do I weave career internships, experiential opportunities into the curriculum?
[11:15] AG: And how can students prepare for that experiential learning? What are the tools or the tips that you provide for them?
[11:23] Noah Simon: There's a lot here, and I think often what you're hearing a lot of is students have to have experiential opportunity, they have to have internships, and it's all true. What we often quickly move over is there's a lot of work needed to get the student ready for the internship, to get to the interview, to get to that place of being in an organization and understanding that professionalism. So all the prep work that goes in in terms of preparing, and that's the work our team does of course, as well as the helping get there, is understanding what are the options? What are the careers? What are the organizations? How do I write my resume? How do I actually prepare? I've never interviewed in my life. Can I talk to someone in this field? All the pieces that ultimately get you to that experiential opportunity so you're prepared and understand what the expectations are, how to gain feedback, how to excel in that opportunity is critical.
[12:17] AG: What are the challenges that you're seeing that students are having in finding these experiences or these skills that they are looking for?
[12:25] Noah Simon: One, you’ve got to start early. You got to make your mistakes early. You've got to be prepared. Two, they don't know how to go through the process. Three, it's an incredibly competitive market, which I don't think everyone quite understands, even within — if you're sitting in a classroom at a 400 level, look around, I hate to tell you, those are the people you're going to be competing with for opportunity. And understanding what they're looking for. Career is not something everyone understands. It's not everyone's like, “Oh, I write a resume.” Well, is that resume even targeted? Is it speaking to a certain audience? Are you networking? Are you making those connections? So the learned skills. How are you doing a job search? And yes, we are incorporating AI and ChatGPT into this process. We're going to lean into those skills. And so one of the mistakes is just waiting and thinking that miraculously, after all this is done, there'll be a job waiting for me. Could there be? Yes, if you've done the right things and gained skills, connected with your professors, done the research. You have to be developing your marketing.
[13:25] AG: You clearly have a lot of passion for it. What excites you the most about where this is going and what the University is doing to support our students in the future?
[12:35] Noah Simon: What keeps jobs and my job exciting is the opportunity to keep learning. So as new careers pop up and I'm trying to stay current, I love talking to students, and there's times I'm learning from students. They're telling me about these opportunities they're taking on, and I'm like, “That is fascinating.” I love what we're doing in a lot of those AI spaces. I love this more career-experiential focus. It gets me very excited because it also is a way to incorporate so many organizations into what we're doing. It's a way to bring back alums who want to get more involved and say, “Hey, I can give advice.” And when you see people doing really interesting work and understanding why they're doing it and the real problems they're solving. One of the things I hear often from employers and I hear from alums, what they love to see in students is curiosity. Are you asking questions? What kind of questions are you asking? One, you did research, but two, there's curiosity about what we're doing. Why are we doing it? Where are we headed with this work? What problems is it solving? And that's one of my favorite questions, whether I'm in a meeting here or I'm advising students, is to what problem is this solving?
[14:45] AG: What problem are we solving?
[14:48] Noah Simon: The problem we're solving right now is a changing job market and keeping our students on par for that. The skills needed for the next generation of workers is where we're trying to keep up to; it’s making sure our students are ready to take on the roles of 2030, 2040, 2050. That's the problem we're solving. Are we setting our students up both in the classroom and in the world of work to be curious, to attain the skills needed, to understand what it's like to work in a professional environment. Those are some of the real problems I think we're solving.
[15:25] AG: Where should students go if they want to get this information?
[15:28] Noah Simon: So our website's a great starting point, of course, and it's curated to each student. So when they sign up with us, it's going to pull in jobs from Handshake right onto their homepage that are going to be curated to what they're looking for. Our website is very targeted to our students, so they can do a lot of exploration there. But again, right there, you'll see schedule an appointment, meet with one of our career advisors. I can't emphasize enough how important it's to start this process early. For most students, what they set into college to do often changes down the line. The majority of people I know are not doing professionally what they thought they would be setting out to do.
[16:06] Host: That was Noah Simon, director of UAlbany's Career Center, sharing his advice on how students can make the most of their time in college to set themselves up for success after graduation.
If today's conversation has you thinking about your next step, the Career Center is a great place to start. You can find links to resources in The Longer Version, in our show notes, as well as Noah's take on what students really thought about working from home during COVID.
The Short Version would not be possible without contributions from many people, including research and writing by Amy Geduldig and audio production and editing by Scott Freedman in the UAlbany Digital Media studio, located deep inside Albany's podium tunnels and harder to find than your first internship.
We're pausing for Spring Break next week, so now's a great time to catch up on any episodes you might have missed. You can follow The Short Version and find all our episodes on Simplecast, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music.
We'll be back March 25th with another conversation about something interesting.
I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist here at the University at Albany, and this has been The Short Version.