Career Interview Research Paper

“I just messed up. Here I was, runner up to the valedictorian and the Eli Lilly scholarship, and I had just thrown it all away to party. I just hated myself for blowing my chance,” This quote from my career interview with Justin explains very clearly the reason I chose to interview my cousin for this assignment: to explain the struggle between what you are and want to be. Justin Lanman, who was kicked out of Rose Hulman for failing grades and later graduated from the continuing studies program of Indiana University, is a 32-year-old male works at Cook Medical and lives at home with his parents due to an accumulation of loan and credit card debt. Throughout this paper, I will detail my career interview with Justin and try to do him justice in

Justin is a 32-year-old male who works at Cook Medical as a biomedical engineer, his dream job. There, he develops new forms of medicine, working mostly Monday through Friday with variability in when he goes to or comes home from work. However, the journey to obtaining it was not so easy. Growing up, he was an only child with two working parents, neither of which went to college. His mother, who was always there when he had chicken pox or needed a ride home from school, was only a grocery store clerk. In fact, one of his earliest memories has to be when he had chicken pox in preschool and his mother let him wade in a kitty pool all day in the backyard, leaving him burnt to a crisp along with being spotted with itchy bumps. But, in the end, his father played a very influential role on his choice to go to college and be a biomedical engineer. His father, who never had the chance to go to college, has worked for many years at a company called TASUS where he helps fine-tune and develop product line. He loves his job, getting to travel to Japan, China, etc. Having this influential role model, who worked very hard at something he never dreamed of doing, formed an important part of his self-concept, letting him know that career is better if you enjoy

In short, this theory states that career development is determined by multiple factors (e.g., interests, abilities, values, environmental factors) (Zunker, 2016), These factors determine what experiences people partake in, and, in turn, these experiences (good and bad) determine self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and personal goals (Zunker, 2016). Self-efficacy is an individual’s beliefs about his or her ability to successfully perform a certain action (Zunker, 2016). In general, self-efficacy is strengthened with the individual has successful career experiences (Zunker, 2016). This strengthening leads to more positive outcome expectations (e.g., this next job will be good because the last one was) and supports personal goals (Zunker, 2016). Overall, this theory states that an individual’s career development can be improved by increasing exposure to successful career-related learning experiences and by improving self-efficacy (Zunker,