What are you going to do with your life?

(Apparently we’re very fond of that particular title for a blahg post.)

It’s still May, so that means more mining of commencement speech material…

Last weekend, Dean Bruner at Darden gave a perhaps more dean-ly speech than the ones about “risk” that have been percolating around at other bschools. He talked about the perennial graduate question, “Have you got a job yet?” and offered his take on what’s really underlying that: “Have you found your vocation?”

It’s worth reading. In the middle it’s got the requisite pumping up of Darden alumni who’ve done great things after leaving their school, which you can skim over (interesting but not quite so relevant for anyone not sitting in the audience that day). The beginning is the good part.

The process that we subject our victims to use with our new clients in developing a platform or theme or whatever you want to call it for the bschool application first focuses on career goals. This is convenient since (ahem) many schools also coincidentally want to know what your career goals are. However this is often a complicated task and the simple exercise that we ask new clients to complete frequently bogs them down in overwhelm.

It is so simple. What do you want to do with your life?

And it so often stops Brave Supplicants in their tracks.

We’ll be coming back to this on a regular basis. Career goals are critical for a successful application at most schools. The vocation part — what is your “calling” — is also a big part of why EssaySnark does this for a living. It’s our vocation to help people achieve the greatest success that they can, both professionally and personally (yes we have an agenda). Discovering and realizing your “calling” should be a big part of the bschool application process and the entire journey to your MBA. This isn’t just about writing essays. It’s about what are you going to do for the world.

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Updated August 2012: There’s an app for that! The Career Goals App Accelerator, to be exact (no it’s not an iPhone app, sorry). We won’t tell you what you want to do with your life — that’s for you to figure out — but we will tell you if what you’ve decided on makes sense and is believable, given who you are and what you’ve done in the past.