The Guide.

Most people spend the summer before college doing nothing with it. A few hours of preparation now will open doors you won't even know exist until sophomore year.

Why you're here.

College is where you have fun, meet people from everywhere, grow into yourself, and build a network that will serve you for the rest of your life. All of that is real and all of it matters.

But college is also about getting a job. That's the part nobody says out loud — and it's the most important part.

It doesn't have to happen right after graduation. For some people it's grad school first, then the career. That's a valid path. But in this economy, you need to be thinking about what you want to do when you leave — what you want to major in, what roles exist in that field, what the path actually looks like. Every professional and educational decision you make in college should connect back to that. Not because college is only a career pipeline, but because the students who leave with options are the ones who were intentional about it while they were there.

Too many people come out of college saying it wasn't worth it. A lot of the time, the real issue isn't college — it's that nobody guided them through it. No one in their family had gone. There was no access to the information that tells you which clubs to join, when internship applications open, how to talk to a professor, what a referral actually does. The guardrails that some people grow up with just weren't there.

That's what this is. We're not here to tell you what to do with your life — what you pursue is entirely your choice. We're here to give you the blueprint to do it well.

Build your LinkedIn before you step on campus.

Add everything you did in high school — clubs, leadership positions, awards, programs, anything. Don't leave it blank because you think you don't have enough yet. You do. Write a bio that talks about what you care about and where you're headed. If you wrote personal insight questions or a personal statement for your college applications, use those as your starting point — you already did the work of articulating who you are and what drives you. Carry that into your LinkedIn.

Start your resume now.

Fill it out with your high school experience — clubs, leadership roles, awards, extracurriculars, any work you did. This is your foundation. As you build experience in college you'll replace things, but right now having a clean, well-formatted resume before freshman year puts you ahead of most of your classmates. We have a template — use it, make a copy, and keep it updated.

Reach out to people at your school doing careers that interest you.

Go on LinkedIn. Search your university. Filter by people working in fields that look interesting. Send a short, direct message — introduce yourself, say you're an incoming freshman, tell them what you're curious about, and ask if they'd be willing to share how they got there. Keep it to three sentences.

Start with people who share something with you — same hometown, same background, same first-generation experience. They're more likely to respond. That said, reach out to anyone doing work you want to understand. The goal is to learn what these careers actually look like day to day.