April 8, 2024 · CUNY School of Professional Studies Student Leadership Conference
In April 2024, I presented “Career to Calling: Leveraging Passion Projects for Career and Professional Development” as part of the 2024 CUNY School of Professional Studies Student Leadership Conference.
The conference centered on mentorship and networking, with sessions on career preparation, professional development, mentorship, and student leadership. My workshop focused on a question that came up often in my career-services work: how do students translate the things they care about and build outside a formal job description into evidence of skills, direction, and professional value?
From passion projects to professional narratives
The session was designed as an interactive workshop rather than a lecture. Participants worked through ways to connect personal projects and interests to a coherent professional story, then apply that story across the places where employers and professional contacts actually encounter them.
The workshop covered LinkedIn and personal branding, strategic networking, resume development, elevator pitches, and responses to common interview questions. The emphasis was not on making a passion project sound more “professional” by stripping away what made it meaningful. It was on identifying the skills, decisions, initiative, research, collaboration, and persistence already embedded in that work—and learning how to communicate those things clearly.
Career development as translation
One of the ideas behind the workshop was that career development is often an act of translation. Students may already be doing work that demonstrates leadership, analysis, creativity, technical skill, communication, or project management without recognizing it as experience they can use in a resume, interview, or networking conversation.
Hands-on activities gave participants space to practice that translation in real time: connecting interests to skills, shaping an elevator pitch, strengthening a professional narrative, and thinking more intentionally about how LinkedIn relationships can support longer-term growth.
A student-leadership conference built around connection
CUNY SPS’s sixth annual Student Leadership Conference ran from April 8–11, 2024 as a student-organized series of eight virtual events focused on mentorship and networking. In its later conference recap, CUNY SPS reported approximately 100 students participating across the webinars.
For me, the session also captures a through-line in my work: building practical learning experiences that make complicated professional processes more legible, more usable, and easier for participants to act on immediately.
View the 2024 CUNY SPS Student Leadership Conference feature
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