2025 Career and Life Design workshop
"What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
Yesterday I joined UTS Careers for their Career and Life Design workshop, a fast-paced, hands-on event inspired by Stanford’s life design framework.
As a first-year Business student (and someone who's already completed a fine arts degree), I'm constantly thinking about the future. What do I want to major in? What path will give me a fulfilling life and career? With AI shifting the landscape and endless possibilities in front of me, I’ve been craving a structured way to figure it all out.
This workshop gave me just that. A toolkit of mindsets and methods to approach the “wicked problem” of life and career planning.
One activity really stayed with me: we were asked to map three possible five-year timelines. One based on our current plan, one based on a completely different path, and one dream version with no limits. What surprised me most was that my current path was my dream. I struggled to come up with a more “ideal” version, which left me with mixed feelings. Gratitude, but also frustration. Was I thinking too literally? Was my autism making it harder to step outside the box? These moments can be challenging, especially when open-ended tasks are involved. But they’re also part of the process.
Another standout moment came when we prototyped alternative futures. I explored an old interest of mine: becoming a life coach. I’ve always been the one friends go to for advice. Observant, direct, and driven by patterns. So I put the idea to the room. We wrote open-ended career questions on butcher’s paper and moved around adding our own answers to other's questions. Mine was: How do I become a life coach, and what should a life coach know? Some of the responses? “Try seeing a life coach yourself” and my favourite: “Offer free life advice on Alumni Green.”
This exercise captured the essence of radical collaboration, one of the core mindsets we explored. As someone who thrives on independent work, group discussions can be overwhelming. But this was different. Thoughtful. Organised. Inclusive. Hearing a range of perspectives, from law students to biomedical students, helped me see new angles I wouldn’t have considered alone.
And that’s the magic of life design. It’s not about figuring out your one perfect future. It’s about staying curious, taking small steps, and building confidence in your process even when it feels messy.
Huge thanks to the UTS Career's team and facilitators who made this space feel so welcoming and thoughtful. You gave all of us the chance to reflect, connect, and test out possibilities in a way that felt both personal and powerful.
If you’re someone who thinks about the big picture, I highly recommend this workshop.