Arts & Sciences Launches Innovative Career Design and Discovery Initiative for Undergrads

Graduates of the University of Virginia’s College of Arts & Sciences go on to realize professional success across every imaginable career path. In 2025, LinkedIn ranked UVA as the No. 1 public university in the U.S. for graduates' long-term career success and #12 overall.

The College’s launch of a new career design and discovery initiative will further boost students’ success from their earliest days on Grounds. Those success stories begin with a 21st-century liberal arts and sciences curriculum designed to hone students’ critical capacities for deliberation, discovery and imagination, providing a wide-ranging base of knowledge and capabilities that prepare them to flourish in the future world of work.

Thanks to the generosity of College alumni, who are eager to support the next generation of Wahoos in discovering their passions and connecting them with possibilities, Arts & Sciences is able to deepen its investment in its students’ futures through a new initiative to expand experiential learning and career exploration. The effort will be led by Julia Lapan, a university expert in innovative career and professional development programming, recently recruited through a highly competitive national search as the Office of Undergraduate Education’s inaugural executive director of career design and discovery.

The creation of Lapan’s new role in the College reflects a commitment to ensuring that every student in the College has the resources and opportunities to connect their academic journeys with their post-graduation possibilities, said Christa Acampora, Buckner W. Clay Professor of Philosophy and dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

“The leadership that Julia offers will be essential to our ambitions of strengthening how we prepare students for lives of meaning and purpose in a rapidly changing world,” Acampora said. “Liberal arts and sciences students have the greatest variety of opportunities after they graduate — supporting students in recognizing those opportunities and developing in ways that they can realize them is intrinsic to what a liberal arts education offers, so this is truly part of our mission.”

Avenues for exploration and opportunity

The A&S Career Design and Discovery Initiative aims to connect students’ academic learning with avenues for career exploration and professional development opportunities, including internships, research, study abroad programs and community engagement.

Lapan’s recruitment builds on the College’s launch last year of a re-designed pre-major advising system that matches incoming students with advising fellows who also serve as instructors of the Engagements, small, seminar-style courses that introduce the College’s first-year students to the liberal arts and sciences.

“Julia’s leadership role reflects A&S’s commitment to ensuring that career discernment, experiential learning, and advising are fully integrated into the undergraduate experience — not as add-ons, but as core elements of how students navigate their academic journeys,” said Judy Giering, associate dean for undergraduate affairs.

Lapan joined the College after working the last 11 years in UVA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, where she was credited with building a career development program that embedded career planning into that school’s first-year curriculum, strengthened alumni and employer engagement and built partnerships with faculty to connect academic learning to student success.

Lapan said she looks forward to working closely with the College’s academic departments, Advising Fellows, the University’s Career Center and other University partners to ensure that every A&S student can identify paths and opportunities in preparation for life beyond UVA.

“We are building an ecosystem to support student success holistically,” said Lapan, who holds master’s and doctoral degrees from UVA, as well as a bachelor’s degree from the College of the Holy Cross, where she also ran track and cross country. “Career design and discovery is a framework, a way that we can encourage students to approach their careers in a human-centered way. It differs from career planning in that career planning is often approached as a linear process where a student will develop a career goal, write a resume, go out and interview, and then land a job.

“We're teaching students to think about their careers in a new way. We are encouraging them to lean into their curiosities, to try and discover new things, to lean into their human connections,” Lapan said. “We look at it as a process of inquiry about learning about oneself, learning about the world, and then also discovering one's place in the world.”

In an ever involving and increasingly complex world, Lapan said, integrating career design and discovery in a liberal arts education has never been more essential.

“We want our students in the College to pursue their curiosities and engage their imaginations,” she said. “Lean into the liberal arts and the humanities, and at the same time, we want them to be building the skills, the insights and the connections they need to go out into the world and have a positive impact on society.”