Breaking Down Barriers to Find Career Clarity
Stories from four students who benefitted from the Dartmouth Center for Career Design funding
College is a time for exploration, self-discovery, and learning. Ideally, students emerge with a degree and aspirations for what they want to do with it. Often, these realizations come outside the classroom, during internships that provide invaluable networking opportunities and conversations with people in the working world.
The Dartmouth Center for Career Design is an on-campus hub designed to facilitate those experiences. Among its multiple responsibilities, the center aims to provide students with critical real-world opportunities that will help them to define their career paths.
Experience can come with a hefty price tag, though—accommodations, commuting costs, and other living expenses—and without a stipend or an hourly wage, internships and volunteer work can quickly become non-options for students.
The Center for Career Design works to ensure that doesn’t happen, and these four students can testify to that. Meet Grace Caldwell ’26, Rachel Hall ’26, Vedant Tapiavala ’26, and Oumie Fatty-Hydara ’27, who shared how the Center for Career Design funding enabled them to pursue their passions and clarify their futures.
Grace Caldwell ’26
Grace wanted an internship but was concerned about supporting herself doing her sophomore winterim term—a short, six-week period inconvenient for finding employment.
She had an array of interests she wanted to explore, including a fascination with anthropology and education. The winterim term offered an opportunity explore one of those interests, to determine what could be the right fit, and what kinds of jobs might exist that she didn’t even know about yet.
Grace had experience in a traditional classroom setting, having served as a summer teaching fellow in a San Francisco school the year prior. While there, she stumbled onto a new career avenue entirely.
“Someone shared they wanted to be a teacher for incarcerated students, and I never considered that being a part of education or in this field.”
After a resume-refining session with the Center for Career Design, Grace cold-called a jail in her Oregon county to ask about an internship working with its incarcerated students—an opportunity to explore a passion, gain career experience, and give back to her community, all at no cost to the county.
For six weeks, Grace entered the jail through its intricate security process, sat down with students—of any age, speaking any first language, facing incarceration for any length of time—and tried to meet them where they were. She built connections with students, found ways to engage them with core subject material, and left with a newfound understanding of herself, her students, and what she hopes to do.
Grace’s volunteer work in Oregon exposed her to the world of juvenile justice and education, bolstered her confidence and motivation, and, ultimately, empowered her to continue exploring this path. She plans on working with incarcerated students again, this time at a jail in Washington, D.C. “My internship experience made me realize that I can seek out alternative pathways for myself.”
Rachel Hall ’26
Rachel knew she wanted to be a veterinarian since she was eight years old. She declared a biology major with a minor in environmental sciences and immediately pursued the pre-veterinarian track. But “vet,” she quickly realized, encompasses many potential avenues—specific to certain species, environments, or treatment types.
When she started her Biology 11 class, she didn’t know what kind of vet she wanted to be—but as soon as the class visited the Kilham Bear Center in Lyme, New Hampshire, she knew where she wanted to work.
“I just fell in love with the place. The program that they’ve got going on, the research Ben Kilham is doing—the center is just so unbelievably amazing,” Rachel recalled. “I ended up reaching out to them and asking if they took interns, and later, once I got that settled, I ended up going through the Center for Career Design to get funding.”
Rachel helped house, feed, and care for orphaned black bear cubs at the rescue and rehabilitation center until their releases in June, which mimicked the natural 18-month cycle as if they’d been raised by their mothers.
Rachel isn’t set on her specialization, as each internship has proved enriching in its own way, but her love for the bears—their mannerisms, their personalities, their routines—has stuck with her.
“I hadn’t worked with bears before, and I loved it. And I could see myself becoming a wildlife veterinarian. For now, the path to veterinary school is still the same.”
Vedant Tapiavala ’26
Vedant has also been struck by the need to take care of others. His volunteering with a hospice group turned into an internship opportunity, thanks to Center for Career Design funding.
A neuroscience major on a pre-med track, Vedant runs Dartmouth Generations, a club that began in 2019 and brings students to nursing homes in the Upper Valley to spend time with residents. Dartmouth Generations brought in a speaker to discuss palliative care, which caught Vedant’s attention. “This is what got me interested in specifically end-of-life care for an off-term,” he explained.
He approached the Center for Career Design to secure funds to explore this path. “I’ve been going to the center for résumé reviews since freshman year, and the opportunity for funding came during one of the sessions,” Vedant remembered.
During his internship, Vedant was responsible for spending time with patients, making sure they’re as comfortable and content as they can be. He learned the ease of connection, the satisfaction of calming down agitated patients by reminding them of their past conversations, the joy of finding shared passions with patients. If anything, it made him more excited about the ability to go beyond talking to help palliative care patients find treatment.
“It has definitely reinforced my intentions to go to medical school to do similar kinds of work, but in a capacity where you can more directly help people. Rather than just talking, I’d also be able to prescribe medication, or, if I’m a surgeon, perform operations,” he said. “I’ll be continuing to work toward that.”
Oumiehkari “Oumie” Fatty-Hydara ’27
Like Vedant, Oumie discovered an internship opportunity on campus. As a molecular biology major, she regularly attends programs hosted by the Health Professions program, which feature faculty, students, and guests discussing a variety of health-related topics.
After befriending an attendee at one of the events and discussing her interest in cardiothoracic surgery, Oumie quickly discovered he was Dr. Charles Thomas Jr. ’79, P’09,’12, founder and department chair of radiation oncology and applied sciences at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, professor of medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine, and the guest speaker for the night.
He gave her his card and agreed to hop on a Zoom call with her to discuss, in more detail, her career interests. There, he gave her two contacts for potential summer internship opportunities. One of them, Dr. John Kang MD, PhD, of the University of Washington Medical Center’s department of radiation oncology, offered her the position on the spot.
Oumie ended up heading to Seattle for the summer. She’d been meeting with the Center for Career Design coaches and heard about the opportunity to secure financial support—a make-or-break factor, given the cost of living there.
“I do feel like the foundation of having that money was really helpful,” she said. “Being able to providing funding for people like to me to be able to engage in opportunities like these is really important.”
She joined Kang at weekly meetings of the multidisciplinary thoracic tumor board, which engaged surgeons, pathologists, oncologists, and more. These meetings introduced her to the multitude of ways to address thoracic tumors. The exposure reassured Oumie that she was in the right place and clarified her vision that cardiothoracic surgery is the track she’d like to pursue.
Beyond building her confidence in herself and her capabilities, Oumie is especially grateful for the research experience and mentorship the internship afforded her.
These are just four of the hundreds of incredible student stories borne out of the Center for Career Design funding. Eliminating the financial barrier allowed Grace, Rache, Vedant, and Oumie to pursue their passions and crystallize their career goals—and helps Dartmouth grads go on to change the world.