Chart Your Own Course: Class Difference and the Construction of Personal Trajectories in Career Portfolio Programs

Abstract

In this article, I examine two students’ experiences with their schools’ career portfolio programs. These initiatives call students to assemble papers, projects, and nonacademic items and to present them in ways that chart their personal trajectories into paid work. Shortly before graduation, students present their portfolios to exit interview panels and discuss how their portfolios reveal who they are, where they are going, and how they plan to get there. In this study, I investigate how two students of different class backgrounds engage in portfolio work. Through conducting discourse analyses of exit interviews, I examine how these students build particular kinds of trajectories into particular kinds of futures. I argue that students and their interviewers work together during their conversations to mobilize class models of personal development. In activating different theories for differently classed students, I contend, they place students on paths toward higher‐ or lower‐status futures.