The Cultural Career Script: College Students’ Expectations for a Typical Career

Abstract

Cultural life scripts are composed of the events people expect to occur in the life of a “typical” person in their society. Building on this psychological construct from the field of autobiographical memory, we investigated the cultural career script, referring to the shared expectations individuals have about the typical career in their culture. This mixed-methods study characterizes the nature of the cultural career script using data from 297 undergraduate students, who collectively generated over 2000 events. The results showed similarities with prior life script research, such as a tendency to generate events that are positive and predicted to occur relatively early in life. However, there was little consensus among participants in the events generated, and potential demographic differences in how individuals conceptualize a typical career emerged. Our findings advance scientific understanding of the cultural life script, episodic future thought, and autobiographical memory while providing practical implications for higher education practitioners.