High Expectations, High Support in Career Navigation
- Rebecca Agostino
- May 18
- 4 min read
Giving students the skills and confidence to open their own doors
"Students don't understand that they have the most powerful weapon in the world to open doors for themselves: they're kids and they can ask for help." - Dr. Troy Podell
One of the most important lessons I learned as a high school leader was the power of pairing high expectations with high support. Everything started with students being surrounded by adults who believed they could do really hard things — and who made clear there was no alternative — paired with deliberate, rigorous instruction on how to get there. You can't build a great school with high expectations alone, but you also can't build one with a lot of support and no genuine belief in students.
I carry that conviction with me today as I build learning experiences for students. It was fitting, then, that this same framework turned out to be at the heart of my conversation with Dr. Troy Podell, a school leader I've come to admire greatly.
Dr. Podell is a senior educational leader for the Downingtown Area School District outside Philadelphia. He is based at the award-winning Downingtown STEM Academy, where all students begin their junior year as either diploma candidates for the International Baccalaureate program, or in pursuit of their Associate’s Degree alongside their high school diploma. The program is exceptionally rigorous, matched by the support and confidence of staff members like Podell.
Troy's program is built around a core conviction: that students have genuine agency to build the lives and careers they want, and that they can make incredible contributions to the businesses of southeastern PA when they are given the opportunity.
Central to that is explicitly teaching students how to represent themselves, their school, and their capabilities to the professionals they meet. He knows that this is the unlock required for students to find great mentors and champions to support them through their careers, especially at the beginning.
He puts it this way: "Any of us in life that have achieved any kind of success have had someone or some ones in our life that looked at us and saw more in us than we saw in ourselves at some point — and articulated that to us, believed in us and breathed it into us."
Troy doesn't sugarcoat what this actually requires of students. He borrows the phrase “embrace the suck” from a friend with a military background — an acknowledgment that initiating professional relationships is awkward, that making big bets in your career can feel uncomfortable, but working through this discomfort is simply part of the deal. He tells students it's hard, and then he teaches them how to do it anyway: rehearsing an elevator pitch until it becomes second nature, understanding why a student asking for help is uniquely positioned to get a yes, knowing exactly how to structure a conversation so that walls come down and the ask feels natural.
Listen as Podell details how he breaks down his expectation that students can build these connections with high levels of support:
Student initiation — the capacity to put yourself forward, to reach out, to ask for opportunities — operates as a virtuous cycle. When students take those early steps and find that people respond, that professionals are willing to talk to them, that they can hold their own in a room with an adult they don't know, their confidence grows. That confidence is what earns them the next experience. But the inverse is equally true: students who never have those early opportunities become increasingly hesitant to put themselves out there. The reluctance compounds, and the longer either cycle runs, the harder it becomes to reverse.
This is why high expectations matter so much at this particular threshold — the passage from learning into work. Students are watching the adults around them to calibrate what's possible. If our systems tell students that they should wait for experiences to be curated for them, they'll believe us — and if they aren't able to generate their own opportunities, their confidence will dwindle. But if adults treat career navigation as something students lead themselves, explicitly and consistently, students will take their cue from that instead.
Troy's belief in the power of connection is something he learned firsthand — through a combination of bravery and skill, a single moment of audacity, and the discipline to follow through. It's a story that I think will resonate with so many of us because it's how the majority of careers begin.
Most of us can point to a version of that moment in our own story. If we're lucky, we learn this entrepreneurial hustle from a community or family member. But if it hasn't been modeled to us, we'll need the explicit instruction that Troy describes.
How are you teaching your students to build professional connections? How did a moment of bravery and skill launch your career? If you have a story to share, I'd love to hear it.
Wayfinders is powered by Prentix, a program equipping students to build local, professional relationships to access real-world opportunities.
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