About Susan Todd
Helping students hear their own stories more clearly.
Susan Todd is an educator, academic advisor, career coach, and creator of the Career Self-Discovery Framework.
The pattern that kept appearing
Over years of working with students across colleges, majors, academic levels, achievement levels, and socioeconomic backgrounds, Susan kept encountering the same underlying struggle.
Who am I, and where am I going?
Students with very different experiences and abilities were asking these questions. High-achieving students, average students, students who had already chosen majors, and students who were still searching could all be uncertain about how their strengths, values, interests, experiences, and preferences connected to what might come next.
Too often, students were asked, “What do you want to do?” before they had enough opportunity to understand themselves.
It began with listening
Long before there was a formal framework, Susan had developed an informal way of working with students. She listened for patterns in what they told her: experiences they loved, situations that drained them, things they were unexpectedly good at, environments where they thrived, values they cared deeply about, and moments that had shaped them.
Those conversations revealed important clues. Yet a conversation could only uncover what happened to come up. Susan began thinking about everything she wished she could know if she had the opportunity to really understand the person sitting in front of her.
What would I want to know about a student if I wanted to help them understand themselves before asking them to choose a direction?
Twenty questions, designed for stories
That question became the foundation for 20 intentionally designed, interview-style questions. Instead of selecting checkboxes or fitting themselves into predetermined categories, students are invited to describe experiences, reflect, explain, and tell stories about themselves.
Those stories provide something especially valuable: context. Across the answers, patterns can begin to emerge involving strengths, values, interests, work preferences, experiences, environments, motivations, and other aspects of a student’s developing sense of self.
From questions to a framework
The Career Self-Discovery Framework did not appear overnight. It developed through approximately two years of building, testing, studying, refining, and thinking carefully about how self-reflection, career development, analysis, and meaningful human conversation can work together.
The Personalized Analysis brings a student’s responses together and examines connections and recurring patterns across the full set of answers. Informed by relevant career-development and psychological theories, the methodology helps make visible connections that can be difficult to recognize one answer at a time.
The resulting personalized report is substantial, typically approximately 17 to 20 pages. It is designed to reflect the student back to themselves in a positive, hopeful, and useful way, identifying themes, possible directions worth exploring, and next steps for continued discovery.
It does not tell a student what career to choose.
The report is the beginning, not the answer
The analysis creates a stronger starting point for reflection and conversation. Students can consider what resonates, question what does not, explore possibilities, and continue learning about themselves. An educator, advisor, career professional, or mentor can help them make meaning from those patterns and connect that understanding to majors, experiences, careers, and future possibilities.
The student remains the decision-maker.
AI supports the analysis process within the framework, while human conversation provides context, meaning, and direction.
A tool for educators, too
The framework grew from Susan’s belief that educators needed a better starting point for these conversations. Educators already care deeply about helping students find direction. What they often lack is a structured way to gather this much meaningful information about a student and bring it together before the conversation begins.
The Career Self-Discovery Framework offers that starting point while keeping the relationship between educator and student at the center. When students better understand what matters to them and begin connecting their education to a sense of direction, decisions about majors, courses, experiences, and next steps can become more intentional.
Why this work matters
Students deserve more than pressure to choose.
The Career Self-Discovery Framework was created to give students something before the pressure to decide: the opportunity to understand themselves, recognize the patterns in their own stories, and begin exploring what those patterns might make possible.