Workshops & Keynotes for Colleges and Universities

What our workshops and keynotes cover

Programs are built around one core idea: that the students who build the strongest outcomes aren't simply the smartest or the hardest working — they're the ones who learn how to think strategically about college before it is too late.

Sessions draw from a framework that helps students align their decisions with long-term goals, identify and pursue high-ROI opportunities, build experiences that compound over time, and tell their story clearly and confidently — to recruiters, grad school committees, and anyone else who needs to understand their value.

Topics include college and career strategy, career exploration, internship preparation, LinkedIn and professional presence, networking, AI in the job search, interview preparation, and more.

Popular sessions

College by Design™: Most students spend four years staying busy — juggling classes, clubs, and jobs — without ever stopping to ask what would actually make it "worth it." College by Design™ gives students a repeatable framework (the 4 A's: Assess, Access, Act, Articulate) for turning scattered decisions into one coherent story: defining a vision to point their effort toward, filtering opportunities before saying yes to them, and building the skills, experience, and connections that compound into internships, job offers, and grad school admissions.

Experiences That Count: Two students can walk out of the exact same internship, club, or on-campus job — and only one of them turns it into something worth putting on a resume. This session teaches students the difference between holding a role and owning one, and gives them a four-step system for getting real ROI out of any experience: choosing which opportunities are worth their time, taking ownership once they're in, and turning what they did into a story recruiters actually remember.

Leveraging LinkedIn as a College Student: Most students have a LinkedIn profile — usually because a class assignment made them create one. But a profile you built once and haven't touched since isn't neutral; it might actually be working against you. This session teaches students how to turn their LinkedIn presence into an active brand ambassador across the entire career search: optimizing a profile that attracts profile views from recruiters, finding and building real relationships with their target audiences, and mastering LinkedIn's search filters — Boolean strings, exact terms, and other overlooked options — to find opportunities most students miss.

Building Habits that Move Your Early Career Forward: No matter what career a student is chasing — finance, marketing, engineering, nonprofit work — the habits that actually move them forward are the same. This session breaks down five of them (staying informed, building expertise, getting comfortable with ambiguity, earning advocates, and improving processes) that compound into real outcomes regardless of industry or target role, and gives students a concrete way to build each one into their daily routine now, plus the exact structure for asking for what they've earned once the opportunity shows up.

Using AI in the Internship and Job Search: There's a version of using ChatGPT that looks a lot like using a vending machine: plug in a prompt, take whatever comes out, move on. This session teaches students how to use AI as a genuine career advantage instead: writing prompts that actually reflect their goals and voice, applying them across the entire job search (exploring roles, optimizing application materials, prepping for interviews), and knowing exactly where the line is between AI assistance and misrepresenting themselves to an employer.

Building Your Career Compass: Knowing you're supposed to "explore" careers and actually knowing how to do it are two very different things. This session gives students a practical three-part system (Explore, Commit, Reflect) for finding direction, even as the field itself keeps shifting underneath them: scanning for real signals instead of just doing research, running low-stakes trials before making bigger commitments, and closing the specific skill or connection gaps standing between them and their next move.

How it works

Every engagement starts with a conversation — about your students, your goals, and what your office is trying to accomplish. From there we determine which sessions fit best and how to tailor them to your context.

Engagements can be delivered as a standalone keynote, a single workshop, or a multi-session series. Some institutions start with one session and expand from there.

If you're not sure what format fits, that's what the first conversation is for.

What students walk away with

Every session includes a student workbook — a practical, immediately usable resource tied directly to the session content. Not a handout. A tool students can return to throughout college as their goals and circumstances evolve.

About the facilitator

Lasse Palomaki is the founder of The Strategic Student LLC and has delivered keynotes and workshops at 40+ colleges and universities, reaching 5,000+ students across every major.

He holds certifications in instructional design from the Association for Talent Development (ATD) and in design thinking from IDEO — meaning every session is built with the same rigor applied to the best corporate training programs in the world, and designed to actually change how students think, not just what they know for an hour.

He also serves as Associate Director of Alumni Career Services at Elon University, where he works directly with students, alumni, and employers daily.

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