#318 – Roadtrip Nation, with Mike Marriner

Unpacking Education August 28, 2024 35 min

In this episode, we are joined by the President and Cofounder of Roadtrip Nation, Mike Marriner. Roadtrip Nation features a catalog of over 12,000 recorded interviews highlighting careers across the country as well as a curriculum designed to engage students in their own career exploration. Mike talks about the origins of Roadtrip Nation, how it is inspiring students across the country, and how teachers can take advantage of these free resources.

Read a transcript of this episode.

Mike Marriner
President & Cofounder of Roadtrip Nation
Paul Beckermann
PreK–12 Digital Learning Specialist
Rena Clark
STEM Facilitator and Digital Learning Specialist
Dr. Winston Benjamin
Social Studies and English Language Arts Facilitator

We take road trips to capture empowering stories that give you the confidence and tools to find a career that matters to you.

Roadtrip Nation, from their website

Resources

The following resources are available from AVID and on AVID Open Access to explore related topics in more depth:

Passion First

“Get in touch with the things that really get you excited,” says Mike Marriner. He believes that is the first step in finding a fulfilling career. Then, once you’ve identified your passions, you can explore and look for career connections. Although you’ll eventually need to find a way to make that passion financially feasible, it’s important to begin with a passion.

To help students find their career match, Mike and his team have developed an extensive collection of resources at Roadtrip Nation. That collection includes over 12,000 videos of people and careers from all walks of life. Roadtrip Nation has also been working to tag this content, making it searchable so that students can find careers matching their interests. Mike points out that having such a large collection of resources makes it more likely that a student can find an interest match. The following are a few highlights from this episode:

  • About Our Guest: Mike Marriner is the President and Cofounder of Roadtrip Nation.
  • The Beginning: Mike and his friends graduated from college and were searching for direction with their career prospects, so they decided to set out on a road trip across the country to interview people and discover possible careers.
  • You Have Time: After listening to people’s stories, Mike’s team realized, “There’s not as much pressure on that [career] decision as you think there is when you’re making it. . . . People have lots of careers their whole life.”
  • Career Agility: Mike’s team also discovered that people today have significant career agility. In other words, people don’t just stay in one job. Mike says, “There’s a lot of change, a lot of agility, a lot of opportunity to work, to go, [and to] move horizontally.”
  • The Motor Home: Mike and his friends bought an old, green motor home and traveled the country interviewing people about their careers. They asked themselves, “So why don’t we just go talk to people that do different jobs that are interesting and people who love what they do—people who design snowboards, and are mountain guide climbers, and design surfboards, and started companies, and started breweries, and all these interesting things—and learn how they figured it out and how they got to where they are today?”
  • An Unexpected Outcome: While Mike and his friends thought they would discover their personal career preferences by interviewing others, they actually discovered something more important. Mike realized the true goal: “Instead of thinking about what career I want to do or what job I want to do with my life, instead think about what really matters to you . . . and when you magnify it, and you wear it on your shoulder, and you do it with distinction, the world somehow conspires to support you.”
  • Getting a Break: They got their big break when a writer from Forbes magazine did a story about their road trip adventure. That led to an agent from William Morris Agency helping them pitch a book version of the road trip to publishers. Random House eventually bought the contract and published the book.
  • An AVID Connection: AVID programs began picking up the Roadtrip Nation book and using it to inspire students. Mike recalls, “Pam McGee from Fresno and California Central Valley, she bought a ton of books for AVID kids in the California Central Valley, and we would drive up there and speak to auditoriums filled with AVID students. And to be honest, that was like a seminal moment for us and our journey because we were like, “Whoa, look at all these kids who are really hungry for examples and role models of people in different careers, and by reading our book, and all these interviews, and these people we’d interviewed, they were inspired by the people we interviewed, and they wanted to have their own experiences.”
  • Next Level: When Mike and his crew realized that students wanted to hit the road and conduct their own journeys, they thought, “What if we could create an organization around helping students build road trips, that otherwise would never be able to do something like that, and give them the chance that we had to go across America and interview people?”
  • PBS: Those early inspirations led to a contract with PBS, and they’ve been putting road trips on the air for 20 years. In that time, they have created a colossal archive of videos, “with people and careers from all walks of life.” Mike says, “And we’ve built curriculum on top of that.”
  • Role Models: Over time, Roadtrip Nation began to understand the importance of exposing students to careers “who otherwise didn’t have a lot of visibility to career pathways” and how that exposure increased their confidence and belief that they could achieve a positive future in that career. When students see people who look like them in a career, they begin to say, “There are people out there like me who came from where I came from, and if they did it, I can do it too.”
  • Finding Your Match: Roadtrip Nation has compiled a collection of over 12,000 videos of people from all walks of life. Mike points out that the “scale of stories matters because every kid comes from such a unique variation.” He adds, “We have gone through excruciating lengths, really in the last 5 years, to get a little more sophisticated with our database and tagging it that way so that young people can come, and really search, and see people like them.”
  • Successes: Mike reiterates a key theme, saying, “It’s helping a young person to see someone like them in those fields and hopefully unlock that sense of confidence and belief that when they can then go on to their next step in their journey . . . they’re like, this person did it, I can do it too.”
  • Resources: Free resources are accessible at roadtripnation.com. On the site, you’ll find the open access Roadtrip Nation experience, which includes a five-lesson curriculum where students can build their own local road trip projects.
  • Making It Local: “You can do Roadtrip Nation in your own community,” says Mike. “You don’t have to get a motor home [and] go across the country. We get letters from students all the time. They’re like, “Oh, I did the curriculum 5 years ago, and I interviewed a firefighter down the street, and I just got accepted into the fire academy. And it was the person who I interviewed who kind of gave me the inspiration and the introduction to pursue this.”
  • The Process of Self-Construction: Mike describes this process, saying, “Get in touch with the things that really get you excited, and maybe there’s not a clear connection to a career at first. . . . But just getting in touch with one-part things that you’re really interested in, and not limiting your thinking to be like, ‘Oh, that can never be a job because you know what? Like, the world’s changing so quickly. There’s so much power and ideas to not hold yourself back towards thinking about a way to make something feasible. Now, there are realities, and that’s kind of one part of how we think about self-construction too.”
  • A Balance: Mike says, “It has to be one part true interest, something that matters to you, something you believe in. But then, there also has to be one-part, kind of [a] financial engine part of it too, to make it economically viable. And ideally, you start with the former—you start with something that really gets you up in the morning and makes you feel like you’re making a difference in the world.”
  • Shedding the Noise: Mike explains this mantra as the quest to “shed all that pressure around you from people who tell you [that] you should be a doctor or people who tell you [that] you shouldn’t be a doctor.” It’s not that those paths are right or wrong in general. It’s a matter of finding your own path. Is it right for you?
  • Mining the Data: With 12,000 interviews, Mike says, “we can drill down and kind of decipher the insights, the common insights, from all of these people and how they found their roads in life, and a lot of it is that idea of self-construction and finding something you really believe in first. Then, finding a way to make it economically viable, which is important, and then being flexible to change and knowing that there’s no right or wrong path. And maybe something is right for one chapter of your life, and then it changes for the next chapter. And that’s okay too.”
  • Vulnerability: Mikes shares, “At Roadtrip Nation, we really strive to have a lot of vulnerability in the storytelling and honesty that when students are watching that content, they see, ‘Wow, you know, like not everyone has a straight path. Mistakes happen—lumps, bumps in the road happen. And you know what? You can’t control what life sends your way, but you can control how you respond. And look at the resilience that these experiences gave to these people and look where they are today. And if they can do it, maybe I can do it too.”
  • The Value of Teachers: Mike also expresses his gratitude, “Without education, you can’t have a thriving democracy, and without teachers, you can’t have a thriving education system. . . . So any teachers listening, thank you very sincerely. We’re very, very grateful for you.”

Guiding Questions

If you are listening to the podcast with your instructional team or would like to explore this topic more deeply, here are guiding questions to prompt your reflection:

  • How did you learn about career opportunities?
  • What do you know about Roadtrip Nation?
  • How could you use the resources at Roadtrip Nation with your students?
  • Where might students explore career opportunities in your community?
  • Why is it important to find passion first and career second?

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