Apply to the HELM Founding Student Advisory Cohort

Our first phase kicks off the week of November 2 and wraps up by December 4. We won't ask anything of you from December 5 to January 3, so you can focus on finals and enjoy the holidays.

During active weeks, expect to spend about 1–2 hours per week with HELM. Most of the work happens on your own time, with roughly one Zoom conversation each week, either 1:1 with Carly or with your student cohort.

Week of Nov. 2

Getting started

We'll start with a 30-minute 1:1 with Carly to get to know each other, introduce you to HELM, and get you set up in the app. We'll also watch you try a few things for the first time, so we can see what's intuitive, what's confusing, and where you get stuck. Your first assignment will be completing HELM's career assessment on your own.

Weeks of Nov. 9–30

Use it, and tell us what you think

Each week, you'll get an assignment to complete in HELM, followed by a short feedback loop:

• Use HELM on your own. We'll give you a specific activity to complete, and may occasionally ask for screenshots or screen recordings.
• Give us your immediate reaction. After each activity, leave a 1–5 minute audio note telling us what stood out, worked, didn't work, confused you, or surprised you. Don't polish it. We want your reaction while it's fresh.
• Reflect. Before we meet, complete a very short survey about what you noticed, what you liked or didn't like, what was confusing and, importantly, what you actually remember about the experience.
• Talk it through. We'll use your responses to guide a short conversation with Carly. We'll also periodically bring the cohort together to see what comes up when students compare and react to each other's experiences.

The goal isn't for you to tell us what you think we want to hear. We want to know what actually happens when you use HELM, including what you forget, don't understand, don't like, or would do differently.

January

Using HELM to move forward

In January, we'll shift from mainly testing HELM to using HELM to help you move forward. The exact activities will depend on what we learn together in November, but the time commitment stays at about 1–2 hours per week. We'll focus more directly on your own goals: exploring possibilities, building relationships, telling your story, and taking concrete steps toward internships, jobs, or other experiences.

Our initial commitment to one another runs through the end of January. From there, we may invite some members of the cohort to keep working with HELM through February and March, with a greater focus on making progress toward a specific goal for the summer.

HELM is a new career navigation platform designed to help college students figure out what they want to do, and actually start moving toward it. Instead of asking you to pick a career path or sending you straight to a list of job postings, HELM helps you better understand yourself, explore what's out there, learn from real people and experiences, and take concrete steps toward internships, jobs, and other opportunities.

We're building HELM for a world where careers are increasingly nonlinear, the job market is changing quickly, and simply submitting more applications online isn't enough.

We're asking you to give HELM your time, ideas, and candid feedback, and we want this experience to be genuinely valuable to you, too. As a Founding Student Advisor, you'll get:

• A structured place to explore your future career. You'll spend time thinking about what energizes you, what you're good at, what you want to explore, and what your next steps might be, without any expectation that you already have it figured out.
• Support as you pursue your next opportunity. Whether you're looking for a summer internship, exploring a field, trying to meet people in an industry, or figuring out what kind of experience would actually be useful, we'll help you turn what you're learning into action.
• Carly in your corner. You'll have direct access to Carly throughout the program for career questions, from figuring out who to reach out to or how to make an ask, to thinking through an opportunity, application, or interview.
• A chance to meet students from across the country. You'll be part of a small group of sophomores and juniors from different schools, majors, backgrounds, and parts of the country. You'll build relationships with people you likely wouldn't meet otherwise, and hear how they're approaching many of the same questions you are.
• A front-row seat to an early-stage startup. You'll see HELM while it's still being built: testing early versions of the product, seeing how feedback turns into changes, and getting exposure to what building a company from the ground up actually looks like.
• A real voice in what we build. Your feedback won't disappear into a survey. You'll work directly with the founder and help shape a product designed to serve students like you.
• An experience you can put on your résumé and LinkedIn. You'll be able to list yourself as a Founding Student Advisor to HELM, and speak concretely about your role in testing and shaping an early-stage product.

• Undergraduate sophomores and juniors currently enrolled at colleges and universities across the United States.
• Students with different perspectives and experiences. We're looking for a diverse group across schools, majors, backgrounds, interests, and career goals.
• You don't need to have your future figured out. You might know exactly what internship or experience you want to pursue next, or you might have absolutely no clue. We want both.