We are MIT Career Advising and Professional Development (CAPD). Our office is the Institute’s hub to explore and prepare for jobs, internships, fellowships, and medical or graduate school. Our expertise and reach spans industries and disciplines, and stretches across the entire MIT ecosystem, allowing us to connect students and postdocs with a sprawling network of alumni, faculty, and thought leaders. Our advisors understand the career planning process and the uncertainty it can bring. Whether they’re in-person or online, providing one-time support or long-term advising, they’re committed to sharing their expertise, advice, and encouragement. 

At CAPD, we support students, postdocs and alumni on a journey of self-discovery, enabling them to build a challenging career and a rewarding life – and empowering them to make a difference in the world.  We help MIT students, postdocs, and alumni think strategically about their career goals and trajectory, working with them in four key areas:  Career Services, Distinguished Fellowships, Prehealth Advising, and Graduate Student Professional Development.

MissionVision
We empower students, postdocs and alumni to explore their life and career goals by helping them to develop core competencies and build professional networksOur goal is to engage students and alumni in self-discovery to craft lives that are intellectually challenging, personally enriching, and of service to the world.

Excellence in Service: We aim to serve as a trusted source of career and professional development information, offering excellence and quality service. We are committed to decision making that is grounded in research, best practice, and a deep assessment of our contribution.

Diversity and Inclusion: We celebrate and welcome the diversity of our constituents, appreciating their backgrounds and perspectives. We advance inclusion by strategically seeking the diversification of opportunities and offering equitable access to underrepresented and marginalized groups.

Collaboration: We aspire to develop and sustain meaningful connections amongst students, employers, and members of the MIT community to foster access to career and professional development information and opportunities.

Adaptability: We strive to be agile, responsive, and nuanced in our approach when meeting constituents’ needs. To maintain this perspective, we provide access to relevant and transformative, professional development to the CAPD team.


Student-Centered: We support the professional and personal growth of students, postdocs, and recent alumni. In all of our work, we focus on their experience and seek to understand, guide, and empower exploration and development.

Career Advising and Professional Development (CAPD)  is dedicated to helping all MIT students and postdocs in the pursuit of their career goals.  As part of the Office of the Vice Chancellor (OVC), CAPD is committed to OVC’s Diversity Statement.  Our team works hard to form authentic and meaningful relationships with students, postdocs, and recent alums. Whether it’s a single appointment or a longer-term engagement, we get to know the unique needs and concerns of everyone we work with so we can provide them with the right resources and support.  We understand that based on your identity and the intersection of your identity, your career path may be different. There may be additional hurdles, different pathways, and longer journeys.  Some detours are caused by systematic barriers and CAPD will do our part to educate ourselves and employers, institutions, graduate schools, professional schools, fellowships, and other organizations about best practices for recruiting diverse candidates at MIT. Additionally, we will use our position as a top university  to advocate for change to eliminate those differences that presently exist. These are some of some of the ways that we are currently working on making changes and through CAPD’s strategic priorities we will make sustainable changes to our office and work with organizations that recruit MIT students to bring about change.

We welcome the feedback of the MIT community regarding our services and those of organizations that engage with our office,  please send an email or give anonymous feedback.

We acknowledge and recognize the systematic processes that disadvantage our Black and African American students in the MIT student recruiting process. We are actively working to ensure Black and African American students are able to pursue their interests in industry and academia free of bias and discrimination.

As part of our commitment to Equal Pay, CAPD is committed  to ensuring our students and graduates are offering equal pay, opportunity, and advancement for their work. We are currently leading MIT’s Equal Pay Working Group. Read more about our Absolute Value efforts on our Pay Equity page.

To strengthen our mission in providing holistic career services, we have created Affinity Groups that acknowledge the identities and experiences of our underrepresented, marginalized, and/or the intersection of their identities.

“MIT acknowledges Indigenous Peoples as the traditional stewards of the land, and the enduring relationship that exists between them and their traditional territories. The land on which we sit is the traditional unceded territory of the Wampanoag Nation. We acknowledge the painful history of genocide and forced occupation of their territory, and we honor and respect the many diverse indigenous people connected to this land on which we gather from time immemorial.”

Read MIT’s Land Acknowledgement Statement.