Tim Clydesdale is professor of sociology at the College of New Jersey. This article is adapted from the author's forthcoming book "Calling on Purpose: The Conversation Every Campus Must Have with Students" (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Clydesdale met two students, James and Tracy, during their senior year of college, when his evaluation team visited their campuses to observe the effects, if any, of the Lilly Endowment's nearly quarter-billion-dollar investment in purpose and vocation exploration programming on eighty-eight campuses across the United States. Clydesdale was initially dubious that these programs would accomplish anything more than an increase in maladaptive idealism among self-selecting college students. By the time his team had studied twenty-six campuses, interviewed 284 students and 274 faculty or staff, received 2,111 responses to a survey of participants, and supplemented these with sixty-five comparison interviews of students at nine nonparticipating campuses, he could no longer deny the remarkable and enduring effects of purpose and vocation exploration programming on college students, on faculty and staff, and, sometimes, even on whole campuses. Here Clydesdale presents James' and Tracy's stories as illustrative of the hundreds more the team heard.