A 1980s neon green RV visited Sacramento State on March 1, attracting students toward an unconventional way of searching for their careers.

The 31-foot-long van is part of Roadtrip Nation, a group that has been picking up students since 2001 and driving them 15,000 miles around the country so they can interview as many leaders as possible to get a sense of what to do with their degrees after college.

Sac State is one of 50 college campuses that partnered with the career supportive group three years ago to give students a chance to go on an all expense-paid road trip, interviewing people like the CEO of Aspen Skiing Company in Colorado, the founder of Nirvana&s record label in Seattle and a Pulitzer prize-winning novelist in Carmel Valley.

Martha Schuster, a counselor for the campus career center, said she brought Roadtrip Nation to Sac State in 2002, when it presented its program and offered applications for students who were grouped into teams of three.

&It inspires students to take chances and go on and search for their road,& Schuster said.

Roadtrip Nation picked up three Sac State students last summer, who not only honed their interviewing skills and learned how to land a job after college, but also had their experiences taped and shown on the Public Broadcasting Station, a national television station.

Schuster said the program teaches students to stop listening to the &noise,& which includes advice from parents, friends, counselors and professors, and to instead experience job searching their own way.

&Behind the Wheel,&is in its fifth year and also has a DVD and a book about what it does for students including previous road trip experiences.

Roadtrip Nation will visit 100 universities this year.

Student teams from 40 universities applied last year and the program only took three of them, one from the southern region of the United States, one from the central and one from the northern.

Gloria Pantoja, a graduate in business with a concentration in marketing, was one of three students who was picked last summer to travel nationwide.

She said she applied after watching Roadtrip Nation&s presentation early last year and qualified.

Pantoja was assessed on how well she got along with her teammates, whether she was a full time student and over 18.

She also had to contact a list of people whom she wanted to interview and then tape herself interviewing someone.

Pantoja said she ended up interviewing President Alexander Gonzalez, which she taped and mailed in soon after.

When she got the call, Pantoja said she was ecstatic.

&I couldn&t even believe it,& she said.

She soon found herself in Huntington Beach with her teammates 8211; her brother and her best friend/sorority sister 8211; painting their RV and getting ready for a five-week trip on the road.

Two Roadtrip Nation crewmembers traveled with them and taped their thoughts before and after each interview.

Pantoja said her favorite part was interviewing Betty Cortina, editor of Latina Magazine.

&It was nice to see someone I could relate to,& she said. &I read her magazine every month, and there I was talking to her in New York City.&

Pantoja&s team also got to interview Richard Wolcott, cofounder of Volcom.

Pantoja said there were leaders they interviewed who said they also had insecurities and confusion in college, which encouraged her to continue pressing on toward a career.

Roadtrip Nation will be at Sac State again on April 3.

The &Behind the Wheel& program not only positively affected Pantoja, but also inspired Al Striplin, an instructor and counselor in Sac State&s Educational Opportunity Program, a California State University systemwide program.

Last semester, Striplin sent 40 of his students from two sections of his freshman seminar class in ethnic studies out into Sacramento to interview local leaders.

They did this without a budget or an RV and instead took their own video and digital cameras, a tape recorder and notebooks and traveled by car, bus or on foot to learn interviewing skills and types of careers outside of college.

He said they came back with two different conclusions: what their majors are all about and that their majors are not necessarily connected to their careers.

&It blows away the stereotypes people have,& Striplin said about college students thinking they have to work in a field related to their studies.

&Students find that they are not locked into their majors,& he said.

Striplin used his own life as an example. He majored in biology and minored in chemistry, but taught high school English after college and is now into counseling.

&Careers are something that develop continuously,& Striplin said.

Roadtrip Nation asked Striplin to write a letter about his class assignment, which will appear in its new book that comes out this summer.