What is known about college students' search for purpose more than ever before due to the scholarly attention devoted to purpose development over the past two decades. This growing research on purpose increasingly makes it clear, as Tim Clydesdale ( 2015 ) writes, that when colleges "launch sustained conversations with students about questions of purpose, the result is a rise in overall campus engagement and recalibration of postcollege trajectories that set graduates on journeys of significance and impact" (p. xvii). Yet, scholars also find that not all purposes or purpose conversations are the same. The authors sought to discover how students' think about purpose, what purposes inspire them, and what influences their development of purpose. To find answers, the authors drew upon numerous sources, including interviews with 110 college students (ages 18-25) from 10 colleges and universities. They interviewed students at a variety of institutional classifications (e.g., a regional university, different types of liberal arts colleges, and various levels of research universities) as well as different missions (private, public, religious, and secular). The authors asked a variety of questions aimed at discovering how students perceived how college helped their purpose development and what purpose or purposes they currently espoused (if any). What the authors discovered both did and did not surprise them.