Saving a text field on a thing using states

I am currently looking for ways to visually create and update fields in a thing based on the click of a “button” which is a text group.

My present thinking is to have a custom state on a popup set when you click “button” an example is school subjects, and clicking “math” would set the subject state to “math”

When you are done selecting options and you click the Update user button, it would set the inputs to their linked fields and it would modify the subject text field to read “Math” in the user profile in the backend.

I can set the state on the popup, but when I go into workflows, I cannot figure out how to link the state value to the field in the usertype.

Any ideas?

Just reference the state value when changing the field.