Should I Go to Grad School?

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Should I Go to Grad School?

Dear Janet: 

I'm graduating this year, and I'm not sure if I should go on the job search, or if I should go to grad school. Should I go to grad school? 

- Student 

 

No. No you should not go to grad school. Are you listening? You should go to work. 

Too many young people I talk to go to grad school because they don't feel really ready to face the working world. Maybe it's because you worry that you won't be able to compete for a job (maybe you've already been rejected for a few jobs that looked really good), or maybe it's that you don't really know exactly what you want to do yet. 

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4 Excuses That Are Holding You Hostage

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4 Excuses That Are Holding You Hostage

A couple of months ago, I was contacted to participate in creating a public video about my work. The request came by email and I ignored it. When I eventually prodded myself into responding, I was reluctant. "Ok, maybe, but can you give me more information?" That led to emails with a production company that I also delayed in responding to. 

Eventually, I agreed to interview with them, giving them little time and a tight schedule to work with. I slowly came around and the project went forward. It culminated with a full day of filming at the end of November that was one of the best professional experiences I've had yet. The video will be published early next year, and I am thrilled. But why was I so reluctant for this fantastic opportunity to grow my career and expand my professional reach? 

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Drinking on the Job

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Drinking on the Job

It's holiday time, and where I'm currently working, that means we're getting gift boxes in the office and hosting staff holiday parties, and we're generally a bit more relaxed and laid back than we would usually be. We've hosted a retirement party, two Christmas parties, and here, at this university in Australia, that means drinking wine on company time. 

This is new to me. I came from a public university in the US, where the alcohol policy was strict and explicit: alcohol on campus is not allowed without a permit, should not even be stored in staff offices, and we would never have a drink even off campus during working hours. You just didn't do it. 

Here, we pour champagne at lunch for a retirement party, we pour shiraz at 4:00 pm when we get a little antsy in the week before Christmas. And we sit at our desks with our disposable wine glasses and chatter on about work as we would any other time.

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How to Get What you Want at Work

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How to Get What you Want at Work

"My girlfriend invited me to go to New York with her next week, for a conference. It's a great opportunity and I really want to go! Can I ask for the time off this close to the date?" 

One of the biggest challenges in establishing yourself as a professional with a solid reputation is how to juggle what you reaaaaaallyyyyyy want to do outside of work, with what your workplace needs and wants of you. "But it's my life, I should be able to do what I want," you think, while your boss is thinking "it's our busiest time of year, is he blind? If he asks for one more day off  I need to hire someone more reliable." 

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A Tribute To A Friend and a Life Well Lived

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A Tribute To A Friend and a Life Well Lived

I lost a friend this week. Captain William Dubois, an air force pilot, was killed when his plane crashed in the middle east due to a mechanical failure on Monday. Will and I were casual friends, actually. I met him when he was in Seattle on training several years ago, we flirted in a restaurant and had a date together and then kept in touch via phone and email and Facebook while he finished his military training. We both fell in love with other people and stayed in touch, saying "happy birthday" now and again or asking about each others' travels and times abroad, and watching our Facebook feeds for fun and interesting news and photos. You could hear his laugh right through the computer screen in the images put there, and his almost shy sense of gentlemanliness came through in his smile. But now he's gone. He leaves behind his new wife and labrador puppy, and a devastated family that adored him. Will was 30 years old, and he was right at the beginning of something. 

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Work For Free

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Work For Free

 

 There is a lot of coaching opportunity here for both the project manager and the intern. For example, we might talk about clear communication throughout the project, and the importance of creating check-in points to assess progress against the goal. It might be important in this case for both the manager and the intern to have been proactive in making sure expectations and needs were being met, perhaps after 4 hours of work, or after an initial milestone was completed. But even with all that, if you're an intern or a new hire, I'd like to make the case for doing additional work, even if it's beyond what you expected and even what you were paid for.

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Why a Startup Should Be Your First Internship

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Why a Startup Should Be Your First Internship

I'm often asked by students contemplating job offers, "Should I start with an established company and then go to a startup later, or take this opportunity with a startup and hope that it works out?" 

 

Even when you're drawn to entrepreneurial, fun work environments and the excitement of a startup, it can be tempting to want to take the position at the well-known company. Doing that provides name recognition on your resume, and can be a secure way to add to your bank account and maybe pay down your student loans (or avoid taking out more). But if you're drawn to startups at all, they make great internship and first job experiences. Here's why: 

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Oysters and Hurricanes: Bad Decisions in Business Travel

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Oysters and Hurricanes: Bad Decisions in Business Travel

Before I became "CareerJanet", I was Oil Spill Janet, working for a small environmental consulting firm that contracted with a large government agency that got involved any time someone accidentally broke a pipeline or leaked some sludge. There's a lot of travel in this business. When the Deepwater Horizon oil spill happened in 2010, I was contracted to go on site to the command post, based in New Orleans, as part of the spill management team, and thus began several months of continuous business travel. I was in my mid-20's. This was heaven.

On Location

New Orleans is both the most ideal and least ideal location to put a whole bunch of extremely hard-working, stressed out consultants, scientists, Coast Guard officers, and oil company managers. The city was the most accessible and logical hub of the gulf coast to this particular incident, having enough hotel rooms to accommodate the several hundred personnel stationed there on behalf of the environment. And, the city specializes in helping you relieve that work stress in any way you need to.

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Whose Career Goal are you Pursuing?

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Whose Career Goal are you Pursuing?

"My mom said I should be a librarian because she knows someone whose daughter is a librarian and said that's a good option," my student told me.

"Do you want to be a librarian?" I asked.

"I don't know...", she broke eye contact.

 

At least it's obvious that she's pursuing Mom's goal instead of her own. Some of us are working on a far more insidious type of career choice....the one made through more subtle clues about what our parents or family members want of us. It's more common that I work with a student who says, "My parents are worried about what kind of internship I'll have this summer."  Or, when I ask "How did you decide you wanted to be a doctor?" the answer is "My dad is a Neurologist," which, I have to remind the person, is not actually answering the question.

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Don't Quit Grad School

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Don't Quit Grad School

About a year into my graduate degree, I agonized about quitting. I was burned out by the juggle of life and school, I was watching my loans build, most of my courses weren't stimulating, and I was having major doubts about my chosen career path.

My experience is not unique. I hear this kind of thing more than you'd think from graduate students or post-grad students, folks in law school, PhD programs, or medical residency. Someone in this boat will go on to talk about how it seemed like the best thing to do at the time, but that working 80 hour weeks or the total lack of a life outside of whatever program they're in makes one reconsider their decision. Sometimes the feeling of regret and "can't go on" is even more extreme, like the med student who realized a year into her program that she actually doesn't want to be around sick people all day every day. Or, maybe you're a PhD student and the never-ending criticism and lack of support from your faculty members or grantors feels impossible to slog through any more. What do you do?

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When You're Killing Your Job Search

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When You're Killing Your Job Search

I have a good friend who is an expert gardener/horticulturist who loves to grow native plants from seeds. This year, he was lamenting the fact that less than 10% of his seeds successfully germinated.

 

"I don't understand! Last year I just dumped a bunch of seeds in the backyard and they did fine. But I think I tried too hard this year," he said. He had carefully arranged his seed collection in labeled containers, given them both the freezing and warm temperatures he knew they would need to be tricked into growing, kept their individual soil samples with the precise amount of moisture, and dutifully checked them daily.

And what happened? Nothing. Those seeds lay dormant. Later he told me, "It turns out seeds are like girls. If you overdo it, you’ll fail."

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Stuck in a giant Vagina sculpture? Here's how to recover your reputation.

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Stuck in a giant Vagina sculpture? Here's how to recover your reputation.

We can only wonder about the series of decisions that led to the fateful US-student-stuck-in-a-vagina-sculpture incident in Germany this week. One thing is sure: this kid is famous, but not for the best of reasons. One also might wonder, as soon as his name and personal information are made public, how anyone could take him seriously after an incident like this? We can assume that this guy was studying SOMETHING in college, and probably aspires to be employed at some point in his career. And unless it's performing stunts in movies or comedy routines, this type of famous is not usually a great career move. So, if you find yourself in a similar incident of public shame or embarrassment, how do you recover?

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