Category Archives: Isobel

#CareerGoals

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In past blog posts, I’ve talked about the importance of goals, dreams, and aspirations, of having somewhere to aim. I think it’s important to have a sense of direction. While I know I won’t achieve every one of my goals, and while most of my goals, over time, will change, they keep me moving, discovering, and experiencing new things.

One way in which I’ve set goals my whole life is by having role models, a different one for every stage of my life (I’ll call them “career crushes”). While my role models have ranged from family friends to the famous, from athletes to scientists, there’s a common thread between each of them. I tend to admire my role models not just for their line of work, but for the grace with which I see them weave together their career, life, and passions. Each of my role models has embodied some kind of value to which I aspire.

Career Crush #1. I’m seven years old, and I’m obsessed with JK Rowling. I’ve been reading her books for two years already and I know that I want to do what she does. That is, create entire worlds. When I read Harry Potter, I feel transported somewhere else. As a kid with an imagination so vivid that it spills over into my perception of the real world, I want to be able to pull other people into a world of my creation. While I’m beginning to understand that magic like Harry uses isn’t actually real, JK Rowling’s ability to use words to create a new animal or spell so vivid that I can see it in my head seems like another kind of magic, one that I want to master.

Little me... erm... Hermione

Little me… erm… Hermione

Career Crush #2. I’m fifteen, and all I want to be is my assistant Cross Country Coach, Jenn Shelton. Accompanying us on runs, she tells us all about how she studied poetry at a prestigious university, got tired of that, then left to live life moment to moment and pursue adventure.

As a strung-out, type-A high school student desperate for a 4.0, I was fascinated by the idea that you could just leave something making you unhappy. It seemed dangerous, but so enticing. Jenn tells us about how after tiring of competing as a surfer, she got back into running and like with everything she pursued in life, went for it with gusto and a great sense of humor. We hear her stories of ordering Pizza Hut in the middle of a 100-mile race, hallucinating with fatigue and losing the trail in her attempt to break the world record for running the 273-mile John Muir trail, and the infamous story of the ultra-marathon she and her friends completed the day after eating an entire pan of jalapeno mac-and-cheese. She’s kind to me and everyone on the team, always tries to downplay her accomplishments, and promises that she’ll only run as long as she enjoys it. It’s not so much that I want to be a professional runner (although I would happily take that). I just want Jenn’s attitude towards life.

Career Crush #3. I’m seventeen, and I’m all about setting achievable goals. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m not about to leave school to become a professional anything, and my new career crushes are family friends Tim and Leslie. They are doctors at the rural health clinic “La Clinica,” and I’m currently shadowing Tim. He’s only allowed 15 minutes per patient, but he’s animated and friendly as he rushes between an old woman, who he clearly knows well, joking around with her in spanish, and a little girl with asthma, who he instructs to “breathe like she’s blowing out all the candles on a cake” during her breath test. Leslie’s there as well. At the end of Thursday they go home together for the weekend. Leslie and Tim share a job, but they’ve worked it out so that they complete their hours at the same time. On the weekends, Leslie goes on long runs and Tim goes snowboarding. Their life epitomizes a balance between hard, meaningful work and family and relaxation that inspires me with excitement for the “real world”.

Career Crush #4. I’m a sophomore at Scripps and until recently, I’ve felt a little lost. I’ve given up on becoming a doctor, because I realized that the vast majority of students and doctors I meet do not have Leslie and Tim’s work life balance. But recently, I’ve found a new career crush: Barbara Kingsolver, a writer, bringing me full circle to my days of idolizing JK Rowling (and let’s be honest, I never stopped idolizing her). Barbara Kingsolver touched something in me with her poetic words describing science and nature. I’d never realized that you could use words in a way that could transform science into something so beautiful. Plus, I knew that Kingsolver had a PhD in biology, and moved between Arizona and an organic farm her family runs in West Virginia. Her life for me had elements of both contradiction and the balance I sought. Suddenly, I’m awoken from my indecision, inspired to find a middle ground between my love for science and my lifelong love for words and imaginary worlds.


In the future, I don’t know where I’ll end up. I could still be a writer, a doctor, or a PhD (I’m just going to venture and say I’m not likely to become a professional ultra-runner). I guess I could even be all three, although that would involve a lot of school. But there’s value in reflecting on who I’ve looked up to, and the values I saw lived out in their careers. The people I’ve looked up to are creative, and a little crazy (in the case of Jenn, at least). They have ventured off the beaten path, and taken some risks. They work for themselves, but their careers do something that I see as valuable for the world, whether that’s by weaving stories, coaching teenagers, or healing people.

Self-Awareness in the Job Market and Beyond

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I’ve always been a bit of a lone wolf, even a rebel. There’s a strong instinct within me to go in the opposite direction of my peers, or of my family’s expectations for me. There are perks to my contrariness. I’m creative, a good problem solver, and I’m loyal to my passions.

However, it can also come at a cost. I sometimes have a hard time joining group activities, I rapidly change my mind if I feel like I’m going too much with the status quo, and I can occasionally come off as a bit bristly.

Over the years I’ve learned that key to career and academic success is learning to navigate these pro’s and con’s.

For me, rebelliousness is only one of many quirks I have (albeit, probably the most noticeable of them). But the fact is that everyone, like me, has a character trait that can both pose challenges for them and aid them in all areas of their life, including their relationships, academics and, most important to consider here at Beyond The Elms, their career. This is the reason why job interviewers notoriously ask the “what is one of your weaknesses” question (and why they aren’t looking for the glib “I’m too much of a perfectionist” answer).

*Not* what self-awareness looks like

*Not* what self-awareness looks like

Ignoring these quirks doesn’t make them go away, and can even make it more difficult to address their potential negative impacts on your career trajectory. Self awareness is an important piece of being successful, independent, responsible, and even happy. The idea isn’t to make your “quirks” go away, but to figure out how to manage them in the best way possible. Here are a few tips I have:

Get comfortable with taking a good hard look at yourself. Self awareness can suck. It can be deeply uncomfortable to come to terms with the pieces of our personality that can potentially make us difficult for others. It’s also not something that comes easily in our culture. In the USA especially, we have a reflexive tendency to want to put a positive spin on everything, and ignore anything that might be unpleasant or potentially negative. But after a while, being honest with yourself gets easier, and with that growth comes a lot of maturity.

Have a sense of humor. My mom’s from Northern England, and has the notorious self-deprecating sense of humor that you would expect from a Brit. In England, potentially the worst social faux pas you can make is by taking yourself too seriously. Unfortunately, this is a character trait the Brits associate with Americans. While I’m not saying that you should develop the knee-jerk self-belittlement of my mom’s fellow countrymen (and women), being honest with others and with yourself gets a little easier if you’re not afraid to tell a few jokes at your own expense (just remember that there’s an appropriate place and time for these jokes. Hint: a job interview’s probably not it).

Think about the ways in which a particular trait might help (and hinder) you in the job market. There’s a good chance that any particular piece of your personality has a roughly equal number of pros and cons. Think about the ways in which your tendencies make you a good friend, make you a more responsible employee, and a better student. Then think about the ways in which you struggle in these areas because of a particular trait. If you’re a visual person, try journaling about it with a pros and cons list. Doing so will help you recognize both your strengths and weaknesses.
Self awareness means recognizing both the positive, and the negative. In the end, doing so will help you figure out the best fit career for your personality, strengthen your resumes and interviews, and make you a more reliable student, employee, and friend.

How to Avoid Grad School Induced Panics (Hint: The Answer’s on Google)

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In high school, I almost constantly had an adult leading me by the hand towards college, telling me how to build up my resume, when to interview and with whom, and helping me decide where to apply.

That’s not to say that applying to college was an easy process, but looking back as I prepare to apply for grad school, I can see that I took these resources for granted. While I know that there are resources here at Scripps and through Keck to help me on that search, the steps to figuring out which programs to apply to, and in finally applying to those programs, are far less well-defined, and no one is monitoring my process.

Another factor that makes the whole process more confusing is the fact that unlike senior year of high school, everyone’s planning to do different things after graduation, so I can’t just copy whatever my peers are doing. Instead of everyone filling out the same application and writing the same essays, I have friends who are applying to medical school or PhD programs, friends who are taking a few years to figure out what exactly they want to do, and friends who are going right into the job market. Exactly no one is applying to the type of program I’m looking at, and while this means less competition for me, it also means that I have a lot to figure out on my own.

However, if you are at least thinking about going to grad school, there is one lesson that is universally applicable across disciplines. I learned this lesson the hard way, but you don’t have to:

Start searching now. Perhaps more important than this advice itself, however, is its crucial qualifier: Don’t treat the search like a scary, momentous thing, or like a commitment to a given discipline. It doesn’t have to be.

Maybe this seems like an obvious suggestion to make. However, it was a difficult lesson for me to learn. A year ago, I was so scared of the future and so in-denial about my lack of plans or goals that I just avoided doing research altogether. The excuses I made were that I had plenty of time to figure things out, and that I was too busy anyways. I didn’t start my grad school search in earnest until my dad asked me over this past summer what I was planning to do after graduating. I didn’t have an answer. Instead, I sputtered out some defensive quip, broke down in angry tears, and ran to my room in a fit of adolescent-level indignation.

But thankfully, I am an adult and not actually a teenager anymore. So as soon as I was in my room, I opened my laptop and simply google searched “grad school science writing” (I had enough of an idea about my future that I already knew this was what I wanted to do). I clicked on the first program that popped up, clicked around the website, and within 20 minutes felt overwhelmed by excitement, motivation, and purpose. Call me impulsive, but the program seemed perfect. I knew that was where I wanted to go.

 

Next, still sitting on my bed, I clicked on the page on the website that listed the bios, credentials, and contact information of alumni, and I stalked each alum in awe of their achievements in journalism and science. I found one alum from last year’s class who seemed oddly similar to me– she had graduated from a small liberal arts college, worked in a couple labs, but had always felt torn between science and words. I shot her a polite email expressing how I connected with her bio, and asking her if I could ask her a few questions, Almost immediately received one back exclaiming that yes, she would love to talk! In just 30 minutes, my grad school search had begun. Not only had it been painless, but it was exciting to think about the future. Most importantly, I felt relieved of the burden of total uncertainty and denial.


Evidently, most people aren’t going to complete their grad school research in 30 minute time span, compelled by their panic-induced hyper-focused state. My point is that just beginning a search doesn’t need to be hard. Literally, it can be just a google search. Most importantly, it is definitely nothing to panic or throw a fit over. Whether you are a freshman, sophomore, or junior, think about what your interests are, and look around on the internet, or if you are more brave than I am, ask a professor. You can always change your mind, but I would have saved myself a lot of stress and panic if I had just begun my search earlier on.

5 Reasons Why It’s OK Not to Overload

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It was second semester of my first year at Scripps that it began to seem like five classes was the standard course load. I remember a group of upperclassmen coming into my AISS lab and talking to us about overloading.

Wait... That's a thing?

Wait… That’s a thing?

At first, my classmates seemed a little mystified. This was something you could do? And then, once it became clear that taking five classes was an option, the logical response was “why not?”.

Students at the Claremont Colleges tend to be high-achievers and perfectionists. Once we see the bar set to five classes by our peers, even if to do so is technically overloading, than taking fewer classes suddenly seems like falling short. But as a first year, I decided that overloading was not for me, and I’ve stuck to that resolution ever since.

I understand that overloading can have its merits. Some majors have more requirements than others, and if you want to explore any classes outside those requirements, overloading is necessary. It’s also useful for those of us who come into our first and second years unsure of what to study, and later find ourselves scrambling to fulfill the requirements of our chosen major. Deciding to study abroad or trying to fulfill grad-school requirements (such as pre-law or pre-med) are two other situations in which students decide to overload.

However, sometimes overloading can seem tempting because there are so many interesting classes to take, or because it’s uncomfortable to have too much free time, or because having a second major or a minor seems like it will be attractive on a transcript. If you fall into this camp, I would encourage you to consider paring down your schedule to four classes, and this is why:

  • You’ll get more out of each of your classes. If you’re anything like me, you care about putting time and thought into each of your classes. It can sometimes seem like the best way to take full advantage of the academic opportunities offered by these colleges is by maximizing your course load. However, by taking more classes, you may not get as much out of each individual class. With fewer classes, you have more time to spend focusing on each reading, getting to know your professor in office hours, or working on a term paper you really care about. Most importantly, you’ll have the mental capacity to better digest more of the information you learn in each class.
  • You’ll have more time to take advantage of the events offered at the colleges. Every time I return to Claremont at the beginning of a semester, I promise myself I will listen to more of the speakers who come to visit, attend more panel discussions, do more game and trivia nights, and engage more with the community. In general, I am successful for the first six weeks of school, and then once classes get busy, I start forgetting my resolution. In short, classes aren’t the only important things to take advantage of at the colleges, and when you take fewer classes, you’ll be able to attend more of these events.
  • You’ll try more things. Have you ever wanted to dance in Sanskriti or go rock climbing with OWL? What about working on an independent research project in a professor’s lab or teaching in preschool classrooms with Jumpstart? While many students are (or seem to be) somehow able to overload and participate in these activities, it’s a challenge and isn’t for everyone. Whether you’re pursuing a passion or trying something completely new, each of these activities can help you figure out what your interests and values are, just as much if not more, than an extra class.
  • Your resume may actually benefit. While choosing not to overload may mean that your transcript will have fewer classes listed or even one major instead of two, trying new activities and spending more time exploring college outside of the classroom can ultimately add to your resume.
  • You’ll be less stressed. Always remember to prioritize your mental health. You can’t fully benefit from your college education, or enjoy good times on campus, if you are failing to take care of yourself. People wonder how I always have time to keep a journal or cook for myself or read for fun (all things I do most days). I make time for these things, and they definitely improve my overall quality of life.

For some people, overloading may work just fine. Perhaps they need the extra classes to fill requirements, or they just can’t function with too much free time. But if you see your peers taking five or six classes, and but feel ambivalent about whether to take an extra class or not, or find yourself the only one in your friend group taking four classes, remember that it’s ok, and that holding yourself back from overloading may be the best decision for you.

 

 

Looking Out On The Final Stretch

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It is now my last semester at Scripps. This is not a statement, but an attempt to remind myself of a fact that constantly slips to the periphery. I won’t go so far as to say “I can’t believe it’s my last semester,” because it’s a fact that I just accept as true. But I can’t really comprehend what it means. It’s similar to my inability to comprehend the reality of news that happens far away, or the magnitude of the world’s population. I don’t doubt that these things are true, but they don’t feel present or immediate.

Sometimes the fact that after this semester, I will never return to Scripps feels so true that I am filled with butterflies of excitement and anxiety. I feel this way when I make concrete plans for my post-graduation life, such as the celebratory bike tour my best friend and I just finished planning. When I picture us with our bikes loaded up with gear, riding up the East Coast from South Carolina all the way to Quebec City, I suddenly am able to imagine a future with a wide expanse of discovery and opportunity. Granted, I understand my post-graduate life is mostly not going to involve riding my bike around the country. Just the fact that I have this single plan in place, however, makes everything else- like the grad school applications I will not complete for another year, and their even more uncertain responses- feel simultaneously more imaginable and manageable. The uncertainty feels less daunting, and more like a challenge to seize new opportunities. I can’t wait to see what will unfold from each of these new experiences.

Most of the time, however, the idea of leaving Scripps seems too abstract to comprehend. Scripps is a place that has taken care of me. I’ve been guided by Professors and advisors who had my best interests at heart, and been surrounded by both friends and like-minded peers who have offered support and influenced my ideas. Completing my bachelor’s degree has provided me with a constant goal that has kept me in motion, even when the details of my aspirations and future plans have been murky. I’m not sure what it will be like to leave behind the professors who were lenient with me when I was having a tough time, but pushed me when I needed to be pushed, or what it will be like to move away from my best friend who has always just been a text away if I needed her to drop by my room. I’m not sure what it will be like to not have grades to motivate me, or a professor helpfully reminding me of due dates.

On the other hand, I also have a hard time imagining what it’s like to not live in as high-stress an atmosphere as the Claremont Colleges, to be surrounded constantly by high-achieving peers with whom I constantly compare myself. I don’t know if I remember what it’s like to have a life that doesn’t revolve around one thing (school). Will it feel more or less stressful? Will I thrive in this more independent phase of life that I am fast approaching, or will the transition period be long and rough? I suspect it will be somewhere in the middle, that some things will feel harder and some things easier, and that there will be at least one aspect of life I will miss bitterly that I barely even notice now.

I’ve always liked endings. They provide an opportunity for reflection, and these are all the thoughts that I am processing, even as I am 3 ½ months away away from graduation.
Whether or not I am able to comprehend what comes after leaving Scripps, something about this semester already feels different. There is a sense of both urgency and hope, of youth and getting older, an end and a beginning.