Category Archives: Mia

Combating the 40 Hour Blues

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When I was in high school, I always argued with my parents about who had it harder. I was pretty sure that I did– I started school at 7:30 in the morning, often getting home at 6 or 7 after extracurriculars, only to be faced with a mountain of homework. Even on my lazy senior schedule of 7:30am-1:30pm, I was convinced that being a student was harder than being an adult worker. Maybe that was true in high school, with back to back classes and 7 classes worth of homework every night.

But I can definitely say that working 40 hours a week this summer has been more taxing than my first year of college. I definitely worked a lot my first year at Scripps, but the rhythm suited me. I woke up around 8:30, ate a leisurely breakfast, and had plenty of time to do reading, problem sets, and work on essays between classes and my work in Scripps IT Department. I saw my friends (especially the roomies) throughout the day, and almost always paused work for a long, social dinner. After 9 or 10, I declared my working brain dead, and did only fun things before I slept. I was remarkably unstressed compared to high school, and although I worked more and played less during finals and midterms, I was always surrounded by friends, in a beautiful environment, and could wear the comfiest or cutest clothes I wanted.

My work this summer has not been stressful–it’s an incredibly supportive environment, very focused on learning and professional growth for interns. But the rhythm of the “normal adult work week” , and the office environment, has been getting me down. I’m in a grey cubicle, in a huge windowless room, for most of my day. After work, I’m often ready to collapse in my bed, but I also desperately want social interaction with people my own age. That’s not as easy as it is at school, where everyone’s a 3 minute walk away (or zero minutes, when it comes to my lovely, lovely roomies). The weekends feel like they pass too quickly.

I still have a lot of professional interests that point at a 40 hour workweek for most of my future. So I’ve been trying to develop strategies to feel good on the grind.

1. Exercise! One of the great perks of my workplace is a free office gym, which is right next to my workspace. I’ve been going pretty regularly after work for the last week, and I feel great. I’ve been coming home after my workouts with much more energy to go out or get things done at home. Even just 30 minutes helps me transition out of late afternoon stupor.

2. Purposeful socializing I’m used to plans just falling into place casually, but when my free time is so limited–and many of my friends are also working–it takes a little more forethought. I’ve met up with friends working nearby for lunch, or to hang out right after work. I’ve been filling my weekends and nights much more than I’m used to. I’m an introvert, so usually I’m cautious about wearing myself out with too many plans. So when I feel super worn out, I just have one-on-one hangouts with people I don’t have to impress. It satisfies my people need without overwhelming me.

3. Sleep Sleep deprivation makes me grumpy and stressed and prone to eating sugary foods which exacerbate that mood. Sleep is great! It’s like free coffee.

4. Tea and snacks I love jasmine tea. Jasmine tea smells great, keeps me alert, and generally just keeps happiness levels high. There’s a water cooler with a hot faucet near me, so I make tea constantly. I also make sure to have little snacks on hand–Luna bars, veggies, sesame sticks, and beef jerky. I’ve found that a big lunch makes me sleepy, and then hungry two hours later. Snacks keep my energy levels constant throughout the day.

5. Books No, I don’t read at work, but my commute and time at home are so enriched by reading. I started with The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, which is like female empowerment steampunk-y scifi. Now I’m switching back and forth between Cryptonomicon, by the same author, and God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism by Abraham Joshua Heschel. Even though my work is super interesting, it helps me to engage my brain with something totally unrelated. (I’m also watching multivariable calculus lectures online in preparation for fall semester. Yay for different modes of thinking!)

What are your happy strategies? 

Assertion and Argument

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In debate, we try to develop full arguments, with assertions followed by reasoning, evidence, and significance. The same is true in most college writing. In the rest of life, most of us speak just in assertions–statements of opinion without much to back them up. In the workplace, being assertive is good, while being seen as argumentative is probably unfavorable. This is kind of silly wordplay–after all, nouns and adjectives have different connotations all the time, and labeling aside, the elements of sound argumentation (reasoning, evidence, etc) are key to workplace success. But somehow these words float in my head when I think about the tension I feel as a young, assertive, and yes, argumentative woman.

I’ve been debating formally since freshman year of high school, and informally for much longer. Seven year old Mia had some truly eloquent speeches about why reading Harry Potter throughout math class was acceptable behavior. As I grew up, I was always an enthusiastic participant in classroom discussion. Supposedly many girls quiet down in the classroom around puberty, but I discovered feminist blogs in middle school, and if anything, got louder.

Now in the workplace, my verbal confidence is mostly an asset, but I’m always tiptoeing at the edge between confidence and impudence. This is my first internship in which I’m regularly participating in meetings and email conversations with adults who have significantly more professional experience than me, but who essentially treat me as one of the team. I’m conscious of my status as an intern, but I also want to add value, which I can’t do with my mouth shut.

I talked to my mentor at the organization about this tension, and she told me that when she began work there, 20 years ago, she was told that she was too quiet. She was actually prompted to attend a leadership development program for women. Her advice, based on the organization’s culture, was to always speak up in meetings, even if it was just in agreement.

So I’m trying my best to not mute my voice, to be professional but fierce. It’s a balance I know how to strike in other areas, but it’s still adjusting to the strictly professional world.

Has anyone been told they are too argumentative or too quiet in the workplace? Is anyone else deeply afraid of the send button on email?

Embracing Uncertainity and Other Good Life Choices

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I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, which will come as no surprise to my roommates, friends, parents, professors, and anyone who has ever had the misfortune to ask me my major when I’m in a talkative mood. There are roughly two schools of thought in regards to career and major advice:

1) Do what you love and 2) Do what is practical

I’m not particularly satisfied with either. I love doing lots of things: reading (fiction and non-fiction), baking, talking to people, dancing, taking long walks, and explaining concepts. I am interested in many subjects: politics, economics, literature, philosophy, anthropology, mathematics, and history. And I know that challenging my brain, and then moving past that challenge into a peaceful flow of work, makes me happy regardless of what I’m doing.

I think I could love any career in which I had the opportunity to engage with meaningful problems, work alongside other people, and feel capable of success.

I could just try to choose, then, the most lucrative field with the greatest projected growth, assuming that I would grow to love anything that I grew to be good at.

But at the same time, the values I grew up with, and that pushed me to attend Scripps that I should use the resources at my disposal–my intelligence, my skills, my access to education, and my energy–in order to nurture my community and work for justice.

I used to think that the way to do that was through politics. I’ve always read obsessively about politics, and it felt like a way to make a large impact on serious issues. But when I got involved in politics, both as an intern and as a government appointed official on a youth advisory council, I found myself frustrated with the slow movement, inefficiency, posturing, and constant tradeoffs of the political and governmental system. My idealism and my introversion were not ideal–I could only ever fake schmooze, and I found myself often straddling both sides of an issue in my heart, uncomfortable with the existing political alliances in city politics that pushed me to outwardly adopt one stance.That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy my time–I developed facilitation, public speaking, research, analysis, and communication skills that serve me to this day. I felt like I was a part of some truly important and successful grassroots community efforts, such as Free Muni ( local transportation system) for Youth and stopping the SF police from getting tasers.

(That last link is a great, um, example of, like, the importance *touches hair* of, um, figuring out your, like public speaking *touches hair* tics)

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My time and frustration in San Francisco politics made me more interested in economics, because, as a field, it promised a reasoned and often quantitative approach to public policy decisions, in contrast to the emotional, sometimes misleading rhetoric and side-choosing that had frustrated me in politics. I loved AP Macro and Micro as a senior in high school, and Economics is the major I put down on my graduation announcements. It’s still tentatively the track I’m on, since it lets me blend math and politics and psychology and after graduation, gives me a fair amount of wiggle room.

But I’m not sure, still. Who knows where I’ll end up? I would have never guessed, in my high school politics nerd phase, that I would be learning about software development frameworks and working on data migration and executive metrics. My current perspective, though, is skill-focused, inspired by the excellent blog of Cal Newport (who advocates for a skill based, “career craftsman” approach to finding a career). As long as I’m building skills and not doing anything evil, I can just explore, and be ok with uncertainty in terms of my long term career plans. I’m a planner–a really obsessive planner–but when I Wikipedia stalk my career role models, it’s clear that most career paths zigzag, and cannot be charted out in neat 5 year and 10 year plans. Focusing on skills and exploration, and being open to opportunity feels like the best plan I can make.

Reflecting on Recruitment

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Hi there! I’m Mia–a rising sophomore from San Francisco, exploring agile project management this summer at a large organization in the financial industry. This is an amazing opportunity for me, especially just after my first year, but I almost didn’t apply, and thought my chances of actually getting it were minimal.The formal recruiting process was overwhelming. The online application, just the first step, was at least 10 pages, and reminded me somewhat of the arduous college application process. I’m not new to the world of internships, but I’m used to a simple resume and cover letter or written questionnaire. This was just a modified version of the same application real life adults used to apply to full time professional jobs at a huge national organization. Many of the questions didn’t apply to me–at the time I was applying, I didn’t even have a college GPA to put down. And my perfectionist brain freaked out at the opportunity to upload supplementary documents. Resume and cover letter to start, but what else? I could upload transcripts, baby pictures, SAT scores, interpretive dance videos, references…I didn’t have a clue. I was slightly tempted to give up and just apply to less formal positions, especially because people around me kept on telling me that I was just a first year, and should work in some customer service job like everyone else. However, I had already spent high school passing appetizers, working in coat check, and for a few weeks, memorably and awfully, even telemarketing. All of those customer facing jobs brought me skills for life and money for college, but I felt determined to learn something new this summer. This internship matched all my target areas: It was a new industry and role for me, it fit my interest in technology and economics, it was paid, and I could live at home in San Francisco. With that in mind, I couldn’t just give up. Instead, I used all of the resources at my disposal to come up with the best application possible. I went to CP&R (shout out to the wonderful Lesley Bonds) and made my resume a thing of much pride. Also on her advice, I uploaded a note explaining my GPA situation, as well as a transcript. (No baby pictures, although I feel like it could have only helped)

I already valued dressing for success

I already valued dressing for success

I asked my older brother, a product manager at a startup in San Francisco, for examples of his cover letters. In the past, cover letters have always seemed like bland instruments of torture. I knew from CP&R that they *should* be reflections of my personality, but I wanted an example of how someone I knew actually meshed personality with professionalism in a cover letter. Because my brother works in tech, his cover letters were significantly less formal than mine could be, but I still found them helpful. My brother’s cover letters were like previews for an interview–and I love interviews. The formula I ended up deriving for my cover letters was why I want the position+why the organization should want me, where the latter is a function of the match between my skills and the organization’s stated needs. I didn’t use my brother’s cocky tone (not my personality) or his bullet points (not appropriate for my industry) but I drew on his structure and confidence as I wrote my own cover letter. I also reached out and had coffee with a Scripps alum who currently works at the organization in order to get a feel for the culture, and also just to see what people can do with a Scripps degree in economics! In the end, my first intensive recruiting cycle–from application to interview to background check–was a team effort and a lot of effort. But it was worth it. What I’ve taken away from this process is not to be afraid to know what I want and ask for help to get it. My first week at my internship has flown by, and I can already tell I’m going to learn and grow. I’m excited for the rest of the summer, and I’ll keep you updated!