I Do This, I Do That: UNH Paul Scholars

 

Frank O'Hara once described his own poems as follows: "I do this, I do that." I remember years ago using that line as a way to give myself permission to just start posting YouTube videos where I just showed some things I was doing, no real jokes or anything. It became sort of a joke with my wife -- if we were on a mountain and I got my camera out, she would know I was about to say, "Hey what's up, I'm on a mountain." End of recording. I do this, I do that. It was very freeing.  

Last week I went to UNH to talk to a group of students called "Paul Scholars." They're incoming freshmen to the business school and there are just so many reasons I can scarcely imagine what that must be like now.

I was there as part of a group of recent graduating alumni (despite the fact that I am neither an alum nor a very recent grad!) for a "Reverse Career Fair." The idea was to talk about how we found jobs that aligned our career with a sense of purpose -- and given that this event was put on by the school's Sustainability Institute, obviously all of us were there representing fairly virtuous organizations. Nobody was there to talk about realizing their postgraduate dream of manufacturing and distributing assault weapons, in other words. 

I was very excited to do this -- I feel as though after graduating college I spent about a decade in the wilderness, really just surviving, career-wise, while pursuing other interests. And it really felt like the right move until it didn't anymore. Now, I work for a company that I believe in, doing work that I feel is contributing to the greater good, and even, weirdly, drawing on all of the talents I developed over that decade in the wind more than I ever thought I would be allowed to at work. 

I know I'm a weird case, but as happy as I am with my path and the pace with which I got there, there's a part of me that wishes I'd just been able to imagine it was even possible a little earlier. One thing I told these kids was that I really had no sense about what most jobs even were when I was their age. My parents and most of my friends' parents were teachers. So, I knew that was one. Beyond that, I mean, doctor? Cop? There were no large employers in my home town -- no corporations or factories or software companies. Just gift shops and houses and property taxes.  

The truth is there are so many jobs out there, so many positions where you can really determine, yourself, a lot of what you actually DO day to day. In every job I have had as an adult, I have seized many readily, increasingly available opportunities to define my own position, shaping it more and more in my own image. I wanted them to know you could do that. 

There were seven of us speaking at this thing; we introduced ourselves, one by one, with a two minute talk. One guy actually timed himself out on his phone, which I thought was a very cool, organized move. After that we circled the room, sitting at tables with 5 or 6 students for 8 minute Q & A sessions. They all asked very different questions -- at one table I talked about how my roommates and I used to pay our bills winning video contests on Revver and even briefly tried to explain how the dot com bubble bursting in the 2000s was how all that money ended up on weird websites like Revver anyway. At another table I talked about opioid overdose death statistics in 2020. I stopped myself from swearing for emphasis a few times, but also let myself do it a few times, just for fun. 

I spent a lot of time and a lot of 8-minute sessions trying to articulate my career path. It's helpful to have to slot yourself into a brief narrative every once in a while-- you're never telling the whole story, but it's a way of getting closer to your fundamental truths somehow anyway. I told them that I graduated with a degree in Poli Sci, and while I never really used my degree specifically, Poli Sci did give me a very strong sense of how to translate academic speak into normal human English. I also learned how easy it was to dazzle people by doing that. And when I look at my own career and my successes honestly, that's the main thing I do. I translate some form of technical speech into every day conversation and I'm pretty good at it.

And I spent too long undervaluing that ability! In my conversations with these students I found myself frequently paraphrasing something I'd heard recently on the podcast How to Save a Planet -- it's important to think about what you like to do, and what you're good at, and find the places where they overlap. It's hard to learn what you're good at -- took me like fifteen years! -- but again, I don't think I was really looking. I wasn't wondering what I was good at, and I wasn't wondering how I could apply whatever I was good at to anything other than a project I created myself. And I wasn't very confident. I'm learning now how important it is to ask yourself those questions, and how to move confidently once you have the answers. 

Most likely, I didn't really leave those kids with a lasting sense of any of that. Most likely, they will just briefly remember me as the energetic guy from the bank. And that's fine! But if a few of them come away with at least the beginnings of a wider sense of what's possible for a career, that's enough for me. That's huge for me.