I think it’s important to reflect on your values, both personal and professional, and to try to find professional opportunities that are congruent with your personal values. And just because you like doing something doesn’t mean you want to make it your professional work or your livelihood. I think there’s differences between how I like to spend my time, what I do as a hobby versus 40 plus hours a week. You know, how do I imagine my professional life playing out. So I think we can get into majors, choose majors for a lot of reasons, but it’s important to think about, how I imagine spending my time as a professional. Can I imagine doing this? and if you can, I think that’s a good indication to pursue it. The advice that I received was, if I want to become something, find somebody who’s in that field and shadow them. You think you might want to do things, like I thought I wanted to be an engineer and it turned out I’m much better at finance. You can’t do anything in solitude or in silos, you really have to understand the expanse of experiences that you could have and the only way to know that is to talk to people who have had those experiences. And so I always tell people, you know, go talk to somebody. If you think you want to be a lawyer, go talk to a lawyer. If you think you want to be an engineer, go talk to an engineer. One thing that I personally did is, I sat in on classes of things that I was interested in. So I emailed professors and I explained what I was looking for and a lot of people are very very welcoming I also think that joining different clubs can be really beneficial. I went to a lot of club meetings for the specific majors and I think that’s probably the the biggest help that I had, just because in those club meetings you meet a lot of upperclassmen who are already very deep in the field and they know what it’s like. As an undergraduate, I pursued many different research internships and it was my participation in those internships that really helped me develop my passion for research
and inspired me to pursue my PhD. There were times in my kind of career path of doing a lot of different things, moving around a lot, that I felt like, oh I wish I would have just jumped into something would have had a job for seven years now and be that far along in my career, but I think that I’ve gained so many different perspectives, I had so many different opportunities, met different people, got to live abroad and work abroad, so I think at whatever point it happens, like being open to that exploration is good and not panicking about trying lots of different things. For students who are kind of trying to determine where their best place may be, I would encourage them to pursue internship opportunities or even work opportunities to really get a feel for if that path that you’re currently on is of interest to you and something that you really think you would want to consider moving towards on a long-term basis. But I think, above all, for students coming in to the University and students who are here trying to discover, you know, which path to take, it’s definitely finding those resources within that perspective field and coming alongside and learning as much as as he or she possibly can. Don’t close the door because the doors are opening all the time around you. Do what you think you want to do at this point in time but keep your eyes open to how the world changes around you because it has opportunity everywhere if you keep that perspective. I think of it in terms of doors, so you don’t necessarily want to close doors you want to open them and look into them, so my advice for people is to, not walk past doors even if it’s a boring looking door, even if it scares the heck out of you, you need to open it up and actually, like, look inside and see what it is before you make a judgement about it.
