I thought long and hard about this prompt. My life so far hasn't gone as planned (yeah, I know, tell that to the fifty-somethings, give them a laugh)—and I've learned a few things I would have liked to know beforehand. So I wrote a letter. And then realized that the entry format was limited to 400 characters.
Oh really? Wisdom and experience in 400 characters? If we're going that route, how about a haiku?
Congratulations!
Now be wise, young padawan.
Things could get crazy.
Now be wise, young padawan.
Things could get crazy.
That's 66 characters. I could write six haikus.
Eat veggies. Back up
your data. Start saving. Be
honest. Call your friends.
Duke 2016:
I wish the world in your hands.
You've got a good start!
Now you get to sleep.
It's pretty nice, right? One of
life's little pleasures.
Start your 401-
K. I'm not sure what it is,
but it's important.
I'm not sure exactly what I sent in, but it wasn't as clever as all that. Regardless, what I really wanted to send in was this:
To you, the graduating senior:
I graduated Duke, class of 2012, so the four years I've spent away from college are probably the four years you've spent in it. This fall, I return to university to pursue a higher degree, so you can see that I'm still figuring a lot of things out.
While I didn't get it right on my first try, I hope you can take comfort from that: you're not tied forever to the first thing you do when you get out of college. Most of my friends—from fellow engineers to graphic designers and political science majors—have switched jobs in the past two years, some of them more than once. They tell me this is typical now—that the days of lifelong loyalty to a stable company are bygones. I guess I should have known that when I graduated, but I'm not sure where I would have learned it from. It's not something I saw in my parents or my friends' parents, and if there was a course on “preparing for America's changing corporate culture,” I didn't take it.
So—predictably—I've spent the last four years realizing that, despite my academic and non-academic successes, I have some very pertinent knowledge gaps. If being an adult means being wise and self-sufficient, I'm still not ready. On the other hand, when it comes to the arms race between me and Murphy's Law, Duke did give me a lot of good battle prep. (And friends. And basketball. Man, I love this place.)
I hope my war metaphors have nothing to do with your first experiences out of Duke. But, since I'm not the only one among my peers who's felt pretty overwhelmed with life post-graduation, I offer these tidbits of advice to you, graduating seniors. May they serve you well.
Point #1—The modus operandi that brought you to this point, that gave you success at Duke, may not include the same set of strategies that will serve you best in the next phase of your life.
- You may have enjoyed developing hard skills. Now you may have to learn about soft skills, economics or business in order to satisfy your boss and understand his agenda.
- Your teachers have been responsible for evaluating your work. Your first job may give you once-yearly reviews that leave you floundering for feedback and your progress mostly ignored unless you take matters into your own hands.
- You may have focused intensely on your work. Now, focus on work-life boundaries, especially your health and your social life.
- Or, maybe you didn't focus on work, and that worked out for you. Maybe something different will be required this next time around.
Sometimes it takes a while to figure out how your new place pulls you into and out of balance. So: keep your eyes open. Be observant. Be adaptable. Even a good change involves an adjustment.
Point #2—The people who surround you are incredibly important.
There's a story behind this one. The biggest differences between life in school and in industry—for me—in order of importance:
3. Scenery. (My first job was in Texas.)
2. Social life. (Turns out, it's much harder to squeeze in “making new friends” time in the wee hours before and after work. Unless you can make friends at work. That's probably the best thing.)
1. No longer being surrounded by people who cared about my success.
There was also having my own kitchen and bathroom and car and income and access to big-city festivals and extracurriculars. But #1 pretty much dominated all the rest.
I was hired for my dream job after graduation—I hadn't thought a bachelor's degree could qualify me to design computer hardware—and I came on during what was supposed to be the transition point between two projects. The team was kind and generally supportive, I was nervous and eager to please, so everything was good except for the minor distraction of getting the older (late) project out the door. In the meantime (as my teammates slaved and the schedule got delayed and delayed again) I “ramped up” more or less on my own—with one hour of training meetings a week, a mentor who was on maternity leave for my first three months and then transferred to a more urgent assignment, and a three-hundred page technical document that was not written for the novice (in fact, it had crossed-out sections with “update this please” in the margins). Sick of stagnation, both bored and overwhelmed, I asked my manager repeatedly how I could be more helpful. He told me to be patient. I tried. After six months, I owned a spreadsheet.
There are a ton of lessons I could pull out here about assertiveness, future-focused priorities, communication, and office politics. But the overarching theme I want to pull out of this is: the people around you matter. I'd spent six months trying to contribute to my team as diligently as I'd been instructed, and by so doing had arguably wasted half a year of my life. It wasn't their fault—turns out, my team hadn't had a new hire to train in about ten years. (They'd hired experienced professionals only. That explains the age demographic that I didn't think to pay attention to when I interviewed.) Regardless, I was very dependent on their examples and their input, so when I should have been making friends and pushing my way into influential pieces of the project, I stayed meekly unobtrusive in my office. Friends: being unobtrusive at work is not a virtue.
The reason is this: the people who surround you are your biggest asset. They're the ones who look out for you and tell you things you don't know to look for; their reactions to things become your basis for evaluating the environment. They're the ones who provide the culture that makes you complacent or inspired, and they're what makes you want to come to work even when it's hard—because a challenge makes a bond that's worth the overtime and stress. You need to connect at work almost more than you need to work. The former enlivens and empowers you. The latter gets you paid.
That's for coworkers—now, how about your boss? If you're so brilliantly effective that your boss never needs to check on you, you should still have regular contact to keep from falling through the cracks in his brain. If, like me, you're struggling, the longer you wait to ask for help, the deeper and more embarrassing is your quagmire. In my case, I think my boss felt trapped between a rock and a hard place. The team was behind, so my help could have been used, but on the other hand, everyone was too busy catching up to devote time to mentoring. Anyway, I was an untested chess piece and there were higher-ups breathing down my manager's neck. So the choice to leave me to my own devices was the convenient one, but also the myopic one; I think there were better compromises possible, and I'd have earned more respect if I'd insisted on what I needed to contribute.
Which brings me to
Point #3—the lifelong goals of balance and resilience.
We're living things, and we do fantastic things to maintain homeostasis. Balance is a life-long pursuit, full of continual epiphanies as we discover that “one change” that makes all the difference between living on the positive and negative edge of the threshold.
Trouble is, that one thing changes. So we look at someone else and see that they have what we need and we get jealous, not realizing that the thing that solves our problem doesn't necessarily solve all of theirs. (At some point, I finally got handed real work, and had two months of thrill before the stress levels skyrocketed. Then, just like my coworkers, overtime became my new battle. Until I quit my job, and some of them became jealous of me.)
So balance involves a perpetual chase, and yet—there's a synergy to it. Some things remain important, and when we keep those as our anchor points, it's much easier to stay centered. Those good things form a foundation that's likely to give you the energy, health, confidence—whatever that next unnameable thing is you need—that lets you grab hold of the next thing that builds you up. When times get tough, your foundation erodes, or you're simply in an unfamiliar place and you feel weak and out of control—these are the times when it becomes really obvious what anchors were holding you together before and just how valuable they are.
The bad news is, being out of balance is also a spiral. The good news is, people have overcome tremendous odds before—I daresay, this includes you—and because of synergy, every anchor point you harness makes you more capable/increases the speed of your progress. One of my foundations is journaling—it helps me keep track of the others. Exercise, sleep, and diet are recurrent themes; I'm learning which ones work when.
My life works better when I make good decisions convenient. Also, when I'm doing hard things. (Purpose above comfort: my brief experiment with a life of pointless ease was terrible.) Health is a huge priority, but if I'm healthy enough in one area, I can use it to make up for lack in another. I look for friends who help me trust myself. Try to align my wants with my needs. Make decisions that my future self will thank me for. And when I'm teetering, surround myself with uplifting and inspiring friends and media and hold to the rules and schedules and things that keep me disciplined instead of distracted.
It's a starting point; it's what works for me. As you explore, may your skillfulness in personal things be prelude to the many outward accomplishments and contributions you bring into the world. You were not meant to live an unimportant life.
To you, the class of 2016!
--Jenna
