What are your key roles and responsibilities in your current positions? What do you like most about your job and what do you find most challenging?
List or describe the top 5+ professional skills that are crucial to your role.
- Problem-solving
- Research
- Teamwork (no, really!)
- Communication
- Aptitude for learning
- Ability to dive deep into new areas and emerge with relevant insights
- General business knowledge
How did your time at Yale shape your career trajectory? For example, what skills and/or experiences did you acquire that have contributed to your career success?
Yale allowed the freedom to explore far beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. I took classes from different departments in History, Classics, Comparative Literature, anthropology, and more. Yale’s Archaia program fostered constant engagement with texts, conversations, students, and scholars well-outside my area of expertise. In many ways, that freedom to follow intellectual threads wherever they may take me mirrors my own career trajectory and gave me the necessary confidence and practice to explore new areas in my career.
Notice that I didn’t mention business classes, economics, school of management, or computer science. It wasn’t a matter of freedom to find content that would later help in my career. It’s a matter of stretching your own boundaries and applying key competencies to new areas while practicing developing new skills. That, for me, is pretty much the practice of business everyday.
What were the biggest challenges that you faced when transitioning to different workplaces and cultures? What advice and suggestions can you offer to current students to help them prepare for those challenges?
First, I’d say be prepared to challenge academic workplaces and cultures. Sometimes they’re great! But predatory academic environments exist and it may be hard to recognize when you’re in one. It’s okay to recognize the transitions are not just “academic to corporate.”
Second, be prepared for setbacks and rejections (from academic institutions as well as corporate ones). I applied to more than 100 universities and to more than 30 jobs before landing my current job.
Third, treat new workplaces the same way you treat a new course. Confusing at first, maybe. A new argot and topic to learn, definitely. But you look for the framing devices you know that help you get up to speed, and you work with your colleagues to figure it out together.
