Career Services Informer

Two summers ago, I was on a co-op term at St. Paul’s Advocacy, a non-profit organization located in the West End of Vancouver, where I worked as a legal and social advocate and homeless outreach assistant. I was at first hesitant to accept the position because I thought that the skills I would obtain would not at all be relevant to my career path of going into law or policy work with the government. Because the position would involve approaching homeless people I, along with my friends and family, was also concerned for my safety. There’s a negative stigma of homeless people being reckless, lazy, and dangerous. The news media does not improve this image, to say the least. Nonetheless, I decided to take the position since I thought experience in the non-profit sector would be beneficial and I would gain office skills.

The job was a 4 month co-op position where I assisted homeless people in finding housing, applying for social assistance, landlord-tenant disputes, or anything else they needed. The Advocacy Office is a free service to those in need. Some clients often were not able to resolve their issues in an appropriate way due to physical or mental disabilities, or the mere fact that they were uninformed of what the best resolution path would be.

Another aspect of my position consisted of being a kind of social worker, seeking out homeless people on the streets of Vancouver, offering them food, and talking to them about their needs. I got first-hand experience speaking with various homeless people on the streets of the city, who I made close bonds with. A lot of these people seemed to have been on a good trajectory in life, but they hit a bump in the road and their life took a turn for the worse. They had degrees, spouses, and had previously maintained jobs. Unfortunately. many homeless are affected by mental illness, alcoholism, and drug addiction, creating a downward spiral into chronic homelessness.

I learned through this experience how the social service system is extremely inaccessible for the average citizen, let alone people who are mentally or physically disabled and without a home. Welfare forms are difficult to fill out and a lot of documentation is needed to prove one’s identity, which homeless people often don’t have. It is evident that the system is not easy to use by the people who need it. This is, in essence, marginalizing the very population it is in place to help.

It turns out that I greatly enjoyed my experience being an advocate. My job was interesting and had a lot of variety to it. Through both of my positions at St Paul’s Advocacy, I’ve realized that the negative stigma attached to homeless people is very inaccurate. Homeless people are the same as people who are more financially privileged, and require the same things in life. Some of my regular clients kept such a positive outlook on life, despite their living conditions not giving them a reason to.

From a humanitarian point of view, the people that I’ve worked with and the clients that I’ve helped gave me so much inspiration to appreciate the opportunities I have. I developed many transferable skills that greatly helped me in my job search afterwards. I developed my sense of professionalism, organization, and communication skills immensely. I also learned a lot about law and social work, which I wasn’t expecting at the start. I put my effort into this job and as a result I got a lot out of it.

In the end, I learned that trying out things that do not appeal to you 100% at the beginning is often a risk worth taking. I also learned to put a lot into what you’re doing, because you will be rewarded in the end, be it with experience, transferable skills for future jobs, or the gratification of knowing that you helped somebody.

Jennifer Miller is a Career Peer Educator with SFU Career Services.

“When you’re wrong, you’re right.”

These words, spoken by a student I saw recently, gave me pause. They were talking about confidence – or at least the appearance of confidence – in this instance pertaining to the context of a job interview.

When you’re wrong, you’re right. It’s not what you say that matters, but how you say it. You could be making something up on the spot, and be totally wrong on whatever it is you’re talking about, but if you appear confident in what you’re saying, you’re more likely to be seen as right.

What exactly is confidence, and how do we get more of it?

What is confidence?

I’d like to make a distinction between what I see as different kinds of confidence. There’s confidence that’s similar to a personality trait, deriving from an overall sense of self esteem that is fairly constant; and there’s confidence that comes from performing certain tasks repeatedly such that you become more and more certain that you will be able to perform those tasks effectively, which obviously fluctuates significantly according to the nature of the situation. For the sake of this post, we’ll call these two confidences “trait confidence” and “task confidence.” Let’s think of them as existing along two separate continua. I’ve created a crude diagram depicting this spectrum below, where the vertical axis represents trait confidence, and the horizontal axis represents task confidence.

I don’t really think it’s as simple as the graph above would suggest, but if we’re talking about where confidence comes from, I think these different quadrants might be helpful.

So, according to my theory, your overall level of confidence in any given situation is going to be dependent on your overall tendency to be confident  (trait confidence) combined with your sense of efficacy in that specific situation (task confidence).

It’s obvious that the place to be is in the top right quadrant, where you’re generally confident in your abilities and outlook, and you feel well practised in the task that you’re accomplishing. Barring that possibility, you either want to be in the top left quadrant or the bottom right quadrant, where you’re high in one kind of confidence but not the other. The place you really don’t want to be is obviously in that lonely square in the bottom left, without any confidence whatsoever.

How do we become more confident?

The seemingly intuitive thing to do is to practice. If we take into account our model of confidence above, however, we see that practising a task likely only improves your confidence as it applies to that task. I’m not convinced that becoming really skilled at playing chess, for example, will in and of itself make you a more confident person outside of that context.

So, the answer to the above question seems to be, as my supervisor so likes to say: “it depends.” If you want to feel more confident during job interviews, it makes sense to do lots of practice and try to go to as many interviews as possible, just as playing lots of chess makes sense if you want to be a more confident chess player. Simply by becoming more familiar with the process, and learning from your experiences and mistakes, you will become more confident in your abilities over time.

But what about that other kind of confidence? You know when people have it – they just seem to carry it around with them wherever they go. They inspire trust. They don’t seem to really ever get fazed by anything. They’re Confident, with a capital C.

How can you be more like that?

I believe the first step lies in something that humanistic psychologists have long been calling the self actualization tendency. In essence, self actualization is a fictional end state (we never get there, that’s why it’s a tendency) in which a person has totally fulfilled all of their humanly needs (starting with survival needs and escalating hierarchically to more spiritual and collective needs), and meaningful growth as a person is no longer possible or even desired.

Again, according to humanist psychology, the tendency to self-actualize is innate and automatic. We’re already trying to do it, all of us, from the moment we are born. The problem is that we encounter barriers to our growth, and we spend most of our lives figuring out ways of getting around them.

So, what does this have to do with confidence?

Sounds like a good topic to delve deeper into next week, doesn’t it?

David Lindskoog is a career advisor with SFU Career Services, and Dave’s Diary is an ongoing series of journal entries touching on various aspects related to careers and well-being. Look for updates every Friday.

Want to hear my thoughts on a particular topic? Send me an email, and I’ll do my best to include it in my next post!

With a semester of co-op experience, I figured finding my next work term would be a breeze. After all, now I had relevant office experience to add to all the volunteer and part-time work on my resume. Unfortunately, I was mistaken. I didn’t get hired on a work term, and while my story comes from a co-op standpoint, what I learned is relevant and important for anyone looking for work.

I figured this seeking semester would be a breeze – after all, I had a good amount of experience, and pretty well-written application documents. Without doubt, I’d have a second co-op in no time. Well, the months passed, and I still didn’t have an offer. Sure, I got a nice number of interviews thanks to my strong resume and cover letter. I’m even confident I was a strong interviewee, based on feedback I’ve received from others in the past.

Still, no offers. So what was I doing wrong? When I followed up with my advisors and coordinators in an effort to get some feedback, I was rather surprised and confused about what I learned.

I realized that I had been falling into two different traps: I was either a very promising candidate, but simply lacked directly applicable experience; or the recruiters had liked everything I’d done but just didn’t think I was the right “fit.” I learned that even if I did everything right in the application process, and had lots of experience on my resume, there was no guaranteed job waiting for me right away.

It might be the same for you. If you didn’t get that job you really wanted, the reasons might be completely out of your immediate control: you can’t instantly gain experience you don’t have, and you certainly can’t change who you are. Simply put, it’s a buyer’s market: there’s heavy competition for students and new graduates, and companies can afford to be very picky on who they select.  I don’t want to discourage looking for jobs right now; rather, I hope that this can help you to avoid obsessing over why you didn’t get an offer, or stressing out about what you did wrong.

No matter what happens, never give up. If you can’t find the paid work you want, think outside the box for alternatives. Can you work towards your goal by volunteering part-time to gain the direct experience you’re missing? How about taking on a less related role that would develop some transferrable skills? There are more possibilities than you might think, and Career Services and Volunteer Services on campus can help you learn where to start, both on and off campus.

Seventeen applications, seven interviews, and zero co-op placements later, I ended up taking classes and volunteering with two positions on campus. You might imagine that I would be pretty depressed about all the rejections and failures I experienced, but I managed to stay positive throughout the process! If I learned anything from this, it’s to avoid getting emotionally attached to a job possibility when the outcome is still uncertain. At the end of the day, you don’t know what’s going to happen, so why hop onto an emotional rollercoaster?

Jennifer Gutzmann

Jennifer is a Career Peer Educator at SFU Career Services, and a fourth-year business student pursuing a career in Human Resources. She loves being with people, and wants to do something to help others.

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It was in the north – swamp country, but the forests were little more than books of green matchsticks drying in the relentless summer sun. After a long, hot day taking shelter under the shade of our helicopter, waiting and waiting for a call to action, we would fly back to camp, and hope to watch heavy storms pass overhead in the blue-grey night skies, grins as wide as the prairies on our faces. Storms meant lightning, lightning meant fire and lots of it, and fire meant one thing: overtime.

It was about seven years ago, and I was a wildland firefighter, living and working “in the boonies” of northern Alberta each summer to pay for my university education. It was a job that I have often described as being 90% boredom, and 10% excitement. It was also a job that paid very differently, depending on the severity of the fire season. There was nothing special about the wage, especially considering the physically demanding nature of the work. There was, however, a significant potential to find yourself in a situation demanding long, continuous hours, and significant overtime. Fires, after all, don’t just work from 9 to 5. (more…)

They make you cry in front of complete strangers. They make you shout at or hurt people, even if they did nothing to deserve it. They can be intensely energizing, just as they can be suffocatingly demotivating. When they grab hold of you, logic and reason cease to make sense. as we give in to something baser, more ancestral, more automatic.

Emotions are one of the most distinctive, primal, and ubiquitous features of human life. Yet, despite their important role in career development and decision making, they can be one of the most frequently overlooked issues in career advising/counselling. It’s a bit puzzling at first, but something that I think makes sense when looked at through the correct lens. (more…)

Raccoons are excellent role models for anyone looking to get a head start in their career.

"Look over there, a job posting!"

I know what you’re thinking. It goes something like this: “Wait, raccoons? Those back-alley dwelling, trash-pilfering, nocturnal city stalkers? Surely, Dave, you’ve lost your mind to make such an outrageous comparison. Promptly return yourself to a satisfactory level of sanity before writing your blogs, in order to spare readers like us from such outlandish claims.”

Well, I’ve never really been one to make perfect sense all the time, so at the risk of being “outlandish,” allow me to explain why you should look to this wonderful, adorable animal as an inspiration for your career. (more…)

“The more I have the more I think I’m almost where I need to be, If only I could get a little more”

The Avett Brothers – Ill With Want

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What’s the secret to happiness?

Is it that there’s something missing in your life? Something that, if only you had it, you could finally be happy?

It could be money, though there’s plenty of research out there these days that suggests this is not the case: wealthy people are no more happy than everyone else.

Maybe it’s just a matter of finding a job that you love: your dream job. Certainly, there are many people out there that have been fortunate enough to find themselves in this situation, but the reality is that the insistence on finding the perfect job is a myth that just makes persistent dissatisfaction acceptable.

Okay, maybe it’s love. Or perhaps time. If you had more of those, then you’d be happier, right? Intuitively this makes sense, but if we’re going by intuition then we’d be happier with more money in our pockets as well. I think it’s probably safe to say that these things can make you happy, but in and of themselves they’re no panacea.

Money, material possessions, a great job, time, even love… I would argue that adding any of these to your life is not the key to happiness.  No, adding anything is not the way to go. Instead, let’s think about subtraction. (more…)

New Year’s resolutions are really no different than the goals we set for ourselves year-round, except that they are prompted by the façade of a fresh start. Unlike January 1, the new semester really does provide you with a fairly clean slate. The triumphs and tribulations of last semester have no bearing on your new classes, and you have every opportunity to be a better student this time around.

If you are like me, you make new semester resolutions at the start of every term. If you are like me, many of these resolutions are lofty, vague, and eventually unfulfilled. Every semester I promise myself that THIS will be the semester I keep up with my readings all semester. In past semesters I’ve had varying degrees of success with this goal, but I’ve never actually met my objective in full. This could be due to a number of factors, but the easiest one to change is probably the way that I set goals.

Goal setting seems intuitive, but if your goals are not SMART, they have serious room for improvement. SMART goals are:

Specific
If your goal is vague, it is difficult to make plans to achieve it.

Measurable
If your goal is not measurable, you cannot check your progress or know when you have achieved it.

Attainable
Setting goals that are beyond your reach or out of your control will only end in frustration.

Realistic
Knowing that you could achieve something is not enough – will you? Set goals you are motivated to work toward and can realistically be integrated into your lifestyle.

Time-limited
If you leave an open deadline, you may find your goals sit at the bottom of your to-do list. School comes along with a lot of dates that will be on your mind anyway (like the start of reading break), giving you built-in reminders if you pair them with goal deadlines.

To end my streak of falling short of my goal, I hereby resolve to read all assigned material by the dates indicated in my class syllabi until the end of the semester. To be realistic, I will allow myself a grace period of one week when I am in the process of studying for an exam.

I also make a list of goals for myself every summer. I usually achieve most of them, with the exception of those that are unrealistic (things I think I should do, but am not sufficiently motivated to). In addition to making those goals SMART, I write them down and post them somewhere that I will see them every day. This instills a healthy sense of guilt when they fall by the wayside. Another great way to achieve the same effect is to share your goals with others, especially if they have similar goals.

Whether you resolve to be a better student, get more involved, eat healthier, or improve yourself in some other way, I wish you the best of luck and encourage you to use all the tips, techniques, and resources available to you. Happy new semester!

Image: http://www.commentsyard.com/comments/happy-new-year/

Tabatha Patterson, Career Peer.

Tabatha is a Career Peer Educator at SFU Career Services and pursuing a BA in Psychology with a minor in Counseling and Human Development.

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There’s a thin, temperamental line between persistence and stubbornness.

It’s one that I’ve brushed up against, rushed past without realizing, and/or carefully tread over with purpose many times. Like most things, persistence is something of a double-edged sword: it can be either a huge strength when applied in a constructive direction, or an outright flaw when clung to too tightly in situations that call for more flexibility. Like Ned Stark’s honour, it can earn you respect and carry you to high places, but it can just as quickly get you into serious trouble.

It’s no coincidence that many people I talk to who identify themselves as persistent (or who come to see themselves as persistent while talking about their story) also say that their friends and family think of them as stubborn. They are the same quality in essence, distinguished by matter of degree. Naturally, it’s often difficult to know where the shift from one to the other will occur. (more…)

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Around this type of year in any post-secondary education environment, there’s only one thing on students’ minds: exams (or as I prefer to call them, “knowledge exploration invitations“). It’s a bit of a shame, too, as there’s other, happier things to be thinking about around this time of year. Nonetheless, amid bulging auras of festivity as December quickly progresses, students learn that their holiday cheer must take a back seat to these evaluative academic tasks. Stress, sickness, and a bevy of other physical and emotional tolls are common and expected experiences.

In particular, one such experience seems to stand out prominently: procrastination. Yes, that unrelenting, all-consuming desire to defer certain tasks to a later time; that failure to delay the gratification of doing something more fun or less effortful; that most persistent voice in your head that does such a great job convincing you to put something off, then chases you into a guilt storm so dampening you don’t even enjoy what you ended up doing anyway.

How unpleasant. (more…)

Is a million dollars enough to make you just up and quit your job?  Vancouver’s real estate prices would make me ponder this a little, but that’s a whole different story.  I’ve asked this question to friends, family and even the lady behind me at the lottery booth.  The majority indicated that they would quit their job without hesitation and spend their winnings to take exotic trips around the world, buy a new home, purchase a luxury car, donate to charity, and when the dust settles, pursue their “dream job.”

Some people are lucky enough to know at an early age what they want to be doing in the future.  A few may even end up in the career they daydreamed about as a young child.  Of course, nothing is ever handed to us on a silver platter.  It takes talent, hard work, and a little bit of luck – and as Oprah puts it, “luck is preparation meeting opportunity.”

For some of us, pursuing our dreams might be completely out of our comfort zone.  We’re happy to work in jobs we feel are our “best option” at the time.  The problem with this is that we become complacent and our motivation and passion slowly start to dwindle.

Don’t we owe it to ourselves to do something that is meaningful and that we love doing?

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”     – Steve Jobs

Here are a few tips for finding great work that you’ll love: (more…)

What a month!

How else could you describe the process of growing and caring for a moustache for an entire month, other than by calling it a “hairy-ing” experience? (I just couldn’t help it, sorry!)

For 30 days, I cultivated what can only be described as a scratchy, squirrelly patch of fuzzy dirt on my upper lip, ultimately resulting in…

pure fear, manifested as facial hair.

Let’s rewind for a bit, though. I knew what I was signing up for when I decided to take part in Movember this year. I was aware that I was going to look a little bit ridiculous and I didn’t really have a problem with that. I had come to grips with my own level of professionalism, such that I didn’t feel that my new furry friend would compromise it. The first week was probably the most awkward, in terms of facial hair growth. There comes a point in the growing of every moustache when one must cross a threshold that they can never return from, and it is a very delicate line, fraught with peril on either side. I call it the “reveal.” (more…)

An interesting fact seemingly shared by almost all accomplished people is that they had a mentor. Bill Clinton was a protégé of William Fulbright. Sigmund Freud was mentored by Joseph Breuer. Carl Jung by Sigmund Freud. Bill Gates by Warren Buffet. Oprah Winfrey by Maya Angelou. Henry David Thoreau by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Hilary Clinton by Rev. Donald James. Helen Keller by Anne Sullivan. Aristotle by Plato. Plato by Socrates… The list goes on.

What exactly is a mentor, anyway? A mentor can encompass a wide variety of roles. They can be someone who models appropriate behavior, offers encouragement, opens the door to opportunity, keeps you accountable, and inspires vision. Having someone who is willing to share their experience with you can make a big difference, however cliché that may sound.

Surprisingly, despite many obvious benefits, mentorship has been cited as one of the least-utilized tools for advancing one’s career. A career survey indicated that only about thirty percent of respondents reported having a mentor, and roughly twenty percent said that their company had a mentoring program in place. In addition, as an advancement strategy mentoring ranked lowest, far behind the most popular choices of obtaining additional education, seeking more responsibility at work, asking for promotion, and networking. With that in mind, the goal for this article is to explain how to form and sustain a meaningful relationship with your potential mentor(s). (more…)

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If there’s one literary convention I love, it’s the metaphor. And I’m not the only one. I’ve written about metaphors here before – most recently in this post about emergence, but also in a couple of posts about time management, and this post about euphemisms from a while back. Something about metaphors allows us to explain things that would otherwise be nearly impossible to understand, merely by comparing that thing to something else. Practical use aside, metaphors also comprise some of the most elegant, powerful, and emotionally stirring language that we’re capable of creating.

Metaphors come up all the time in my work with students, whether they’re acknowledged or not. There’s clear value in using certain metaphors to explain the purpose behind many of the things we talk about. For example – why is it a good idea to have an attractive format and layout on a resume? Because it’s a great way to stand out from the crowd. No, there’s no crowd in most recruiters’ offices, but drawing that comparison helps to illustrate the significance of having a unique resume style, more powerfully and in fewer words than explaining this in other ways.

I’ve also thought about metaphors in terms of my own position as a career advisor. It’s thought provoking to ask, if you haven’t already, “how would I describe what I do if someone asked me to be as succinct as possible?” It wouldn’t be succinct at all to describe all the things you do on a daily basis, your responsibilities, your accomplishments, your significance. Nor would it be descriptive enough to only talk about a small subset of those things. So, how can we possibly do this question justice? (more…)

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Of all the posts I’ve written, the one that seems to consistently get the most page views is this one on strengths and weaknesses, Freud, and Alfred Adler. I guess there’s a lot of psychology students out there scouring the web in search of information on how these two prominent historical figures viewed the issue. If that’s the case, then I feel a little bit bad for them, because whatever knowledge I have about these two theorists likely derives from the same sort of textbooks that their courses are using in the first place. Although I suppose my writing is probably a bit more entertaining than that of most psychology textbooks (faint, faint praise).

Among psychology buffs, Freud can be a very polarizing figure. There are some – including close friends of mine – who strongly contend that he (and by extension classical psychoanalysis) single-handedly set back the progress of psychotherapy by decades, permanently etching a black mark on the history of psychology thanks to theories that seem almost non-sensical when viewed through a modern lens. What can I say? I guess people get a little sensitive when you tell them they unconsciously want to kill their father and sleep with their mother. (more…)

In this Johnny Bunko series, I’ve so far shared my experiences on:

• Following Guidance (no plan in life),
• Learning strengths (disappointment in school),
• Managing time (working 40 hours a week with full course load),
• Persistence (hard work trumps talent) and
• Making excellent mistakes (careless human error).

Today, I share with you my last entry, on Leaving an Imprint.

During the past five years at SFU, I have been asked multiple times: what do I want to become after I graduate? Every time, I would hesitate before answering. I didn’t have an exact position I wanted to be in, nor did I know whether I would have the skills for whatever that ended up being. Hence, my typical answer: “I don’t know.” To many, uncertainty is uncomfortable. Parents, especially, may start questioning your motives at school and whether you have the desire to become the best at whatever you’re studying. At best, I have a faint idea of the industry I want to pursue, but nothing solid. Does this mean I’m destined for failure? (more…)

Co-operative Education can be an excellent way of enriching your academic experience and narrowing down your potential career options. Employers increasingly cite real-life or internship experience as one of the most desirable qualities in applicants. With that in mind, here are four essential tips for getting the most out of your co-op experience:

Set personal and career goals, objectives, and expectations

In the beginning of your work term, discuss your goals, responsibilities and expectations with your employer(s). Ask any questions you have about the organization and your position. This can prevent some major obstacles or misunderstandings down the road. Make sure any goals you set are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely) and relevant to your long-term professional goals. List the traits that you would like to see in your ideal co-op position. What do you hope to get out of the experience?

Show initiative, drive, and commitment

There are various ways you can demonstrate your motivation and enthusiasm to your supervisor(s) and coworkers. Regularly ask questions, volunteer to take on interesting projects, and set regular meetings with your supervisor(s). You may not always get to do the most interesting tasks, so accept any “grunt work” without complaint, showing you’re willing to do your best no matter the situation. Regularly attend informal or social events to maintain good relationships and network with people in the organization.

Track your accomplishments

After your work term is over, you’ll want to be able to reflect on what you got out of your co-op experience. This will not only enrich your co-op experience, but it will also help you clearly articulate your skills and qualifications in future job or volunteer interviews. Throughout your work term, maintain a journal or portfolio to record details of any projects, lessons, and achievements you have had as a co-op student. Also, consider using tools that will help keep track of your accomplishments like www.idonethis.com.

Use multiple resources to stay informed about future internship opportunities

Make regular visits to Symplicity to stay in the loop about on-going and future co-op postings. Also remember that many job and co-op openings are never posted, so network with colleagues, professors, friends, and family to identify these hidden opportunities. Career Fairs and departmental student unions and groups are excellent means of networking with others. Social networking sites like LinkedIn are also recommended. Take the initiative to conduct informational interviews with key people who may refer you to interesting opportunities. Visit SFU Career Services or attend career workshops to learn about networking and conducting informational interviews.

Eric Kang, Career Peer

Eric is a returning Career Peer Educator and Career Peer Coach with SFU Career Services. He is studying toward his Honours Bachelor’s degree in Molecular Biology & Biochemistry (MBB) and Statistics. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking, juggling, and drawing.

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Money is a terrible motivator.

If I were to say to you, “Reader, I’d like you to come up with a creative way of solving this problem we have,” or “I’d like you to complete this complex task requiring somewhat sophisticated cognitive abilities,” you’d actually perform worse if I offered you a nice chunk of change as a reward.

Seem backwards? It should, because we’re quite conditioned to think about motivation in terms of linear, easily explainable rewards and punishments (see what I did there?).

Classical and operant conditioning form the bedrock of behavioural psychology, and between them explain a whole lot about motivation and learning. Classical conditioning, most widely known by the famous “Pavlov’s dog” example, tells us that we can create a new response to a stimulus merely by pairing that stimulus with another one a whole bunch of times. As a result, we can train dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell by ringing a bell every time we give them food for a few weeks.

Meanwhile, Skinner’s operant conditioning explains motivation in terms of reward and punishment. If I want to create more of a certain behaviour, I should therefore offer a reward after every instance of that behaviour, reinforcing it. Similarly, if I want to decrease the frequency of a behaviour I can pair it with a punishment, which by all reasonable logic should decrease and hopefully extinguish the behaviour in question. (more…)

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“I’m young and I’m pissed off.”

What a wonderful quotation, spoken by a student I saw recently. I was captured immediately by how much it conveyed, both cognitively and emotionally, in such few words.

The student was discussing their passion for politics and ambitions of being an agent of social change. After struggling for a few minutes to find a way to describe their career and life story’s theme, they summarized in six words several meetings’ worth of exploration succinctly and with such an elegantly contradictory combination of brusque and eloquence, that I knew it was only a matter of time before it inspired a blog post.

“Young and pissed off” communicates a certain set of underlying values and motivations. It suggests that there is a strong dissatisfaction with the way things are and an unyielding sense of responsibility to do something about it. It gives meaning and purpose to their story. And make no mistake – we’re all living out our own career and life stories. (more…)

Compared to university graduates decades ago, students today are faced with an even greater number of career paths to choose from. How are we supposed to know which career to pursue? Common symptoms among students include fear and feeling overwhelmed. Despite graduating from Capilano College as a top student and valedictorian, Sean Aiken was not an exception, so he launched a project for which he tried out one job per week for 52 weeks to narrow down his passion. When asked what possessed him to initiate such a wacky project, he responded, “…far more wacky (than trying out different jobs) is the number of people who get out of bed in the morning and absolutely dread going to work because they hate their jobs.”

In February of 2011, I had a unique opportunity to attend a talk by Sean Aiken, who visited SFU to share his stories about the project. It was a must-attend event for me because I wanted to hear about the project from Sean’s personal point of view, and it surely was an exciting opportunity to watch him speak in person. Shortly after the event, I wanted to know more about the project, so I read his book The One-Week Job Project: 1 Man, 1 Year, 52 Jobs, which provided me with a bit more detail on each of the jobs he worked in throughout Canada and the U.S. Below is a list of ideas that I took away from the event and the book:

1. Not knowing what to do with your life is perfectly okay, as long as you continue exploring and doing meaningful things that can help you learn more about your aptitudes and interests.
2. Life is inherently uncertain so it is better to stay flexible and open-minded than to try to devise and follow a rigid plan. According to one career survey, only 2% of the respondents in the work force ended up doing what they thought they would do when they were under 20. This also ties into the idea of Chaos Theory of Careers.
3. School is important. Do your best to get the best grades you can, because the higher your GPA is, the greater number of opportunities will be open to you.
4. Real life experience is crucial. Immerse yourself in extracurricular activities and consider participating in Co-op or internship programs.
5. People whom you work with have a tremendous influence on your job satisfaction. Happy people seem to have two things in common: They like the people they work with; and they feel like they are making a difference in some way.
6. Money is important but it is not everything. After all, what use is there if you make millions of dollars a year but hate your job and feel miserable every week?

As much as I was fascinated by what Sean did, I thought one week was too short a period for Sean to truly learn about different jobs. Personally, many of my learning experiences came after I was in a job for a few months, if not years. By staying in each job for only five days, he would have obtained only a superficial understanding of various jobs at best. Nevertheless, I find it quite admirable that Sean had the courage to resist conforming to the expectations of his family, friends or teachers, as many students who take the first job that comes along do:

“The reality is that many people make these huge life-changing decisions based on their perception of what others think. I often thought, what are my friends doing? What will make my parents proud? What title will allow me to confidently answer the question ‘What do you do for a living?’ I was cultivating a life built on fear, not conscious choice.”

These are questions I am sure lots of students must be asking themselves. There seems to be no easy answer. The best we can do may be to stay patient and do what we must every day and, as the late Steve Jobs said, believe the dots will connect looking back.

If you would like to learn more about Sean, visit his project website here and consider attending the upcoming TEDx Vancouver event, for which he has been selected as one of the speakers. The event is to be held on November 12^th, 2011.

Eric Kang, Career Peer

Eric is a returning Career Peer Educator and Career Peer Coach with SFU Career Services. He is studying toward his Honours Bachelor’s degree in Molecular Biology & Biochemistry (MBB) and Statistics. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking, juggling, and drawing.