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Advice Topic: Self Assessment

Graduating soon, and what next?

“I am a fifth-year doctoral student and will be graduating soon. I’m at the point in my graduate education where I am thinking about possible careers. What are some simple steps I can take to start my career planning?” –Anonymous

Lucky you, grad student, you get two answers to your question! One is from Catherine Basl, career counselor with Career & Internship Services. Catherine manages the center’s programming for graduate students. Another is from the Core Programs team, who support personal and professional development of grad students at the UW. You know what they say, two heads are better than one!

Catherine Basl, career counselor, Career & Internship Services:

Leverage your research skills for career planning! Aim for a mix of independent reading about options and connecting with professionals in coffee chats or at events.

A few ideas for getting started:

  • Talk to one alum of your graduate program who works outside of academia in an area of possible interest. Graduate Program Advisers could be a good resource for finding alumni.
  • Attend an event on campus (Core Programs and the Career & Internship Center host many) that is focused on employer connections or exploring options.
  • Reflect on your time here at UW. Consider all of the roles you have held as a graduate student (TA, research assistant, mentor, tutor, lab manager, writer, coder, etc.). Looking at each role, what were the tasks and activities you enjoyed most? Least? See if patterns emerge across roles. For an example of this activity, see pages 8-10 in the Career Guide.
  • Paula Di Rita Wishart’s article on Career Callings also provides some great activities for reflecting on your graduate school experience and next steps.
  • LinkedIn’s Alumni tool shows you where actual UW alumni work and you can sort by location, employer, and field of study to see possible career paths.

Some notes:

  • Looking at job postings when you aren’t sure what you want to do can be overwhelming. Job boards become much more navigable when you have established criteria for what you want in a position. The same goes for large career fairs.
  • Gather multiple data points. That means talking to more than one person, reading about career options on more than one website, and testing out the information you hear.
  • Realize career planning is like all research projects—sometimes things fall into place quickly and sometimes you encounter roadblocks along the way. If you feel stuck or would like someone to brainstorm with, consider booking an appointment with a career counselor and checking in with mentors.

A few more resources for exploring:

Core Programs Team:

Dear UW Grad Student,

Thank you for reaching out! This is a great question, and one we hear frequently from graduate students who are further along in their degree programs and thinking through different career paths. Whether you are thinking about working in industry, non-profits, government, or academia, there are several resources that can help you do intentional career planning (many of which we’ve learned through collaborations with partners at the Career & Internship Center).

First step: do some self-assessment work. Where are you with your skills, strengths, interests, passions? Then, use a planning tool like an Individual Development Plan (link) to start to map out possible goals and steps you can take toward them in the next few months. You can also utilize this helpful career planning guide from the Career & Internship Center that provides several clear, proactive steps you can take towards finding that job you’re passionate about.

To explore and open your possibilities, do LinkedIn searches for professionals with jobs you’re interested in learning more about and set up informational interviews to hear more about their unique career trajectories.

Explore different career options within academia and/or job sectors outside of academia with the amazing resources on the Career Center website.

We totally get that you are 100% focused on your dissertation work and graduation – it’s a lot! And, we know that setting aside 1-2 hours per week (starting right now) to explore, research, draft, attend something that helps you refine your career search will really help you identify career options and opportunities for your next steps. It’s worth it – give it a try!

Sincerely,

Core Programs Team
#UWGradSuccess
 

Being Intentional and Productive This Summer

Summer is the perfect time to make room for activities and experiences that will help you be—and feel—prepared for the coming academic year! The pace can feel slower during this time of the year, and there’s a little more wiggle room to be intentional about visualizing and achieving your intellectual, professional, and interpersonal goals. Maybe you’re starting from scratch (or already have some initial goals) and just need a plan of action. Maybe you need some structured time and support to work on a writing project? Or maybe you’re interested in career development activities?

No matter where you’re at, below are some initial strategies that can help you create intentional space for productivity this summer!

Create a plan to meet your goals. As graduate students—and as whole people with complex lives—we know that completing your graduate degree is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to meeting your goals. And we know it takes time to reflect on the skills you already possess—and the academic, professional, and interpersonal competencies you’d like to develop in the future.  Creating an Individual Development Plan (IDP) can help you map out realistic, achievable goals for your time in graduate school and beyond. Use your IDP as a roadmap for meeting with mentors and advisors. What’s great about an IDP is that you can adapt and revise as you see fit!

Make progress on your writing. Whether you are working on a thesis, dissertation, or an article for publication, set achievable and concrete writing goals for yourself this summer. In past Core Programs newsletters, we encouraged you to start out by setting aside 15-minute blocks of time to write each day. Then try working your way up to 30-minute chunks of time. You’ll eventually see that you’re making progress. Reach out to peers (they can be peers outside of your graduate program too) to schedule skype and/or in-person writing support group meetings. You can receive and share constructive feedback on writing projects and hold each other accountable to getting tasks done. Finally, here are great tips on how to move past feeling stuck in a writing rut from Dr. Kerry Anne Rockquemore, President of the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity.

Get involved in professional development activities. There are many ways to brush up on your professional development this summer. 1) Update your CV or resume with skills and professional experiences you have gained from 2016–2017. 2) Identify conferences you’d like to present your work at for the coming year and mark those proposal and registration deadlines on your calendar. 3) Set up informational interviews to network with professionals currently working in fields or companies you’re interested in working for. 4) Volunteer in your local community to gain skills and to give back. 4) Contact your UW career center at Bothell, Tacoma, or Seattle for guidance with your internship or job search. 5) Check out just a few of our Core Programs newsletter links below on professional development:

Research funding opportunities. Whether you are seeking travel funds to participate in an academic or professional conference or grants to fund your research, start by learning about the breadth of possible funding opportunities available to you. Because application deadlines and eligibility requirements vary widely—and can sneak up on you when you’re busy during the academic year—it’s always a good idea to plan in advance.

Funding Information Resources

We hope you find these strategies useful, and please let us know of tips that worked for you!

Best,
Core Programs Team
#UWGradSuccess

Translating Your Postdoc Experience into Practice

An academic journey is an interesting thing. After focusing on developing specialized knowledge in a field during your PhD and then digging deeper during your postdoc, it is understandable to wonder how you might use your specific expertise in different settings – whether inside or outside of academia.

A recent panel of Ph.D.s working in industry highlighted the importance of translating your doctoral and postdoc experience into broader terms. Taking an inventory of your skills, capabilities, and strengths can help you gain confidence as you begin to imagine you do have something remarkable to offer to a future employer or to leverage for success in your career.

Skills learned during graduate school and a postdoc fellowship have set you up to be a competitive applicant for most industry and start up jobs, in addition to the traditional academic track. By the completion of your training, you are highly intelligent, with an ability to learn and teach yourself “what you don’t know.” You are adept at gathering all the available information and making a good decision regarding what it means and what’s next. You have developed great analytical and logic-minded skills, which you can apply to move an issue, experiment or conversation forward. All it takes is stepping back, and reframing your experiences for a different audience.

Need some ideas about how your graduate and postdoc experiences have prepared you for a rewarding career inside or outside of academia? Check out this list from Peter Fiske’s keynote at the National Postdoc Association meeting 2017 (#NPA2017) to get you started:

  1. Ability to function in a variety of environments and roles
  2. Teaching skills; conceptualizing, explaining
  3. Counseling, interview skills
  4. Public speaking experience
  5. Ability to support a position/viewpoint with argumentation and logic
  6. Ability to conceive and design complex studies and projects
  7. Ability to implement and manage all phases of complex research projects and to follow them through to completion
  8. Knowledge of the scientific method to organize and test ideas
  9. Ability to organize and analyze data, to understand statistics and to generalize from data
  10. Ability to combine, integrate information from disparate sources
  11. Ability to evaluate critically
  12. Ability to investigate, using many different research methodologies
  13. Ability to problem-solve
  14. Ability to do advocacy work
  15. Ability to acknowledge many differing views of reality
  16. Ability to suspend judgment, to work with ambiguity
  17. Ability to make the best use of informed hunches

As you develop your own inventory, keep in mind that similar skills or capacities may be called different things in different sectors or fields. Do your research when you are targeting a job prospect and develop tailored versions of your CV or resume and cover letters to reflect the field specific terms.  You are prepared – it just takes a little translation to help others see it easily. We invite you to budget an hour or so a week to explore the references below for more tools and ideas.

When Things Don’t Go As Planned… Now What?

As we’ve noted in past newsletters, this is the time of year where it seems everyone around you is hitting milestones, getting summer internships or jobs, being awarded fellowships, or graduating.  What happens when you find yourself in the midst of setbacks or what feel like roadblocks to your progress?

Maybe you’ve been applying for jobs and haven’t received calls for interviews.  Maybe all those fellowship applications are going unanswered.  Perhaps your committee or advisor decided to postpone a major exam until the fall quarter, throwing off the timeline of goals you planned for.  What now?

We consulted a few sources for advice, including the UW Resilience Lab. First, it’s important to acknowledge and sit with the emotion you’re experiencing (perhaps shame, disappointment, frustration, anger, or all of the above).  Recognizing your feelings is an important step for moving forward, otherwise it can be difficult to see through the emotion and be creative about next steps.

Second, talk with trusted individuals about what you are facing.  It can feel like everyone around you is successful, but you may be surprised at just how many setbacks and failures are experienced by all of us (including advisors and mentors). Talking with others can help validate your feelings and also help you see additional perspectives on what’s happening–as well as generate more creative ideas about what you can do to adjust, adapt, and move forward.

Business consultant and author Chris Winfield offers these tips to address what to do in the face of setbacks, highlighting how setbacks can be learning and growth opportunities:

– Give yourself time. Lifehacker recommends 24 hours just to let it out.
– Avoid making any big decisions, if you feel panicked or overwhelmed.
– Make peace with your failures.
– Cut yourself some slack (but don’t let go of the rope).
– Regain your control.

For more on these tips, see Winfield’s blog post.

Whether you are sailing through the end of the quarter or not sure what’s next for you, we stand with you.

Best Regards,

Core Programs Team

Additional Resources

Work-Life Balance? For Real?

The aspiration of “work-life balance” is often recommended in our everyday lives, but this approach can be met with a sense of dread rather than a sense of hope. Really though, when the demands of work and life seem to be unending, how can we possibly keep it all in “balance”? This can feel so true, especially if the popular analogy to life balance–that of tipping scales–feels all together inaccurate. In actuality, most of us have more than one set of “scales” in our lives (e.g. graduate school, additional jobs on or off campus, family and community commitments, self-care, etc.), and they can often feel like they are in competition with each another. Below are some possible ways to rethink how we might approach working towards work-life integration rather than “balance.”

Integration. Some have talked about “work-life integration.” The idea is that a life worth living is better served if your passions and life commitments are incorporated or expressed in your daily work. This is not to say that we don’t have obligations that we just plain have to do. But this perspective does however allow us to ask ourselves, “During any given work week, do I have opportunities to feed my passions and core commitments in some way?”

Separation. That said, sometimes what refuels you is practicing setting clear boundaries between work and play or being able to volunteer with community groups or organizations that have nothing to do with graduate school work or a job. These are important projects too and—as David Whyte would say—are still integrated in that you are stoking your own fires in service to your work and your engagement in your life.

Reflection. How do you spend your days? Your weeks? Are you happy with your personal mix of commitments and activities? Is the mix serving you and contributing to your ability to be your best self –whether at work or at home with friends and family? Many of us need to do a mental “check-in” on these questions every few months or so, and when necessary, adjust the mix. The aspiration of “work-life balance” is often recommended in our everyday lives, but this approach can be met with a sense of dread rather than a sense of hope. Really though, when the demands of work and life seem to be unending, how can we possibly keep it all in “balance”? This can feel so true, especially if the popular analogy to life balance–that of tipping scales–feels all together inaccurate. In actuality, most of us have more than one set of “scales” in our lives (e.g. graduate school, additional jobs on or off campus, family and community commitments, self-care, etc.), and they can often feel like they are in competition with each another. Below are some possible ways to rethink how we might approach working towards work-life integration rather than “balance.”

Integration. Some have talked about “work-life integration.” The idea is that a life worth living is better served if your passions and life commitments are incorporated or expressed in your daily work. This is not to say that we don’t have obligations that we just plain have to do. But this perspective does however allow us to ask ourselves, “During any given work week, do I have opportunities to feed my passions and core commitments in some way?”

Separation. That said, sometimes what refuels you is practicing setting clear boundaries between work and play or being able to volunteer with community groups or organizations that have nothing to do with graduate school work or a job. These are important projects too and—as David Whyte would say—are still integrated in that you are stoking your own fires in service to your work and your engagement in your life.

Reflection. How do you spend your days? Your weeks? Are you happy with your personal mix of commitments and activities? Is the mix serving you and contributing to your ability to be your best self –whether at work or at home with friends and family? Many of us need to do a mental “check-in” on these questions every few months or so, and when necessary, adjust the mix.

We hope that these strategies for work-life integration are useful to you. Also, please let us know if you have other tips or strategies, and we’ll share them out!

Best,

Kelly, Jaye, and Ziyan

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Professor Carolyn Allen’s class of first year doctoral students in English, who inspired this reflection.

Additional Resources

We hope that these strategies for work-life integration are useful to you. Also, please let us know if you have other tips or strategies, and we’ll share them out!

Best,

Kelly, Jaye, and Ziyan

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Professor Carolyn Allen’s class of first year doctoral students in English, who inspired this reflection.

Additional Resources

Beyond “Plan B”: Crafting Your Career Journey

With today’s careers, it is more common than ever before to change directions multiple times in your life. This can happen in the course of a graduate program where perhaps the career you came looking for now looks different to you as your experiences have grown.  We have an on-going theme in Core Programs of exploring diverse career trajectories.  Below, we emphasize a few lessons shared by Philosophy alums at a recent panel, who are working in very diverse sectors.* Whether or not you are in a Humanities, Social Sciences, or a STEM field, these insights may be of use to you:

Beyond Hoops.  We know there are many obligations and milestones to completing a graduate program.  Rather than (only) thinking of these requirements as hoops to jump through, take some time to reflect upon the career skills you will gain from them over time—transferable career skills you can utilize for many jobs inside and outside of academia.  For example, even when it’s not apparent to you at first, one skill set you develop when completing a thesis or dissertation are project management skills.   Skills under project management can include, organization (outlining and prioritizing tasks that need to be completed), time management (setting up and meeting deadlines that are realistic), synthesizing complex ideas and details succinctly (writing up your project), and communication (meeting with advisors to state, clarify, and/or revisit your goals and expectations).

Beyond Job Titles.  Instead of focusing solely on job titles during your job search, consider the kind of work you want to do and the kind of setting you would like to work within. What strengths do you have, and where are those best expressed? Recruiting expert Christian Lépolard offers these guiding questions to help you think expansively about your job search, “What is your ultimate career goal, inside and outside of your current organization?  What hard skills (practical and theoretical), knowledge, and soft skills do you need to possess in order to get there? What skills do you already have and which ones do you need to acquire?  What skills will this next role bring you?” Read more from Lépolard’s article.  We would also add, what kinds of tasks and projects fuel your passions? What contribution do you want to make? How do you prefer to spend your time? Reflecting on these questions can help you find a range of ways you might be able to do your best work, rather than limiting yourself to certain job titles.

Beyond a “Career Path.”  If we shift our thinking away from the idea of a “career path” (often imagined as linear) towards the notion of a career journey, then we open ourselves up to change, flexibility, and opportunity.  Sometimes you just need to get your foot in the door at an organization or institution.  Start out with a short-term internship (or in other instances, see if there are volunteer positions), as this experience will help you determine if you will enjoy working there and if the work and the workplace culture allow you to thrive. The right kind of entry-level position can open more doors quickly once you shine. It may not be a straight shot through to your dream job, but you increase your professional networks and get to showcase your talents along the way!  Also, think broadly about a range of jobs that match your technical and transferable skills.  Career strengths assessments such as this free one can help you do just that.

Spring can be a job search season for you, or perhaps a chance to line up more growth opportunities once summer arrives.  It can also be a time to consider making a 1-1 appointment with a UW career advisor who can help give you feedback on your resume or CV.  We are cheering for you – let us know how it is going!

Best,

Kelly, Jaye, and Ziyan

*Acknowledgements to panelists Summer Archarya, Dustyn Addington, Karen Emmerman, and Ann Owens from the Philosophy Branches Out event.  This event was held on February 28, 2017 at UW Seattle and was co-sponsored by the UW Philosophy Department, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and Core Programs in the Graduate School.

Talking with Faculty About Diverse Careers

Spring quarter is full for everyone, and we also know that many of you are in different stages of reflecting on your career goals.  You may be thinking about what you want to do upon degree completion, starting an internship, preparing application materials, or deepening your expertise in a job you already have.  Throughout this process, some of you have asked: “How do I initiate a conversation my faculty advisor(s) about my professional goals?”

Do your research.  It can be anxiety-provoking to think about approaching your faculty advisor or mentor about your career interests, especially if those interests diverge from you becoming research faculty at a college or university.  One of the best ways to initiate a conversation with your advisor is to be prepared beforehand.  Here are some tips to help you gather the baseline information you need for that conversation:  Assess your work-related interests, strengths, and values to develop a more holistic awareness of who you are as a professional.  Utilize the UW Career Center’s comprehensive guide on building resumes and cvs, career advice, interviewing, and job searching. Understand how the skills you are developing in graduate school are indeed transferable across fields and industries.  Peruse job postings (and volunteer opportunities) that resonate with your self-assessments, whether they are based in non-profit, industry, or government sectors.  Research professional associations affiliated with the fields you are interested in, and contact their members via their websites or LinkedIn.  Set up informational interviews with individuals from professional associations, or with employees from companies and organizations that you can imagine yourself working at–to grow your networks.

Get in the habit of career planning over time.  The strategies noted above are part of a larger process of intentional career planning.   This is a lot of work, but well worth the effort.  Intentional career planning is necessary, if you want to move forward in both knowing and reaching your professional goals.  Break your goals up into smaller tasks, and work on them for 30 min. to an hour each week. You will move forward one step at a time, rather than trying to tackle it all at once.

Develop and bring materials with you.  When you do talk with your faculty advisor, you can bring a simple one page proposal of the career exploration you are engaged in, including sources you are researching and near-term plans for learning more about different options.

Prepare for different responses.  You may reach out to one faculty advisor or several.  In fact, we encourage you to meet with more than one mentor on your team to widen your potential for support.  Practice role playing scenarios with a trusted colleague or friend, where you engage in a conversation about your career interests.   Ask your friend to mimic the most unsupportive response to the most supportive response.  Utilize these mock responses to gauge what your next steps will be.  For example, maybe you find out your advisor has no interest in talking about diverse career opportunities with you but is still fully supportive of your intellectual and technical growth as it pertains to your discipline only.  Whom else can you identify (within or outside of your mentoring team) that will advocate for your need to explore diverse career paths?

Help your advisor help you.  It is highly likely that your faculty advisor was trained to be a teacher and researcher first and foremost, so they may not have the experience to guide you in exploring diverse career pathways.  Share with them your knowledge of all the professional development resources you are accessing (networking, professional associations, social media, UW Career Centers, etc.).  Forward them information about campus events, such as job fairs, the Core Programs community college careers panel, or workshops sponsored by the Career Center like How to Find a Job Outside of Academia for Humanities and Social Sciences PhDs.  By doing this, you’ll be facilitating a reciprocal learning process about your professional development with your advisor.

All right, we’re totally rooting for you!  Please feel free to follow up with us, and let us know if these strategies worked for you.  And let us know if you have other suggestions.

Warmly,
Jaye Sablan, Kelly Edwards, Ziyan Bai
Core Programs, UW Graduate School

Getting Unstuck, Moving Forward

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
– Winston Churchill

We know what you’re thinking: why are you already giving me tips on how to move forward from feeling stuck so early in the quarter?  Well, we thought we’d offer you some preventative tips to help you pull through, no matter where you’re at this quarter or what year you are in your degree program.  Besides, everyone gets stuck in life, and graduate school is no exception by any means. There are several factors that can contribute to feeling stuck from getting our work done.  We’ve put together a short list of these, including ways you can move forward.  So let’s begin:

Relieving the pressure.  Looming deadlines for school and work.  Family, community, and financial responsibilities.  Preparing for job searches, interviews, and possible relocations—near or far.  Those pressures can make us feel overwhelmingly stuck.  One way to relieve this weight is to re-focus your attention on what you need right now:  Do you need to slow down and take a few deep breaths (repeat every few hours)?  After that deep breath or two, and in a calmer state of mind, identify a single step you can take for one of your tasks that would help you feel you have accomplished something today.  Each task is just made up of a whole series of steps.  We have to start somewhere, and it often helps relieve the pressure to just take that one step.

Finding value in yourself (despite imperfections). We all struggle and have shortcomings. Indeed, in a job interview a common question is, “Tell me about your weaknesses!”  Being honest about your own limitations – not critical, just descriptive – can sometimes give you the awareness you need to move ahead again.  More often than not, we need a trusted conversation partner to help us see this perspective.  Reach out for support from peers, departmental staff or advisors, loved ones, or campus resources (whomever you feel most comfortable with).

Facing the fear of failure.  Academia can perpetuate the myth that we must be highly productive, all of the time.  And if we’re not, we must be failures.  Not only is this unrealistic and unattainable, this kind of culture obscures actual strategies for how to do our best work—and it can keep us from trying in the first place.  So how can we best manage this?  First, it’s helpful to think of failure in terms of progress over time—so you can grow into being that better professional, practitioner, or scholar.  It’s a process, not an end result.  You try, you learn, and you move forward—all the while validating and/or rewarding yourself each step of the way.  No matter how big or small the milestone.  It’s also vital that you build a support system of people who’ve got your back and will recognize your achievements along with you.

Remembering your purpose.  Feeling stuck can make you forget why you are in graduate or professional school in the first place.  It can also keep you in a false feedback loop that makes you believe that you are unsuccessful or unworthy of achievement.  Whenever you feel this way, remember that you are working hard towards your degree for many amazing reasons and focus on those—whether it’s to making a contribution to a field of knowledge, impacting policy that improves lives, getting a job that you love and that helps you provide for your families.  Remembering your end goals helps us focus on what really counts.

Warmly,

Jaye Sablan, Kelly Edwards, Ziyan Bai
Core Programs Team

Exploring Careers the Non-Linear Way

Career pathways are often viewed as linear. An imagined life scenario goes something like this: You go to college, get your first job, earn a promotion, get a graduate degree, move up the ladder to your dream job, secure that dream job, then happily retire–all within a few decades and all within the same company or organization. However, industry trends and professionals in our networks have increasingly told us a different story: before, throughout and beyond graduate school, people are following career trajectories that are non-linear and often include, various work experiences and projects that not only enhance the skillsets they already had as graduate students, these experiences allowed them to acquire new sets of tools to pursue their passions.

As you plan ahead, we encourage to think expansively about your professional endeavors. Instead of asking yourself, “What job title do I want to have?,” ask yourself, “What work experiences do I want?”

Here a few tips to get you started:

Managing social expectations. Social messages can impact the career choices we make now and into the future. These messages have the potential to tell us who we “should” be and come from our families, peers, broader community, and an array of institutions around us–this even includes the UW. Sometimes external messages do resonate with our professional endeavors and that’s great! When the messages don’t align with your goals, it’s perfectly okay to take a step back and reflect on your values and strengths in order to switch gears and create roadmaps to do work that excites you, or at least piques your interest.

Flexibility. One skill you’re amazing at in graduate school is being flexible. You’re adept at juggling multiple campus, work and personal responsibilities. Take advantage of your ability to be flexible and remain open to opportunities that provide you with a range of professional experiences. (1) Volunteer a few hours a week (or per month) at a local non-profit and see if your passion lies there. (2) Learn more about a specific job or work culture by arranging a job shadow. (3) If internships or practicum aren’t part of your degree requirements, but you’d like (paid or unpaid) work experience, seek out internship opportunities that work with your schedule. All of these experiences have the potential to broaden your professional networks. And wider networks increase the likelihood of successful job searches and setting up interviews. Volunteering, interning and job shadowing can also help you rule-out options based on first-hand experience, and this frees you up to explore other paths.

Do versus be. Rather than focus on who you want to be (e.g. a person with a static job title), think of the contributions you want to make in your community, with your peers, to your family. How you work is also important. Can you bring your authentic self (values, strengths, ethics) to work? Are you able to start your day from a place of integrity–regardless of whether you’re in an entry-level position or higher? Does doing the work involve more positive stress than negative stress? Is there room to face challenges that will help you grow professionally? Focusing on contributions, rather than job titles, can help you think more broadly about how work can be meaningful to you.

Failing forward. Doing what you love is an iterative process, not without trial and error. Don’t be afraid to take risks, but don’t be careless about the risks you take. Have a new project idea? Share it with colleagues, especially if you notice gaps or issues not already being addressed in your field. Start with a soft launch, on a smaller scale. If your project doesn’t produce the results you imagined, ask yourself the following questions: What went well? What can I learn from this? What would I do differently? Focus on the process and then move forward, and keep challenging yourself to grow.

Best,

Kelly, Jaye & Ziyan
Core Programs Team