I love career days. I think it’s important that young people are given as many opportunities as possible to explore pathways. In fact, I was a founding board member of an organization that works with schools in my community to expose youth to pathways and opportunities to develop their interest called Next Generation Men and Women. It’s a lifelong passion of mine because I remember being in their shoes, wondering, what am I going to do with my life? Like many young folks, I had limited opportunities given my background and environment, and so I took advantage of any chance I had. Yet, a question that I hate to hear posed to young people is, so what do you want to be when you grow up? It’s a ridiculous question, particularly coming from most adults who are still trying to figure out what they want to be. Instead, we should be asking young folks, what are you learning about yourself right now and who are you becoming?

Yesterday I gave a talk for my daughter’s high school class about my winding career path. In preparation for the roundtable discussion, these were the following questions shared with me to consider:

What did you do after high school (college, internship, job, or gap year), and why?
What was your first job?
How did your compensation, roles, and responsibilities evolve and grow over time?
What’s a mistake you made along the way, and what did you learn from it?
What was hard about your career trajectory? What was fun about it?
What advice do you have for high schoolers as they prepare for careers?

I started by sharing that in high school I worked 5 different jobs (Chick-Fil-A, Walmart, for our local newspaper, as a camp counselor at the Y, and as a sales associate at a record/CD store called Sam Goodie). Most students seemed to be surprised at how much I worked while in school, but I shared that I really wanted try out new things, and each experience taught me something different. I also needed money! I learned leadership and service at Chick-Fil-A, the place where I worked the longest (the entirety of my high school years). I learned the dark underbelly of the service industry as a Walmart associate (I still remember the anti-union video I watched as a part of my onboarding). I learned basic journalism at the newspaper and I got my first taste of writing autonomy as I was responsible for copy editing the initial sports reviews. I fell in love working with kids during my summer camps at the Y. And finally, I realized how much I hated working at a record store, doing something that I wasn’t that interested in (selling music). That job taught me to stick to my strengths, and not be distracted by shiny things (working at the mall).

Moving into my college years, I shared how I pursued internships and fellowships each year which helped me to discern which particular pathways I was really interested in, and which ones I should rule out. While I maintained a steady work study job throughout college working at our campus daycare (there goes the theme of working with young people again), I also took on several school year and summer internships. Each year I worked at the Coca-Cola Company for their scholarship foundation. I’d developed a relationship with the foundation during my senior year in high school when I won the prestigious Coke scholarship. So I maintained those ties when I moved to Atlanta and secured an internship working for the organization. This was my first real taste of corporate America and nonprofits and I loved it.

The summer after my freshmen year I worked for two marketing companies and I hated both experiences. This helped me decide not to pursue business school, which I was contemplating at the time. The summer after my sophomore year changed my life because I was accepted into a community building and social change fellowship (at the time called the Kenneth Cole Fellowship named after our alumnus and famous designer). I spent the summer working for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, doing community organizing work in southeast Atlanta and traveling to learn about how social change actually worked. This definitely set me on my path for where I am today. I spent the following summer in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan learning about public policy through the PPIA fellowship. My advisor and mentor, affectionally called Dr. MiLo (one of my first black professors), encouraged me to align my passions for social justice with a focus on policy work. He would later also write my recommendation letter for graduate school where I pursed a degree in, wait for it, public affairs. My senior year I worked for a consulting firm part time (I was only enrolled in school part time at that point because I’d accrued all the credits I needed to graduate). At this firm we helped launch nonprofits and foundations (I got to work on the launch of Usher’s New Look, an organization that still exists.). This further solidified for me that I wanted to spend time in the nonprofit space.

After graduating my first job was as a public school teacher, and from there I ended up working across multiple sectors over the past two decades. In reflecting back on my own career story (which is still a work in progress), I was struck by just how much uncertainty, transition, and risk taking was involved, and yet the dots eventually have connected over time. Some of the more intriguing questions I received from the students were, how did you know what you wanted to do, or how did you decide when to have a family? But my central response always came back to some elements of I didn’t really know. I remained opened to multiple experiences, maintained a reflective posture about what I was learning from each experience at the time, and took a lot of risks.

I ended by sharing how right now I’m at a crossroads in my career. One of the patterns I’ve noticed for myself is that about every three years I make some kind of transition. So I try and pay attention to what’s happening, what I’m learning, how conditions might be shifting, in order for me to move accordingly. As much as it pains me to say this, there is no roadmap, except the one we’re creating in real time. There are however guideposts and guides. And, with a clear set of values we can have a strong internal compass. I encouraged the students to pay attention to what their strengths and passions are, often those are good indications of where to go next or what to do with their time. I also encouraged the students to listen to those who know them best, because sometimes they see things in us that we’re unable to see ourselves. Finally, I encouraged them to take risks early, and build a reflective practice that helps them make meaning of the experiences they’re having as they take those risks.

For any parent, educator, or simply a person who cares about the future of young people in our country, let’s figure out how we can share our own career trajectory stories. It just might be the thing that unlocks a young person’s potential.

SDW3