I’ve been doing quite a bit of personal development over the past two years as part of my recovery from burnout.
One of my development activities was to read the Strengths Based Leadership book by Don Clifton that my colleague Dr. Tony Middlebrooks gave me and take the associated test from Gallup. The test returns your ranks on 43 themes across 4 domains.
Every year I am asked to give a talk to the graduating seniors in our undergraduate policy program about starting their first job in Washington, DC. My first job was as a legal assistant at a busy law firm downtown and then I worked nearly full-time for the Council on Environmental Quality at the White House, while going to school full-time for my master’s degree. I do not pretend to have any deep insights but rather focus here on some practical tips for getting settled in a first job. In no particular order:
To be successful, you need to put graduate school first, always and every day. It is not worth your time or money if you cannot give it your full attention. The following items offer practical suggestions on how to organize yourself and your time for success.
First, I recommend that you acquire a hard copy planner to do semester, monthly, weekly, and daily planning. Yes really! I also keep an electronic version in case I do not have my planner physically handy. Being able to cross tasks off both a physical copy and an electronic copy is a mental nudge to recognize even the smallest successes!
Before we move into the academic strategies for success, I want to provide some insight into why I will regularly bring up mental health and self-care in my classes. I am one of those people who does a million things, saying yes to just about everything that everyone asks of me and trying my hardest to do it all so that I don’t let anyone down.
For years I was successful in this hyperactive mode. I graduated high school at 17 and college at 21. By working overtime in my first job out of college, I paid off my student loans by 23. I completed my master’s degree full-time while working nearly full-time at the White House, first as an unpaid intern and then as professional staff. Despite not initially intending to do so, I finished my doctoral degree by 28. After bouncing around a few jobs looking for the right fit, including a stint at the Brookings Institution think-tank in Washington, DC, I settled on the University of Delaware in 2011. I successfully achieved tenure and am now well settled into academic life.
On the first day of class, I will ask you the following question: what’s your why? Why are you here, today, in graduate school, and in my class?
This question is incredibly important but it is also incredibly hard to answer honestly. To this day, I struggle with answering the question of “what’s your why?”. I know I am both internally and externally motivated to achieve. I love to read, listen, and learn. I am highly analytical and intuitive. I like to understand how and why things work. For me, graduate school was a way to improve my understanding of the world. It built naturally on the academic success I found earlier in my life. I am also goal-driven and seek external recognition for my achievements. I am constantly striving for more- the next degree, the next promotion, the next award, the next gold star- today, just as I was in second grade. And that individual striving served me well through graduate school and getting established in my career.