I hope you don't mind that I've chosen to digress from my usual column this week. My amazing dad recently gave me his "critique" of my column. "Very good, but I really like it when you give a sense of who you are. Some of the stuff is a bit professorial."
What? Professorial?
I am a professor. What else is it supposed to sound like? Anyway, the truth is that my dad is (usually) right. So this week, I have decided to talk about my path to the professoriate which I never imagined would be my destiny.
First, let me say that I have the best job in the whole world. I was reminded of this on Wednesday when I was asked to do a mock lecture for some Grade 12 students. What a privilege... and what a huge responsibility. I hope they didn't guess that I was as nervous as they were. We got through it and they were extraordinarily polite and attentive.
As I left I couldn't help thinking about the journey that they were about to embark upon. The choice to go to university is less of a choice than it was in my day. Now a post-secondary degree is almost de rigueur for most professional jobs. Both college and university provide the tools that will be required to compete in a 21st century economy. Moreover, the structure of employment has changed and we can expect that our children will likely have more than one career over their lifetime. They will be required to be resilient and to have a variety of skill sets that they can bring to a range of work environments.
I have had the great pleasure over the last semester to work closely with our career advisor, Maria Trujillo. We started chatting because I was trying to find a way to bring some career planning into a first year class that I was teaching. We talked about the difficult transition that fourth year students have as they plan to leave the university and enter the workforce. They work so hard to absorb and to critically think about the substance of their discipline that they forget that they have been well equipped with a skill set that they can apply to an incredible diversity of jobs: communication skills (written and oral), team work, problem solving, etc.
I remember when I was a teenager I had wanted to become an anthropologist /archaeologist and my dad had discouraged this career option because it didn't seem to him to lead to a job. I said earlier that my dad was usually right but not in this case. You see he was thinking directly about a linear progression from archeology to King Tut's tomb but few social science careers are as linear as that. Anthropology could have led me to many careers, like work in a museum or archives, journalism, or, as one alumnus on the UNBC anthropology program website tells us, a career in cancer care. The fact is that students gain skills to apply in all sorts of careers that they have never imagined.
As you can surmise, I did not become an anthropologist. I instead headed off to England to study the theatre which was definitely a more promising career choice than anthropology - (I'm kidding). Anyway, I didn't end up as an actress either. I started university later in life and I decided to study political science and history. What I didn't know then was that it would lead me to an academic career. I started off just like those students I met on Wednesday. I built my skill set through my university career. I was inspired by an amazing political science professor. I used the skills I had developed in my acting training to apply to my presentation skills. And suddenly it seemed possible that I could be a part of the professoriate.
The journey to this place has been amazing. That is what these incredible young people have ahead of them. I hope that they take the time to explore all of their options because the world is full of wonderful opportunities that can come out of the most unusual places. After all, who would ever have guessed that I might one day write a column for a newspaper!
