Career counseling VII: It's time

I had my seventh career counseling session yesterday, and this one went 45 minutes. I had several successful informational interviews to report on, but by my request we also spent some time talking about my plans to transition out of my day job. At this point I'm emotionally committed to leaving pretty soon, most likely end of May. I'm open to continuing to work on a contract basis if I can move and report in remotely or come back to this town for the occasional meeting. But I don't want to live here, and this job is hardly enough to keep me here. In a change from a couple of months ago, Debbie didn't really question the rationality of my decision to move on. I mentioned that I feel much better now that I have a long-term career plan, that going to grad school for student affairs doesn't really require that I tough it out to fabricate resume continuity. She seemed to agree.

Speaking of the present job, we're really still just rearranging deck chairs on the site that I work on. It's blatantly obvious that this site occupies very little of my boss's attention, and I get the sense that he doesn't much care whether it succeeds or fails. On Monday several of us are going to float some ideas that we think would build up traffic -- hiring a professional blogger to write content is the biggest of these ideas. I don't know whether those ideas will be accepted or not, but I see this as sort of a "last gasp" attempt to make meaningful change in this job. You may not be able to imagine how frustrating it is to have a fairly clear idea what needs to be done to make my project a success, yet see time wasted on relative trivia that does nothing to drive traffic to our site. If the meeting next Monday doesn't go well then I'll pretty much take a knee and run out the clock.

To be honest, I'm probably going to move on anyway, even if things do go well. There might I don't like this town much at all, and I want to give the "poker pro" thing a shot for several months before starting grad school. I could play online but I don't like it nearly as much, so I need to live somewhere near casinos that offer poker. As I said, I'll keep this company as a freelancing client if they're interested. One of my colleagues had that arrangement for a time, but I don't know how disposed they would be to let me do the same. And I really don't want to do it full-time, regardless.

Falling into place

Things are sorta looking up as of Monday, for a couple of reasons. Keep in mind that I'm INFP with an emphasis on the N, intuitive, obsession with how everything fits in the broader context. So the big reason is that, after a bit more of this informational interviewing, I'm finally starting to see the patterns that unify the baffling gamut of degrees that I could be pursuing.

In short, pretty much all the people I've talked to so far have said that to become a college career "coach" (some places are deprecating the use of the term counselor, since that sounds like it refers to more holistic psychological effort) you probably need a masters, but it can be highly flexible what discipline it's in. Some people in the field have counseling degrees, but it's a little superfluous since they refer people to somewhere else on campus for real "counseling", i.e. to address deeper issues.

So in summary, I'm getting a much clearer idea of what I want to study -- probably student affairs, which goes by a million different names but has this helpful directory. Although counseling is still a viable alternative, and arguably a more versatile one, I don't see the point of pursuing a more expensive degree that takes longer to complete when people tell me it's less applicable to the field I want to go into!

One other unrelated pattern that's a little funny: So far I've called a couple of in-state colleges' career offices, in addition to my own alma mater's, to ask for an informational interview by phone. In both cases the person taking the call has played "gatekeeper" and tried to explain that they can only offer services to students and maybe alumni. And in both cases I've somewhat assertive explained that I'm just asking for a professional courtesy -- today I pointed out that I'd be delighted to do the same for anyone wanting to become a software developer who asked for 10 minutes of my time! -- and eventually gotten through to the real staff. And here's the great part: In both cases, once I got to someone fairly senior, they were delighted to help me learn more about their field. Successful people usually like to talk about their own careers.

I said things are looking up for a couple of reasons, and the informational interviewing is by far the most important one. But I also applied for a contract job in a larger city nearby, one that would make me much happier to live in, and will be going to visit the agency in a couple of weeks to interview with them. I know that tech recruiters are a weird breed, dogging you for days upon days to convince you that you need to rearrange your schedule to go interview with their client, and then not bothering to call you for weeks to let you know when the client turns you down. Arrrgh. Like piranhas. But it still feels good to have somebody treat you like you're valuable, no matter how contrived.

Finally a minor tech note: I screwed up the header, ironically enough, trying to remove the "box" (border) around it. I'll fix it soon when I'm not lazy but that's why it looks like crap.

Career counseling VI: Holding pattern

I'm only now writing about my career counseling session last week because I was out of town for a long weekend.

I've been trying to do informational interviews with college career counselors, but so far it's been slow going. Granted that this is partially because I haven't felt really motivated in the past two weeks, but it's also been because of some hiccups along the way. One woman from my college's alumni network never replied to my two emails; another had just had a baby and pointed me to a professional association instead of talking directly to me. I gained a little bit of information by calling the graduate admissions department at Peabody (Vanderbilt), so I learned what the best particular options would be there. But in general I still have a lot of work to do.

Therefore my conversation with Debbie was only 15 minutes, enough for me to report to her and promise to make more progress these next few weeks. Actually I asked for 3 weeks before the next session to give me enough time for my research.

Heh, I really just want to go play poker all day for a living and forget this tough stuff. :)

Career counseling session.... err, V: Winnowing

Yesterday was my fifth phone conversation with Debbie my career counselor. I would have previously labeled this session 4B, meaning that it was the second half-hour piece of the fourth hour out of the six that I've paid for. However, we only went for 15-20 minutes before she assigned some work for next time and ended the meeting, in essence declaring it a success. So I guess I'll go back to just counting the sessions normally, using Roman numerals to signify this switch. I'll also try to track where I stand in the six hours of meeting time; this session was from 3:30 to 3:50.

We were able to finish early because of four words I uttered, words that don't come easily but are always sincere: "I'm ready to commit."

My last several tasks have been about narrowing down this immense list of careers that I think I would enjoy. It's plainly impossible to pursue everything, or even a good slice of everything. For this fifth session my assignment was to do a fair amount of research on some of my top options, which had the practical by-product of forcing me to allocate my time among them. So I made out what I called my "visceral" top six:

1. College career counselor
2. Market researcher
3. Professor of org. behavior
4. I/O Psychologist
5. Non-profit manager
6. HS career counselor

I proceeded to look through job listings and other resources for each of these six, but with a strong bias toward those at the top of the list. I scribbled my findings into a Google Document, and Debbie and I perused my research job by job during our phone conversation.

As we worked our way down to the bottom few, it became clear that I was really just going through the motions. I'd emotionally attached to the jobs at the top of the list, actually the one at the very top of the list, so it seemed fruitless to invest a lot of time in pressing forward on all of them. So I said it: "I think I'm ready to commit to the top career on my list, college career counseling." And apparently that was a good answer, because we talked a bit more about how to move forward, then wrapped up the call after 20 minutes.

Even now as I type this entry, my MBTI "perceiving" trait is flaring up in full force. I feel almost guilty for ruling out the ones at the bottom of the list. What's wrong with being a non-profit manager?, I'm asking myself. Nothing, of course. The whole purpose of this exercise is that nothing's wrong with the 2nd or 5th or 100th choice. I just can't pursue everything at once.

The next step is to figure out what degree is most helpful for pursuing these jobs. Since there's no obvious right answer, or at least I can't find it on the Web if there is, I'm going to need to contact people in this field to talk about how to break in. In essence I want to keep two steps ahead, thinking both about school and about how to build relationships to help in my job search after school.

But at least I made a decision. I think I should feel proud.