As some of you may know, one of the hats I wear is the Academic-Advising-at-a-University hat. And the most frequently asked question I get is about careers (perhaps because I am the Advisor of an undergraduate program that is liminal in nature): Where do alumni tend to go? What can I do with my major? After having this career conversation with various individuals and thinking about this topic in my sleep for many nights, I thought I'd write down my very general (i.e. non-major-specific) thoughts on the matter. DISCLAIMER: the following thoughts are my own!

This may be relevant for you if you're unsure about the whole how-to-go-about-figuring-out-your-career thing. If you're up for reading the rest, get yourself in a comfy position on the couch and make sure you have your favorite beverage (and/or snacks) in hand... because it is long! :)

Disclaimer #2: I ain't got no Master's degree or PhD so for those who would like to know the details about what it's like to pursue graduate studies you'll need to talk to the experts (i.e. graduate students) - I ain't one.

Other than catching how "off" the job offer sounds, there are other signs that might indicate that something may be awry about the prospective employer or your prospective boss.

COATING THE PROBLEMS WITH SUGAR
If you get a chance to talk to someone at the company you got a job offer from, and if they say something that sounds like the following, you might want to flag those statements and further analyze (and try to get a second or even a third opinion if you can):

• What you hear: "X (your supervisor) is not the easiest person to work with"
  What this could mean: X is a royal pain to work with.
• What you hear: "X can be insensitive"
  What this could mean: X makes wildly inappropriate remarks often.
• What you hear: "X is excitable and full of energy"
  What this could mean: X is highly irritable, with possible yelling and expletives.
• What you hear: "Sometimes"
  What this could mean: This depends on how the "sometimes" is used with other statements. "Sometimes" used concurrently with "excitable" could imply that the person yells at employees on a weekly basis.
• What you hear: various "X-hack" tips and tricks
  What this could mean: X is "not the easiest person to work with" to the point where hacks needed to be developed.

Sometimes, people actually say what they mean (e.g. X is not the easiest person to work with but is not a royal pain). But sometimes, it could be a form of a coping mechanism - they say things in a way that convinces themselves that they're working in the right place (even though they're actually suffering).

RUFFLING THE FEATHERS
The other place to look for signs is X (your prospective supervisor). If they consistently exhibit the following behaviors, you might want to think twice before committing to work for that person:

• What you hear: Bragging about their accomplishments
  What this could mean: Fear of losing "face"; the need to stroke their ego
• What you hear: Lecturing about any and every​ subject
  What this could mean: Lack of self-awareness of what they know vs. what they don't know. This can potentially harm the business' decision-making (if they insist on making a decision on something they have no expertise on)
• What you hear: In an argument, they start with one side but suddenly switch sides when they realize they're wrong, e.g. "(after switching sides) Exactly, that was what I meant" or "That was what I always thought"
  What this could mean: Not mature enough to admit mistakes. They also argue for the purpose of winning (they'll switch sides as long as they can win!) and feel too insecure to "lose a battle"
• What you hear: Calling someone who is reacting normally to a stress-inducing situation "crazy" or "mentally ill"
  What this could mean: Alarmingly low mental health literacy; could be a proponent of mental health stigma in the organization (willingly or accidentally)
• What you hear: >90% talking, <5% listening
  What this could mean: Unwillingness to listen to others or not accustomed to listening to others

If you see a combination of multiple signs, my personal recommendation is to respectfully decline the offer and look for somewhere/someone else (to me, at least, the who you work with is as important as what you work on). But if you think the benefits outweigh the costs, go for it and carpe diem!

When a role "is not properly defined, documented, or controlled," role creep is bound to happen.

One example is the role of supervisor or manager. In some unfortunate cases, some supervisors role creep / micromanage due to the fear of "letting go" of the responsibilities that should be handled by their direct reports. Have you experienced your manager stepping on your toes all the time? The failure to delegate is something that I have struggled to tackle, and I have not found a solution for it (it probably needs to be dealt with on a case by case basis anyways).

If you join an organization that is attempting to expand rapidly, your role will likely experience role creep. You'll probably be asked to wear say 3 hats at the time of hire, but when an organization is forced to "do more with less," one day you'll notice that you have 20 hats instead of the original 3. Some people find this enjoyable but others will find this exhausting.

When the organization is large and stable, role creep may be the key to get you a raise or to get you promoted. If you voluntarily wear more hats and prove to the employer that you can take more things on (or new things on), that may open doors for future opportunities. Let me tell you my relationship with role creep: Whenever I wanted to wear a new hat and my supervisor said "no" to it because it was out of my "scope"... that hat was - consistently - the hat I ended up wearing in my next job. So if you're faced with a situation where you want to wear a hat but get shut down, it may still be worth doing research around that hat (even if you can't wear it immediately). You never know when you'll get a chance to wear it. It could be right around the corner...

Oftentimes I get questions about what resources are available for finding yourself (and your calling). I recommend the following books, not in any particular order - they give you frameworks to think about yourself in different ways and to get valuable information out of yourself.

1. "Designing Your Life" by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
   I think this book is suitable for undergraduates - it gives you frameworks to think about what you want in life, holistically (not only careers). It has some exercises that are definitely worth trying out. My favorite exercise was the 5-year planning in 3 different possible worlds.
2. "Strengths Finder 2.0" by Tom Rath
   (Disclaimer: this book is part of an assessment that you do online, and I haven't done this because I borrowed this book and the access code was already used. So I haven't experienced the whole shebang, but I still found the book valuable.)
   This book may give you some clues as to what you may want to pursue / what role feels right for you at work. This book has 34 different characteristics (Strengths) with different work styles and personalities. It's likely that you'll find a Strength (or multiple Strengths) that is (are) literally YOU. In case you were curious, I see myself as: Achiever/Discipline (in terms of how I work), Maximizer/Significance (in terms of my goals), and Harmony (in terms of personality).
   Update: I realized that you can actually take a sneak peak into all the Strengths online for free here!
3. "Pivot" by Jenny Blake
   A practical piece for those who already have a job but are itching to change things up. It walks you through the steps of how to switch from one to another, and also has exercises that get you thinking about your affordances (e.g. how much runway do you have if you stopped working and lived your usual vs. frugal vs. extravagant lifestyle?).
4. "The Pathfinder" by Nicholas Lore
   I see this book as a really REALLY dense, rich version of "Designing Your Life" - there's definitely overlap in the concepts covered, but this book has a tremendous number of exercises. If you actually sit down and work through all of them, it would probably take somewhere between 3 months and a year. I haven't done all the exercises but that may be something that I slowly do over the next several months (to a year!) for fun.

Have a book recommendation that's not on the list? Let me know in the comments! I want to grow this list into a big repository.

Recently I was asked the following question: If you could redo everything post-graduation over again, what would you have done differently?

My short answer would be: ​I would have said NO a lot more. ​

I recognize that student life is stressful - you constantly get judged. Although marks are not everything, they cannot be trivialized either because they could matter for some things (e.g. getting into a program, getting into graduate school). You get tested on things all the time, and chances are you won't get perfect marks. Although that is an indicator that you can learn more and improve, it is easy for us to beat ourselves up if we don't do well on an assignment or an exam. So if you've been in that judging environment for 4 or more years, it may take a toll on your self-esteem.

As a fresh graduate, my self-esteem was so low from facing uncertainty and rejection that I was willing to do more than I was actually willing to do. I fell for the short-term gains (mostly money) instead of the long-term impact.

Let's say you get a job offer after applying for many jobs. It can be very tempting to just pounce on it - maybe because you've been rejected so many times before and you really wanted this position. But before you make the leap, make sure your gut isn't telling you that something is off at the time you get the offer. If your gut says something is awry, DO NOT IGNORE IT. Stop and listen carefully before you make a decision. Here are a couple of examples:

• Does the offer sound like you're under the employer's mercy? If your gut tells you that the employer is hiring you out of pity, then politely decline the offer. It's not worth working for an employer who does not understand the true value you can bring to the organization. If you say no, it's really their loss - not yours. Drop that mic and move on.
• Does the offer sound strangely flowery? If your gut tells you that it sounded more like a sales pitch than an offer, then politely decline the offer. If the offer sounds unbelievably great, think about why it sounds unbelievably great and why the employer is making it sound that way. Is it actually unrealistic? Is there evidence that the employer is desperate for people to the extent that they would try to lure you into the company, only to show you what the reality is after you signed the contract? Beware.

Your relationship with your employer is a two-way street (it's surprisingly similar to dating). An abusive relationship with your employer is going to come with a cost - it can literally shave years off your life, and restoring your mental health back to normal can take years (or longer). So say no if you know that something is off.

Lastly - if you are in circumstances where you still need to say yes although you know that something is off, know what your limits are and start planning for your next move before your mental and physical health starts declining.

From what I've seen so far, when you go into a career it's usually about solving problems. So then if you know yourself in terms of what kinds of problems you like solving will help you figure out what kind of career you'd thrive in.

For example, I call myself a 'process optimizer'. The world is chaos, yet I still try to come up with ways to establish order (although rather Sisyphean). I thrive when there's processes where I can optimize through iteration:

• When I was managing the vision science lab, I got a kick out of improving the volunteer recruitment protocol.
• When I was running visual analytics workshops, I had so much fun refining the curriculum for the next round.
• When I was managing various parts of a no-kill animal charity, I got really excited coming up with strategies to improve our donor retention for the coming year.
• Now, as someone running an academic program, I'm looking for ways to strengthen the alumni community.
• And in all these aforementioned jobs, I work on optimizing my own schedule - if I know that some months will be busier than other months, I try to move things around so that the workload is spread out more evenly in manageable chunks.

So if I'm put in a situation where 1) there's no process so I need to build from scratch, 2) there's no time to optimize processes, and 3) I don't have the autonomy to optimize my own processes, I become unhappy.

Over the past several years, I learned that I may be a good firefighter (in the figurative sense) but it takes years off my life; can't do it for long. I can also build processes from scratch but it's not something I love doing because if the requirements are unclear, that will significantly reduce your success rate (<rant> people tend to misunderstand what "requirements" means. They jump to solutions which are not the requirements. </rant> It takes a LOT of patience and persistence to eke out those requirements, and I admit that I'm simply not patient enough).

What problems do you like solving?

I failed to write for the last few Saturdays because I had underestimated how much effort it takes to adjust to a new job (^__^;) Now that it has been over 1 month since I started, I can say that I have mostly adjusted.

One of the things I've been (re-)adjusting to is the speed in which things happen, and I am astounded by how different the pace of life is in an academic setting vs. a small not-for-profit-scaling-up setting.

In academia (especially in large institutions), things happen very slowly - some things happen over the course of weeks, other things take years. When I used to work in academia (2 jobs ago, as someone who had been running and managing visual analytics workshops) I found this process painful, but there were some things about that slowness that I now appreciate being back in academia:

1. Predictability - since school runs in terms, the behavior of the system is very predictable (e.g. when students are figuring out their courses, when students have exams, when professors and TA's are busy marking).
2. Timelines - there are dates in school when things happen / when things need to be done by (e.g. when each term starts, when the course add/drop deadline is, when rooms for courses need to be booked, when are course evaluations due), and that information is available way in advance). Since events are predictable because timelines exist, this allows me to plan when to do what so that I don't have a ton of things on my plate at the same time.
3. Cyclic schedule - fall term, spring term, summer term, then fall term comes again. This gives me the chance to optimize systems and processes through iteration.

In the small-not-for-profit-scaling-up setting, the nature of work was far more chaotic than what I expected:

1. Some aspects of running a charity are predictable, like how tax receipts need to be issued by tax season of the following year. But to me, that was one of the very few things that were predictable. There were numerous occasions where I come to work and a new project is on my plate (and since that project has to do with the organization's expansion, it's usually a big one).
2. Timelines exist but are rarely followed because there's so many projects going on simultaneously. When everything (both existing projects and new initiatives) is a priority, it quickly becomes impossible to prioritize and plan ahead. Reality hits - you can't do everything at once. You do one thing, and the other thing falls behind even if you don't want it to.
3. When a small not-for-profit scales up, what you do is mostly expansion projects (and trying to figure out how to maintain everything else when your time is mostly spent on expansion), it's very difficult to find time to iterate and improve on existing processes.

I am definitely a tortoise when it comes to pace of work. I found myself more comfortable and less anxious when there's a stable timeline that recurs so that I can refine systems for the next iteration. I know friends who would get bored out of their minds if they were in the same situation (GOTTA GO FAST)! What pace of work do you prefer?