Second-Year Spotlight Career Readiness Conference Keynote Address
By Sasha Aslanian ’90
Someone saw something in you.
Actually, a lot of people saw something in you.
And that’s why you’re at Grinnell.
You got here with your innate abilities, hard work and something extra that defines Grinnellians: You care about something larger than yourself.
And now you made it through your first year and some tough classes. Late night conversations with people on your floor. Meetings with your tutorial advisor. These interactions changed you. You’ve pushed through some hard stuff. It’s a huge adjustment being here. But you’re figuring it out.
And now, you’re sorting out your major.
I’m sure there’s some formula to picking a major: you gravitate toward what you enjoy, a discipline that makes you feel curious, maybe something that you think could help you make a living, or that’s essential to getting a visa so you can stay and work after graduation.
I picked my major based on one conversation.
One day after class, my English prof said, “You’re really good at this.”
I was like a little seedling stretching toward the sun.
Yes, it was praise, external validation, and you shouldn’t stake everything on that.
But there are clues. What do other people notice and point out about you?
I was always interested in people and their lives, so I was drawn to literature and languages. I double-majored in English and French. And it put me on a path to continue that curiosity about the lives of other people. When I interview someone, I get to slip into their life and briefly try it on and imagine how the world looks from their point of view. So, journalism gives me a way to pack a whole lot more lives into this one life of mine.
If you’re having trouble deciding on a major—which is very Grinnellian of you—we’re overthinkers, have conversations with your professors. Go to their office hours. Talk with older students majoring in the subject. Talk with alums who majored in what you’re considering and see what they’re doing now. You’re looking for what excites you and makes you come alive.
…also, a major is just a direction. It’s not everything. What matters more is your whole Grinnell experience. I’ll come back to this.
My job today is to give you some tools for finding your path after Grinnell.
A Framework for Finding Your Purpose
I want to show you a chart that might be a helpful framework.
Ikigai—it’s a Japanese philosophy “for finding purpose, joy, and fulfillment in life.”
Ikigai is the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for.
So, for me, that was journalism.
Your Ikigai is out there.
How do you find it?
Some of it resembles a process you’ve already done—how you got here. I’ll explain that connection in a bit.
First, let’s map your Ikigai:
What do you love?
This is something you know in your bones. It often reveals itself during childhood. How did you like to spend time as a kid? What was the activity that made you lose track of time, and you could spend hours doing it? It might have been making music. Building something. Being outdoors. Reading books. For me, it was making stuff. And a lot of my job today is making stuff… out of audio.
What you’re good at.
You know this. The subjects that come easily to you.
What the world needs:
You are doing a lot to educate yourselves about what the world needs by what you’re learning at Grinnell. It needs scientists and artists, historians and inventors. It needs people who can solve big problems in health care and the environment. Or sit with a third grader who’s struggling to read. People who can gather and present information so citizens can participate in their democracy—That’s journalism. There are so many things the world needs. And it’s a blessing to be useful.
You are developing skills that create opportunities. For you. For your family, for your community. For your country.
Finally, What can you get paid for?
This one can feel like a bit of a mystery. Where is the money in this economy? And how much do you need to live the life you want to live? When you leave Grinnell, you will have skills people will pay you for. Grinnellians can write, think, organize, research, move data around and solve problems. I love the conversations I see on Everyday Class Notes, a Facebook group of nearly 7000 Grinnell alumni. People share stories, and I remember one guy saying everyone in his office came to him to write anything—and I don’t think he was an English major. Grinnellians can write! Anyway, finding sectors that will pay you for your skills is where CLS and alumni can be really helpful.
I was on the phone with an alum from 2005, Abel Lomax. Last I knew he was working in Mongolia for the State Department. And he said to me, you know what’s really special about this little college in the middle of Iowa? When you come here, you get 20K alumni who have your back.
It’s true. Every one of us has taken exit 182, studied in Burling, and remembers the howling Iowa winters. And life has taken us to Mongolia, New York, and everywhere in between.
We’ve had to figure out how to translate our Grinnell degrees into something the world needs and will pay us for.
Find us.
Use us.
You can look in the alumni directory—search for a math major who lives in Chicago and played soccer like you. Or join the LinkedIn Grinnell group of 5 thousand people. Or ask CLS for help.
So, I mentioned that how you chose Grinnell is part of the solution to cracking your next big challenges: finding a major and discovering a career.
When we pick our college, our sixteen/seventeen/eighteen-year-old brains are sifting through a lot of information: but I think on some primal level, we’re searching for the place that’s going to help us become the person we want to be.
You trusted your gut and came here.
I’m asking you to keep trusting your gut.
Somewhere deep inside you, you have a vision… of the person you want to become. Grinnell was the place you thought could help you do it.
And it’s not easy. I spent a lot of time feeling self-critical when I was your age.
And I worried: would I ever amount to anything?
The answer was yes.
But I wouldn’t know that for a while.
I graduated into a recession. And although I was lucky enough to have the French department send me to Paris to work as an English language assistant my first year after Grinnell, after that year was over, I was kind of stumped about what to do with my life. I moved home. I did secretarial work for a neighbor who was a realtor. He tried to convince me to become a realtor, which I knew I didn’t want to do. My French advisor gave me the name of a French major who’d graduated fourteen years before me. Duffer Schultz did marketing for the Minnesota Timberwolves. I wasn’t interested in basketball, but I didn’t have a lot of hot prospects, so I called him.
Duffer invited me out to lunch in downtown Minneapolis. He was super friendly and nice. At the end of our lunch, he smiled and looked at me with so much kindness in his eyes and he said, ‘With your Grinnell degree, you can do anything.” He’d known me for all of an hour. But his confidence bucked me up. A few weeks later I lucked into an internship in public radio and journalism would become my life’s work. But I’ll never forget that boost from a Grinnell alum just when I needed it.
And we alumni have that same confidence in you.
Get to Know Alumni
But you have to meet luck halfway. Take risks: call that alum. Ask how they got where they are. Ask for ideas for how you can get started. Who else you should talk with? Try for stuff. You won’t always get it. The cool internship with the tech company. Shake it off. Send another email. Fire in the belly is a good thing. You’ll need it.
Move toward what energizes you. And pay attention to what drains you.
Sometimes you’re on the wrong path. I got an internship in advertising one summer during Grinnell. The people at the ad agency were fun. I told one guy I wrote poetry and he said, “Bring it in! We all write poetry!” I liked the ad people’s energy.
But one day, the big boss called me into his office for a chat and asked me what ads had caught my eye. I drew a blank. I couldn’t think of a single billboard, radio jingle, magazine ad, or television commercial. And I was with the kind of people who throw Superbowl parties just to watch the ads. I finally remembered a cute yogurt commercial. But I had to admit the ad was ultimately a failure because I couldn’t remember the brand of the yogurt. It was a mortifying ten minutes of my life, but I learned something: I couldn’t care less about hawking products. This was not the career for me, as much as I liked those poetry-writing, fun ad people. Sometimes you take internships to learn what you don’t want to do. And it’s all valuable info so you can start to hone in on what you are searching for.
Move toward what gets you fired up.
When I interned in public radio, they let me produce a ten-part retrospective on the first Gulf War. (First Gulf War, 1991, when the U.S. and a coalition of other countries invaded Iraq, after it had invaded Kuwait.) Booking these interviews, getting a variety of perspectives, was important and challenging work. I felt like I was back at Grinnell. It’s important to me to feel like I’m learning something every day—that’s what energizes me. Public radio felt like an extension of a liberal arts education. (I would later email that same English prof who once told me I was good at it and tell him, “Send more kids to public radio. It’s the perfect place for English Majors.”)
Really early on in my internship at Minnesota Public Radio, I realized my favorite part of the day was walking in every morning and saying hi to everyone. Like picking a college, in some deep down way, this place felt right to me…it would help me become the person I wanted to become. News was actually an acquired taste. But I liked the team spirit of radio. This is something you want to figure out about yourself. Do you work best as part of a team…or solo? That can help clarify what kind of job you want to pursue.
Mentors
Find mentors. This is a skill that will be important to you over and over in your career. These people see something in you that you can’t see in yourself…yet. They take an interest in you and ask you questions to draw out your thinking. Ask them questions. I think often these people see something of their younger selves in you. They’re interested in helping you succeed. Find these people. Stay in touch with them.
MentorGrinnell had more alumni volunteers than students sign up in its first year. You literally have alumni waiting for students to show up.
Try CLS’ virtual meetups with alumni. These are ten-minute conversations to talk with someone about their career. They’re easy, low-risk and fun. Ask your professors about recent alumni who are doing something interesting. Get them to connect you. Do an externship over spring break. I’ve hosted externs for the past two years in New York where my student gets to meet five alumni who work in print or television journalism or podcasting or documentary film and spend a day with each of us. Externships give you a glimpse into a Grinnellian’s whole life…and you get to try it on. Would you like a life like this? No is an okay answer! All information is good information when you’re in this discernment process. You’re trying to find your Ikigai, no one else’s.
Follow Your Path
Finding a career isn’t exactly a linear process. My favorite thing about meeting Grinnellians is often how much they’ve zigzagged. And how creative they are in building their lives. When I first moved to New York City, I posted a photo of my view from our corporate housing of the Empire State Building. Immediately I got a message from a Grinnell friend who graduated the year after me: Tommy Berger. He said that’s my office! In the Empire State Building. He dropped by for a visit. Tommy majored in anthropology and even got his PhD in it. Now he works on a global team doing environmental consulting. He said he uses his anthro major every day working with international colleagues.
I also want to say that your Grinnell education is about so much more than your major. It’s going to those Scholars Convocations on Thursdays. I still remember some of those talks 35 years later that blew my mind with ideas about gender and racial history I’d never heard about before.
Being part of a club or doing a radio show on KDIC or working a campus job—you never know what might be the spark. Your whole Grinnell experience: the one-off random class because it fit your schedule rocks your world, the lecture you showed up for because there was free food and you discover a new passion. Embrace the luck and magic of this place. Say yes to wild things. Trust your gut. Move toward what energizes you.
Twice a year, the Alumni Council is on campus, and we hold networking events with students. We’ve done them in the JRC, in HSSC, at Hotel Grinnell, the Grinnell Golf Club and here, in Harris, tonight. And what we realize is that over and over, we have the same message no matter our field or what decade we graduated. We look into your eyes, and we see your worry. We’ve come to deliver a message from your future: you will be OK. Better than OK. It will all work out. It might not be easy, but you’re in the right place.
And if it’s not too early to say this, I want to put in a plug for giving back. You can help a kid from your old high school who’s pondering their college choices. You can answer their questions and share what college is really like.
And when you graduate, you can help the Grinnellians who come behind you. I was super charmed to meet an alum who was only one year out of Grinnell when he turned around to offer an externship. The new grad said it had been so hard for him to land his job that he wanted to make it easier for the next person. Be like that.
So maybe you too are wondering: will I ever amount to anything? The answer is yes. You will find your Ikigai. Your uniquely Grinnellian path.
Because with your Grinnell degree, you can do anything.
