How do you plan your career around unknown changes in the future
[Music]
when i was first asked to give this talk
one of the first questions i was asked
was what is my prediction for the future
generation in five years or ten years or
even more
and the honest answer is
i don’t know
i think about i have so many students
who arrive at university and they come
and they know exactly what they want to
do this happened in the u.s it happens
even more so in china they know they
want a specific major and they know they
need to take every single possible class
they can in that field and
they believe that they need to have a
certain internship and publish two
papers and go to this specific graduate
school also they can end up at this
specific job someday
well let me ask you when i look at this
audience a lot of you are not a lot
older than my students
how many of you
are still doing a job today that’s
directly related to what you thought you
wanted to do when you started your
undergraduate raise your hands
not a lot of people out there
and that’s typically true
when i ask an audience especially like
the the parents of my students it’s
typically
20 maybe 25 percent at most that are
still doing something directly related
to their undergraduate degree
and if i think about myself and i think
about what’s changed since i went to
university first of all i brought a
typewriter with me
how crazy does that sound in 2021 i
didn’t get my first email address until
six years after i graduated college the
internet did not become
particularly useful until about two
years after that
the iphone didn’t come out until twenty
years after i graduated
the most popular major at du quinchon
university today data science did not
exist when i was in university
today we read about space tourism and
self-driving cars all kinds of things
that were unimaginable
and
even the chemistry that i learned
there’s so much more now that i never
would have guessed at the time i
graduated and when i think about my
students du quinchon will graduate its
first class in may 2022
by the time they retire the retirement
age in china will be 67 which means they
will retire in the year
- think about that
it’s mind-boggling in those 45 years i
can guarantee that they will see things
that they never imagined and that they
will personally change in ways that they
cannot conceive of
so what i want to talk about is how do
you plan your career
and your life
when you know that there’s going to be
change and you don’t know what the world
is going to be
because i don’t think it’s about coming
in with this predetermined pathway and
following it i think it’s about creating
your own pathway so that brings me to my
first piece of advice
be open to opportunities be open
to new things to taking a detour to
getting lost to finding yourself in
somewhere you never even dreamed of when
i finished university and graduate
school i took a faculty position
teaching and doing research in chemistry
and i did that for about 15 years
then one day the dean at my former
university came and asked me would i be
interested in trying something
completely different
and that’s how i started on my pathway
towards academic administration skip
ahead a little bit january 2018 i got
contacted by a search firm about the
position at duke quinchon university i
had no idea
that duke had a university or was
involved in a university in china i had
never heard of dku and i certainly had
never thought of living in china
but part of me said
i need to at least talk about them
otherwise i’ll have what ifs
and i did
four months later i had a job offer and
two months later i was living here in
china
one of my students
was a biochemistry major
she took an art history class to fulfill
a requirement
she fell in love with the material
the professor ended up inviting her to
join a research project
she had an opportunity to do field work
in asia she’s now at one of the top
universities in the u.s doing her phd in
art history
i could share countless similar stories
most of my students
been in science but they’ve ended up in
careers in business
in investment banking i had students go
to culinary school i had one become an
air traffic controller
something different came along that
piqued their interest and they decided
to take that opportunity of course it’s
not always something good that sets you
on a different pathway
setbacks happen and none of us are going
to get through this life without
experiencing challenges maybe you won’t
get the job that you really wanted
maybe something’s going to happen in
your personal life that changes your
path
so that leads me to the second piece of
advice
which is when those setbacks happen you
can’t change the past focus on how
you’re going to move forward
one of my former students was in a
horrible accident the summer after his
first year at university
he was hit by a truck while riding his
bicycle and partially paralyzed
he had to take time away from university
to learn how to walk again i’m sure
he had times when he was cursing the
unfairness of the situation
but he also took time during his
recovery to think about what really
mattered to him
he had originally been thinking he
wanted to go to law school
he ended up realizing how much he missed
the intellectual life of a university he
got very interested in reading
literature particularly how disability
was portrayed when he came back to
university he had this incredible love
of life
and appreciation for everything around
him
he got involved in just about every
activity we had i don’t think there was
a single person on campus who didn’t
know him by the time he graduated he
went on to become
a rhodes scholar and he’s now doing his
phd in disability studies
he was able to find a strength in
himself a resiliency that he didn’t know
he had
would he have been a rhodes scholar if
that horrible accident hadn’t happened
there’s obviously no way to know but
what i do know is he would not be the
same person he is today had he not gone
through that experience
of course attitude alone isn’t going to
be the only thing that’s going to get
you through the tough times you have to
work on building skills that are going
to help you be successful
and that’s one of the things that dku
with our liberal arts education we
really try to emphasize creativity
problem solving resiliency
and you hear these terms a lot so i’m
going to use an example from my own life
to help you understand really what we
mean by them and how they can be of help
i came to dku to build this global
university where we would have people
from all over the world coming together
to live and work and learn
then the pandemic hit
our international students have not been
able to be in china for a year and a
half and many aspects of our curriculum
we’ve not been able to implement as we
had originally planned i’ve had to rely
on skills that go way beyond my
chemistry training
to make this work
even with all of my years of teaching
nothing had prepared me for online or
hybrid education so i needed the ability
to improve my own technical skills and
catch up with where the world is and
what i needed i needed
teamwork and leadership abilities to
bring together people from across the
university and duke
expertise in information technology and
different types of technological
pedagogies and the science of teaching
and learning so we could teach our own
faculty how to deliver this new mode of
education
i needed to be able to think creatively
because i had to figure out how on earth
are we going to do this when we have
students spread out in just about every
time zone in the planet
i needed to be able to look at data and
analyze it and figure out what was
working and what wasn’t working
so that we could make improvements
i needed communication ability so i
could explain to all the stakeholders
everything we were doing and all the
changes we were making
and while i was doing all of this i had
to be able to work with people from over
60 different countries with different
communication styles and approaches to
working with people and definitions of
hierarchy i couldn’t have done this
if i didn’t have the broader skill set
so next time for those of you in school
next time you need to take a class
outside of your major or those of you
who are working next time you’re asked
to do something that doesn’t seem like
it really fits with your job description
embrace that as an opportunity to
develop skills that are going to help
you truly shine that are going to help
you stand out from everybody else
my third piece of advice don’t define
success too narrowly
and don’t let anybody else define
success for you
those students who come with this set
plan already in motion
some of them are doing what they truly
love
what they want to do
but some of them are doing what their
parents want them to do
or what they think they need to do
to earn a lot of money or to make a huge
impact on the world just remember
you don’t necessarily
have to earn a lot of money or make an
impact on the world
it might be sufficient to do something
that impacts a smaller number of people
more immediately around you or to choose
time with your family over a more
stressful career
that student who switched
from biochemistry to art history i never
saw her happier
until after i made that she made that
change the mother of one of my students
had an undergraduate degree and a
master’s degree in engineering from mit
she chose to become a stay-at-home mom
one of her sons dropped out of
university
he ended up building his own business
where he’s designing and building boats
another colleague left a tenure track
position at a university
to become a tour guide and i still
remember her telling me
life is too short to do something you
don’t enjoy so if whatever you’re doing
now
makes you happy
awesome but if at any point in this
45-year trajectory it stops making you
happy
it’s okay to make a change
all of these people i mentioned did
something that others might have
questioned
but they all landed on their feet they
all been successful
and so be willing if your pathway is not
working for you be willing to choose a
different one
so as you leave here today and you think
about
your future and what it holds and this
journey that you’re on remember that
life holds uncertainties
you never know
where
the roadblocks are going to occur where
the opportunities are going to come up
but what you can do is you can work on
building the skills that are going to
open doors for you or that are going to
help you get through the setbacks when
they occur
so don’t just focus on your technical
training focus on building all of these
other skill sets that are going to make
you successful more broadly than just in
one individual pathway and remember as
well
that it’s okay to choose the path less
traveled
if a different path speaks out to you
that’s okay
so
i’m not saying
technical skills aren’t important they
are
they’re what’s going to get you into the
door they’re what’s going to get you the
first job but they may not be
what’s going to get you the second job
or the third job or the new opportunity
that takes you in a different direction
and i’m not saying don’t plan because
you have to plan but plan in pencils so
that you don’t miss those opportunities
when they come along
that will take you in a new in a
wonderful
direction so as you journey
your pathway whatever it may be
you’re gonna have ups and downs you’re
gonna have roadblocks you’re gonna have
all kinds of exciting things happen and
some not so exciting things happen but
wherever you go you never know what’s
going to lie around the next curve but
whatever it is and how you choose to
face it will determine who you become
[Applause]
you