hold on to your priorities & values and let them guide you

yesterday's entry is a nice segway into today's entry. i have to do what feels right for me, but it's hard. the irony is that others may see me as "Miss Myers-Briggs Career Counselor". the truth is that just like doctors fall ill, lawyers get sued, or auto mechanics have car problems, career counselors aren't immune from facing hard choices when mapping out their own lives. i'm tight-lipped, but i'll say it's tough weighing out pros & cons of various possibilities, including whether to switch careers or stay in the field. is commiting to a Ph.D. worth it when you consider that academicians must go where the jobs are? even if it means going to teach at a tiny college in oklahoma or mississippi b/c it's the only opening? if living/settling in a specific geographic location is important to you, maybe you either need to be super-lucky, or you shouldn't consider a Ph.D./academia. i think as i continue to find myself professionally, and remain true to myself, i'll need to re-visit a class activity from my teaching days:

as part of my grad school internship, i taught a career-planning seminar to 20 undergrad arts & sciences students. it was a highlight of my master's program. one of my lecture topics was "The Role of Personal Values in Career-Decision Making". that day, as my students arrived in class and settled into their desks, i instructed them to get out a blank piece of paper and tear it into 20 pieces. i then wrote up 20 "values" on the blackboard. as i recall, they included: "living near my family", "getting married", "professional prestige", "having children", "being healthy", "earning a high income", "living near art & cultural opportunities", "having strong religious faith", "being politically active", "owning a home", "having a graduate degree", "living in a big city/small town" ETC.

i had my students write each value on a slip of paper, and then asked them to arrange them from "most important" to "least important". i then walked around the room and collected each student's least important value. we repeated this until they were left w/ the five most important values to them. as students had to prioritize and give up yet another value, they struggled visibly and took more time choosing which slip of paper to give me. when they were left with their top five "values", i asked students to rank them. finally, one of my brightest students, a brunette pre-med girl named Devon, waved her hand in the air and blurted out,

"..but i don't see how you can assign more importance to any one of these over the others--they're equally important! like, being healthy is so basic. if you don't have that, how can you expect the other stuff in your life to fall into place?!"

i told Devon she had made an excellent point, and told the class that was exactly what i was trying to get at�that there were "no right or wrong answers, and that career decision making is so personal, it's up to you to weigh your values and priorities", and i wanted to illustrate how difficult the decisions they would face after graduation might be. and truthfully, Devon's comment about having good health really hit me on a personal level that has always remained with me because as i learned, that is so, so true�