Hello fellow Denisonians!
My name is Sophie and I graduated from Denison in 2018 with a B.A. in Mathematics and Environmental Science. A little background as to how I got there is that I came into college with a passion for math, but I added
environmental science when I took a class that interested me Freshman year through the general education requirements. Both math and environmental science were passions. Both were
Sophie Lovett ’18
interesting to me. And together, they gave me a diverse perspective. I also came to college with a desire to have my summers figured out each year (internships and things!), but I had no clue what I’d do each summer or how they’d fit into my career path because I had no idea what I wanted to do. That feeling was and is completely normal.
Whether you’re thinking about summer experiences or your first job after college, the same considerations and questions apply. Here are some examples of the questions I asked myself over the years.
- Where do I want to live?
- What am I good at that I want to continue doing?
- What interests me?
- What type of work environment do I want?
- Is what I am learning in college or pursuing in a degree relevant to what I want to do? How relevant? If not directly relevant (BTW – this is also totally normal & fine!), what do I love about my education path that I want to carry forward into my career?
- What motivates me?
- What have I enjoyed about past work, volunteer, leadership experiences? Are there any common themes?
As you can imagine, the more experiences you have, the more you learn about yourself. You start learning what you like and don’t like and what you’re good at and not good at. You might not have all the answers at a given time, but I bet you have some. That’s where you start, and then you keep building and recalibrating from there. Your starts and stops might be different than my starts and stops, but the goal is to take what you know and follow it until you hit the next juncture in your journey. You can turn this into a “Learned” and “Landed” exercise, where your experiences transition from “Landed” to “Learned” when you move on to the next.
In my case, all I knew Freshman year was that I wanted to live in Charleston, SC and I wanted to have a paying internship. I had enjoyed doing research in my environmental studies class, so I wanted to land an internship in that function of work. Those three things defined my start. I did not worry that I didn’t have the rest figured out because that would have been an unrealistic expectation at the time. That summer, I worked as a research analyst & content writer for a small newspaper in South Carolina and I got paid minimally by the company, but I was granted a Denison stipend that supported me financially. When the summer was over and I revisited the questions above, I had more answers. The answers were: 1) I hated working for a newspaper because it was too slow 2) Charleston was fun, but I wanted a more corporate setting and 3) I wanted to pursue the media industry, but from a different angle. I applied those learnings to the next leg of my journey.
I won’t bore you with my college work/internship/career journey, but I will say that I used the questions and method above over and over again as I navigated my career journey in college. I still use the methodology in my professional life. It has helped me immensely and I would not be where I am today without it.
Today, I am a Product Manager working for a new website (soon to be app!) called Lantern that was started in April 2021. I have 3+ years of professional work experience, but have only been in this exact role for ~3 months now. It’s the first career I can see myself in long term, but I don’t say that to discount the years I spent working prior to this role. I say it proudly because I feel lucky to have found a role that I love just three years out of college. I got here because I kept asking myself the questions above and recalibrating what I wanted for myself and my career. To paint that picture, here it is laid out using the “Learned” and “Landed” exercise.
- (Learned) Digital Marketing Associate (Aug ’18 to July ’21) – After three years in this role I learned: I love analytics, I like working with multiple teams, I care deeply about the consumer (more than the revenue), I did not want to work directly with clients, the entertainment industry that I worked in was too superficial for me, I did not want to continue managing media spend, I liked tackling big projects, I was great at communication, I was great at developing our long-term strategy
- (Landed) Product Manager (Aug ’21 – Present) – Work directly for Lantern, a site that helps career-switchers learn about career possibilities and matches based on past experience, skills, salary, job outlook, and location. Responsible for communicating cross-functionally with business, creative, engineering, content, and legal teams; Manage stakeholders, timelines, and quarterly roadmaps; Initiate new product feature ideas and enhancements through research, data analysis, and discovery; Spend time interviewing Lantern users, getting to know them and turning their feedback into solutions.
There are some lucky people out there that know the exact career they want and how to get there, but the majority of us are constantly trying to figure out what we want to do and how to get there. If you are in that majority, like me, just start somewhere. Realistically, your first job is not going to teach you all the skills you want, be the perfect work environment, or pay you the salary you deserve. It will probably check some of those boxes and that is enough to keep going. Lean on what you know, trust it, and let it guide you to the next step of your journey.
