Steps to Workplace Success

1.  Ask questions.  Especially ones you think are stupid.  There is the cliche that somebody else is probably wondering the same thing--which is probably true, but it is also really inefficient to not ask something when the opportunity arises and then do elaborate workarounds on the parks you don't know.

But don't just ask factual questions, ask perspective questions too.  What does it look like to you?  How did you arrive here?  How do you see it?  This helps you learn from other's peoples successes and failures, which is way more efficient than trying to have all of those experiences yourself.  When you are new somewhere, you don't have time to have all those experiences yourself, and need to understand the experiences of your teammates to be effective working with them.

2.  Set your goals in both concrete and abstract terms.  Self-imposed deadlines are crucial for getting stuff done, but it's not just what and how much you complete, it's what do you want to accomplish, what are the benefits of accomplishing it, and what do you envision as the ideal outcome of what you are doing?

3.  Don't make stuff up, admit you don't know.  And go back to item 1.  Really, knowing you know something is so much better than knowing you don't and trying to work around it without letting on to anyone else that you don't know.  As silly as it seems, this can come up time and time again, no matter how long you've been working.

4. Clarify.  What is going on, what you think other people mean, what you mean, what you need in order to get past an obstacle.  Really, it is so much better than not doing it and letting things go, but the thing is, it also comes across as helpful, competent and confident, even if you think you're just clarifying something other people already know.  Adults really suck at paying attention and listening if you let them get away with not doing those things.

5. Follow up.  This is similar, but frustrates the heck out of endeavors if nobody does it.  It can also be intimidating, because one hates to feel like a broken record or breathing down someone's neck when the follow up is just checking to see if somebody else has done something yet--but things get lost in some crazy vortex sometimes if you don't do it.  Sometimes if you don't bring up something from a past encounter directly, other people will never mention it again, no matter how important it might be.

6.  If the time is right, ask bold questions.  Question even the most basic assumptions, how things are done and why.  A lot of times things are this way Because That's The Way They've Always Been, and sometimes that is a good thing, but sometimes that is an extremely idiotic thing and somebody needs to do something about it.  Do learn how to differentiate these situations, however.

7.  Want it.  Want what you are doing.  Care about it, a part of it anyway.  Otherwise you won't do as good a job as you could, and you'll know it, and a part of you will hate yourself for it, and you'll feel mediocre and miserable.  You don't have to, and probably never will, love absolutely everything about your job.  There may be parts of it you really don't like.  But you have to want the big picture, or at some part of the work that makes up for the part you don't like, or you'll never end up being very good at it because some reaches of your brain will be elsewhere.

Starting on the Backlog

Now that things have settled down, I finally have time to catch up on my backlog of intended entries, so you're getting a barrage at once from my paper journal.  (Yes, I have a paper journal.)


My long absence has been due to pursing a job opportunity I could not logically pass up in the middle of a very short-term job opportunity I really love, and then, more recently, partying pretty much every night, which is very unlike me.


So this is from a couple of days ago:


Today I started my morning by wading into a cool mountain river.  Then I had breakfast at a diner that turned out to be rather nice--though admittedly the topic of conversation was my exasperating co-worked and housemate (the one who inspired my last entry, in fact.)


I sat on a high stony cliff and watched five turkey vultures land and take off, land and take off from stone pillars.  I went to an evening gathering which featured easy-to-learn folk dances around a camp fire, and happily discovered a rhythm of joy around the flames, amid the singing of the catidids, under the full moon.  When I got back home I stopped first, in the big meadow, to listen to the barred owl calling into the night.


When trying to seize the day, some days are much easier than others.


I have a job now.  A real one, not an Americorps park ranger 12-week stay in Shenandoah National Park (oh, that's what she's doing...)--which unfortunately means I have to leave this actually quite amazing experience early.  Stain my name for future Americorps, and all that.


And I am someone who worries so much about the future:  about my plans, my decisions, about how I relate to the people and places in my life.  I worry so much over every little failure or perceived failure, every little uncertainty that I must attend to and turn into certainty if possible--that I forget to seize the day, and be thankful that I live a privileged enough life that every day is generally worth seizing.  I live a privileged life because of luck of the birth draw, but also because of my choices:  to pursue the things I want, to establish and immerse myself in what I value, to hold on to the people I love, to embrace challenge and learning when it is presented me.


Being here, interpreting a natural resource for visitors, has nourished something that has been inside of me my whole life but has recently only had small occasion to voice.  The child who climbed trees to the tallest branch, who knew at ten the common names of most of the tree types in my neighborhood, who captured and released baby frogs while wading in the pond in the backyard, who counted dragonflies and pressed wildflowers and imagined running away to live off of the land as an adult.  How that closeness to the natural world fills and inspires all of the things I love even now, all of my hopes and challenges. 

I have been looking for a job for months and I finally got one, and it is an exciting one, and the fact that I felt no choice but to be distracted from my time here to pursue it, that irony would say that of course when I decide to go and have a self-bettering-through-service experience is when the jobs come up--that can't matter.  I'm here now, I have stimulated that spring of wonder, inspiration, and joy--and if I wish I could have all of it well then I should have just learned to seize the day before it was gone.

"The Lost Generation"

Man, but being a now-not-so-recent graduate, trying idealistically to find a green collar job in a tourist town in the middle of a recession, because the job you have is temporary, the other job you have doesn't have the budget to give their staff more than a few hours a week, and the restaurants won't even look twice at you because you don't have any table-waiting experience--is tough.

So you turn to a year of service, only so does everybody else your age who is vaguely idealistic, wants to live where you already live, and can't find work any other way.   And you can't quite compete there either--or maybe you can, because half of the problem is evaporating funding.  And with all the advice you read about not wasting employers' time--it is hard not to get, well, frustrated, about that.

Performance in school is not the same thing as performance in the real world.  I think there's a demographic of people, who take school seriously because we like to take the endeavors we do seriously, and school for the past 16 years has been our most serious of endeavors.  In school, your evaluation of performance, your A, if you will, is yours, if you earn it.  It's not somebody else's that you are taking away from them.   And I definitely think grade standards have fallen in many places so that As are pretty easy to come by.  Then you get an inflated sense of your ability, your talent, your potential.

Or maybe it's just a recession.

There are two ways to look at constant rejection.  One is to take it as a marker of your real, post-school self worth.  To lower ego, make you realize that you're not that great, and that you now need to re-evaluate your dreams and goals with a real idea of your potential and capabilities, which aren't very much.  There's some kind of self-depreciating egoism in feeling that way.  It's addictive, even. 

The other is to take each rejection as a personal challenge to improve, to succeed despite all those people who "don't feel you fall into the pool of extremely qualified applicants" (you being merely a good one).  Know it's not personal except in that it motivates you to remain personally dedicated to making yourself as awesome as you can be, to pull out all the stops, network like crazy, figure out what you can provide to them.   And buddy, I want to be the best I can be, I know how to evaluate and correct my performance, and I know how to articulate what I have to offer.   I not only can succeed, I will, and I will bring benefit to my employer. 

The whole point of this is that I don't want to go to graduate school just because.

It's Just Adrenaline

So, in this entry I get a little bit gushy.  This is not uncharacteristic of me at all, but it's something I've been trying, relatively, to stay away from here.  Be warned.

Yesterday I went on a very spectacular rock climbing trip.

I'm an old hat at rock climbing--which is not the same thing at saying I'm good at it, because I'm really, staunchly, mediocre--so I can differentiate a spectacular climbing day from a not-so-spectacular one.

My completely awesome, competent, confident, intelligent, extroverted and slightly adrenaline-junkie friend (do I seem jealous?), also severely underemployed, has been climbing with me a lot lately.  You may have heard about her in my last entry about climbing and car accidents.  Since, as severely underemployed and getting over the loss of college-inflated self-importance people are not short on time if we are on money, there are ample opportunities for this.  More specifically, we've been getting into *lead* climbing, which, if you've done it, you'll know is a whole 'nother world from normal rock climbing.  More so to people like me than said competent, confident, intelligent yadda yadda friend, who has so far taken it in stride.

Unlike me, who sweats and hyperventilates and shakes hysterically and swears (but haven't teared up yet) my way through it.

Well.  We had found a nice moderate route to lead, and we were both going to do it.  I was in a state that can best be described as morosely immature, because I'd just been rejected for yet again another job in the same sentence that I was reassured that I really had been such an excellent candidate (yet again on the excellent candidate part of the rejection, too).  So even though knowing better (I'm a Challenge By Choice professional, after all, even if only barely employed as such), even though knowing myself, I looked at the route and let her go first.

She did okay.  There was a spot where she slipped, grabbed the rock, and had to breath hard for a few minutes, which is probably on the level of a nervous-break-down for most other people.  She succeeded of course, without falling,  and then it was my turn to climb the thing.  I had to follow her first, to take out the gear she'd put in.

I learned that that was a mistake, because I went from feeling reasonably pumped about doing it lead, to vehemently proclaiming that I would *not* lead it once I'd gotten to the top.  I should have just had her take her own gear down and be do with without realizing what I was getting into.

It wasn't a hard route, but it was slabby face (like, rock face) climbing.  Imagine an almost vertical wall, with minuscule finger holds and little ripples that your feet may or may not stick to.   That fear-factor, that lizard-brain, was kicking into overtime, even though, like I said, I'm a old hat at climbing.  It's the kind of climbing where you can't stop and think, you can't really plan, you just hold on and move by god before you lose the grip and delicate balance that you have.  And deal with the adrenaline.

I'm actually really good at that kind of climbing relative to other kinds, and I find it very satisfying.

But I am a hesitater, and that's why my stomach dropped at the notion of leading the route.  I can handle a lead fall.  Okay, the concept is still scary, but I've taken moderate falls, and I trust the equipment.  Taking a lead fall would probably be damn good for me, because then I wouldn't be afraid of it.  I always feel better after falling and feeling the safety device--the rope--catch me.  A lead fall just involves a longer interval before that happens.

But that feeling.  Of hanging by very little, and of not being able to take time to *think* about it, of just having to act, and like I said, you can't fool your lizard-brain with a silly safety rope.  It's only adrenaline...but I am not an adrenaline junkie.   I have such performance anxiety issues.  I can't take risks, I want to stop and analyze and make sure I'm not *wrong*.  If I'd lead that, there would be no time for right or wrong.  Just action.

I don't want to give up my love of hesistation.

Of course, this can become a metaphor for grander things.  I do hard work in my job search, but I do hesitate before I make phone calls.  I do plan conversations meticulously.  I do hate to look the fool, sound the fool, perform poorly in front of others.  I take actions to avoid having to perform at something...and fail publicly.

Who's afraid of failure?  Who is, consequently, treating this latest rejection with what moping woe-is-me histrionics, considering it a failure even though it really is nothing personal and may in fact just be that they didn't consider their budget well enough?  Who is taking this "failure" as an indication of doom into repeated, future failure, just a little bit?

Who always has to frikkin hesistate before speaking up, sharing, asking questions, taking risks?

Me.

And loads of other human beings.

Don't worry, I am going to go back and lead climb that thing soon.  I hope I do fall, because that will be the best lesson.

I did and do really want that job though, not some other one.  I guess that is their loss.

To Comfort the Afflicted and Afflict the Comfortable

So, in leui of those great technical opportunities that I was supposed to somehow be able to secure with my B.S. in physics while still living in a tourist town, I picked up some side work continuing my high and low ropes course experience.

I don't mean to imply that it is a drugerious job:  I like hanging out it the trees, and still find belaying for people and instructing them in team challenges rewarding.  The job is also for a conference center--where money is the bottom line, staff are merely expendable timecards whose time in operation must be minimized above all, opportunity for professional training or advancement are negligible to nonexistent--welcome to the real world.   Those who can't stand middle schoolers need not apply.

One thing this job has allowed me to do is observe a heck of a lot of middle schoolers.  Middle schoolers in large groups.   Sixth graders, seventh graders, and eighth graders, male and female, (although mostly white, unfortunately) public school and private.

Working with these groups has radically changed my opinion on the merit of private school.

The private school kids, be them sixth, seventh, or eighth grade, are a pleasure to work with.  They are attentive and polite, they really by gosh do encourage each other, they make truly insightful comments while climbing or during processing, they make references to Winston Churchill and physical laws.

The public school kids, on the other hand, have to be constantly told to pay attention; are full of such witticisms as "this is gay" and "hahaha, you fell"; trying to facilitate discussion with them is like pulling teeth; and an alarming number of the evaluation we ask them to fill out fail to display an adequate grasp of the concepts of sentence, subject, and predicate--much less provide any specific or helpful comments about what could be improved.  "IDK" and "make boring fun" are my two favorite answers.  And by "favorite", I mean the ones that make me most want to hang my head in despair.

I used to have such faith in our public schools, believing the a la Degrassi hardships of popularity, fitting in, and gym class to be necessary character building experiences, thinking private schools were a waste of money for an education that was not necessarily any better, their whole existence a mark of somewhat elitist parents.

There are several factors differentiating the public and private school experience, which might explain the vast differences is emotional maturity.  Money of course leads to greater opportunities, in terms of better funded teachers, and more chances for the kids to also be able to afford developmentally beneficial extracurricular activities.  Parental involvement at all is huge, and while not always present for private school children and certainly not necessarily absent for public school children, it is probably still more likely to be present for private school children, since the parents care enough to send their child to a school they have to pay for.

In the end, though I think a lot of it is about challenge.  I was challenged in public school because I wanted to be, because I was pre-capable, for whatever reason, of challenging myself.

It is immediately obvious to me that the private school kids willingly challenge themselves, because they see the value in challenge for challenge's sake.  They also deal well with challenge.  The ones who start to climb and get afraid are capable of sorting it out, prioritizing, and either consciously pushing themselves in or having the self-knowledge to say "I have reached my limit and would like to stop now."

The public school kids do not, generally, challenge themselves.  The ones who aren't inclined to be afraid just do the activitly quickly, goof around, comment on how easy it is, and go off without processing how it could have been made into a learning experience.  The ones who are afraid cannot be convinced to try, or when they try reach a spot where they are afraid and cannot cope.  They cry, they are non-responsive to processing or encouragement, so we let them down and they go off inside of themselves, internalizing a negative experience.   The emotional maturity, the ability to accept and deal with challenge, is greatly limited, when compared to like-aged private school groups, and even in some cases with private school groups two grades lower.

I think public schools don't have the resources nor the mentality to challenge kids enough, unless, like me, they had supportive and involved parents, and had learned to seek it out.    All this standardized testing as benchmark, and lowering expectations so that passing is possible to more people.   No Child Left Behind, and all that.  Everyone's a winner.  Here's a gold star for trying.

Everyone is not the same though, and everyone is challenged by different things.  Public schools don't have the resources to tackle each student's individual need for the correct challenge; private schools undoubtedly have more of those resources.  Many privet schools also have higher standards in general, and that is really important too.  Allowing people to succeed without being challenged does them a disservice in the long run, even if the standards cannot be met by all.  Dropping a standard ensures that some who otherwise might have will never develop the tools to meet it.  An opportunity to gain emotional maturity--in my opinion equally as important as knowledge--is lost, and we all know what a pain an emotionally immature eighth grader is to be around. At least, I could tell you stories.  Exasperating stories.

No Child Left Behind does exist for a reason.  We don't want to just abandon the failing kids, goodness knows.  In the afterschool girl's program I am doing, I work with girls from the complete opposite end of the social hierarchy as the stereotypical private schooler.  Girls kicked out of public school, girls generally failing and falling behind in their classes, children of poverty-line single mothers drawing largely from the African American and Hispanic communities here.  Because we have a one to one mentor/student ratio, we can get the focus out of them.  We have the resources to find what works for them, find what pushes them.  Attacking and overcoming the challenge of rock climbing is one of the center themes of our program, and the program often dramatically improves the low self-confidence and behavior issues that get them referred to our program to begin with.  These girls are smart and capable but for various reasons aren't stimulated in public school.

Unfortunately, with state budget cuts and state budget cuts, I don't imagine this problem is going to get anything but worse.  The issue is obvious in an experiential learning/outdoor education setting, and experiential learning is both handy at addressing this sort of thing, and not the kind of thing many schools have the resources to provide.  

When It Rains, It Pours

cross posted on author's old blog, Close Encounters of the Awkward Kind.

So, there's this thing called the Law of Convergence. It's not a physical law, per se, rather it lies in that realm of those laws of irony that, although their mechanism is unknown, tend to prove themselves true time and time again.

Lately it has gone like this: as short as one month ago, I spent many a tear-filled morning going over all of the resumes, cover letters, and requests for informational interviews that I had sent out in vain, all of the internship applications that were getting no response, etc, and I was quite frightened. What was I going to do with myself? How would I ever find my place? What do I really have to offer, that anyone else might find valuable?

Now things happen all at once. I got my part-time job, and just as soon as I signed the paperwork, I interviewed for and received an internship I had only accidentally applied for while in the process of applying for others I did actually want. I contemplated that one but turned it down: because I wanted to stay here and do that part-time job, because I wanted to do an intensive volunteer mentor program here that can only happen once, because I just wasn't excited about Frostproof, Florida.

No sooner had I turned that down that I received two other requests for interviews, one that I also turned down for similar reasons, another that I'm still working on trying to schedule. And then I interviewed for that volunteer program and got it...and then my Dream Job responded at long last saying they, too, wanted an interview.

Well I just went to the American Physical Society meeting, (which I'll write on at length as soon as I have time to catch my breath with all of this) and found out that this totally awesome science writing internship that, three months ago I had gotten a) amazingly excited about, and b)amazingly frustrated over when they never responded to my application nor my polite and well-spaced phone calls asking for confirmation of my application over the course of the next three months, is still looking for someone, and that the person I needed to talk to was actually at the meeting. While I wanted to confront him about that in a politely frustrated way, I never managed to run into him, and because I'd let that position go and was already contemplating Dream Job Maybe verses Definite and Rewarding Volunteer Opportunity, I couldn't rummage up the ability to care that much.

Oh yeah, and today I have an interview for a very, very back-up ropes course job that I've been trying to schedule, against the onslaught of Badly Timed Snow Storms, for a month. I should call and cancel, perhaps, but Dream Job is still a maybe, and a maybe that hasn't even confirmed my interview date.

So while all this is wonderful, it's also something of a decision-making minefield. Do I turn down something less desirable for the chance of unknown odds that Opportunity Awesome will make itself into a reality? Do I accept, and then burn a bridge by jumping ship? (Too many metaphors in one sentence, I know...) Do I dare to tell Dream Job that I absolutely want this job but I need Monday afternoons off for the next month, or do I instead suddenly leave an adolescent girl without a rock climbing instructor and life mentor, not to mention screw up the grant-funded endeavor of a local non-profit whose mission I strongly believe in?

Well. At the APS meeting, one of the undergraduate programs was a presentation of job opportunities for physicists. The official definition of "physicist" is anyone with a B.S. or higher in physics, so yes, I can truthfully and proudly call myself a physicist. Physicists are employed in all fields, doing all kinds of things, and the unemployment rate, even today, for people with physics degrees is a low 5%.

So it pays off, it really does. You can use your degree to go from contemplating laws of nature, to wrestling with laws of irony like the Law of Convergence.