Don’t worry, your career will start soon
Everything I learned from the University of Waterloo
The leaves haven’t changed colour yet, so I didn’t see fall creeping up behind me until we were on the precipice of Thanksgiving. I have a lot to be thankful for, 6 months out of a university degree that I loved I have a good job in the field I wanted. But as I scroll through my social media I see the photos of friends just behind me and just ahead of me in the career game and it’s made me very worried. I’m not sure I’ve done enough.
I’ve been asked how I’m liking my job so far, how does it feel to be a graduate, what are my career goals. The truth is: I don’t really know? Uncertainty seems to be a constant factor, without any syllabi, rubrics, or grades ahead of me the world seems like a swirling mess. I have a ton of questions. Should I have replied all to that email or just to one person? Should I ask to clarify or try to figure it out on my own? Am I missing out on course x which will unlock my secret ability to be better than the other candidates swimming constantly beside me?
The safety net is gone. I feel like a young giraffe just learning to walk, stumbling around trying to find my center of gravity. And then I realize, that is how I feel with a great education and fantastic co-op experience behind me. Sometimes I wonder how on the earth anyone else could possibly make it with less than me? And yet, there they are by the thousands.
Which is why this piece by Tammy Smitham, the VP of External Communication at Loblaws & Shoppers Drug Mart struck a chord with me. She says this one thing has really shaped her success:
I happened to overhear a conversation in which it was suggested that I could take on some of the receptionist’s duties like photocopying and making coffee. I was enraged, thinking these tasks were not part of my job description. In fact, I didn’t even know how to make coffee. I marched into my boss’ office and pleaded my case. I thought she would wholeheartedly support me, but to my surprise she said: “Tammy, life isn’t fair.”
And you know what? She was right. It isn’t. That day I learned to accept the fact that as hard as I might try, some things were still out of my control.
I didn’t like reading this quote at all. I was 100% with past-Tammy; coffee-making is not a part of “the work,” and that is without getting into the ramifications of delegating such tasks to the youngest woman around, etc.
The fact is, no matter whether you have the right grades or have successfully sold off your first startup, everyone has to make coffee sometimes. How you roll with the punches when this is thrown at you says more about you than your transcript will.
But, what bothers me about this is the confidence. Smitham writes from the tranquility of retrospect because she has had years to move past it and grow. Down here at the bottom where it is actually happening, it feels like complete chaos. It is the terrifying feeling of struggling to get your first co-op placement or internship times a thousand, because it doesn’t stop. Your career will just keep going.
Amandah Wood, collected advice from interviews with 50 professional women about how they work and came out with these three tips:
1. Find out what matters to you and ignore everything else.
2. Find opportunities to do that thing, and if you can’t find them, create them yourself.
3. Learn what you need to do your best work and build a structure around that.
What do you do when you’re stuck at Step 1? As I thought about this I realized that this is what your program is really training you for. Your education is not about getting better grades than the next person or scoring that average you need for that name on your degree. This is a time in your life that is dedicated to finding out what matters to you, in whatever colour, shape, or form it could possibly be.
This is why there are breadth requirements, why you should go to that lecture even if you find it boring, or try out for that team even if it doesn’t fit. Experimenting is the only way to figure out what really matters. I almost feel bad for Math and Engineering students when I think of it because when you’re bogged down by weekly assignments and fierce competition to score higher and higher, where is the space you need to fall on your face or fail?
If there is one thing I learned the most from being an Orientation Week leader it is this: if you haven’t failed before now — whether it is academically, athletically, or socially — you might have a devastating first year. After a lifetime of learning that failure is bad how are you supposed to cope well? But what’s so much more important than your list of successes are the lessons you have from failure.
Believe it or not, it is all about innovation.
In the past, passion was not essential for all great careers because you could have done well with a strong work ethic, good communication skills, and good sales skills… But now, if you are to have a great career, you must be an innovator and you cannot innovate without passion.
Straight from the horse’s mouth, this advice comes from Prof. Larry Smith in an interview with Forbes. He goes on to talk about the opposing force to our University motto: fear. The reason why my friends who are still students ask me all these questions is fear. I remember that fear really well. I remember being scared to graduate, and scared to start co-op, and scared to start university, and scared that I wouldn’t get into university, and scared of getting my first part-time job, and scared of starting high school, and before that I can’t really remember what I was scared of but I do remember the fear was there.
The funny thing is everyone gets scared. What Smitham was saying is you need to just work through that fear, and learn to make coffee (and then probably fail at it). Just keep pushing on and trying new things, and eventually you will stop being scared of that new job or class or project and then start being scared of some other new job/class/project.
Fear is sometimes the best barometer for figuring out that mythical passion you’re trying to track down. I was too scared to ask my own friends if they thought I could be Valedictorian, one of my roommates casually put it out there. It took another person to flatter me out of my own fears. I shook myself off (terrified the entire time), started asking for signatures, wrote draft after draft, and I ended up making my address two months later. It is one of the proudest moments of my life, and it almost never even happened.
Some of you are at home for Thanksgiving, fresh from failing/passing midterms or in the beginnings of your career. You may feel like you are miles behind another classmate or coworker who just seems to have it all. You might cry a bit and panic as you stuff yourself with turkey but that’s ok. It’s ok to not feel like you’re enough sometimes.
My time at UW taught me that above all you just have to keep going. Make the mistake, observe the lessons, and try it again or try it better. It’s probably not going to go your way but that’s okay, life doesn’t go anyone’s way. It just goes.
We know about humanity
I had the honour of speaking as the morning Valedictorian for the 2016 graduating class from the University of Waterloo Faculty of Arts. You can watch my address above at the 23:22 mark. A small excerpt of my speech was featured on the Faculty of Arts page and I’ve reproduced some more of my speech below.
“So, what are you going to do next? That is the first thing people said to me when I told them I was graduating. I’m sure you’ve heard the same thing too. It’s a question which comes with the kindest intentions. You, by being a student of the University of Waterloo, have already proven you are intelligent, talented, and most importantly, willing to work hard for all you want to accomplish. Of course, everyone wants to know what great thing you’re going to do next. It isn’t really a question. The real question which they sometimes mean is: what are you going to do with an Arts degree?
Yes, we’ve all heard it before and we’ve all tried to explain. There is something special about the Arts. There is a reason why we exist and continue to exist and that reason is you. It is because of minds like yours that take the time to study everything from Greek mythology to neoliberalism that the world becomes better. No, we aren’t engineers or computer scientists, so we might not know about bridges or combinatorics or titration. We may not have a technical degree, but we have something that is fundamentally and unequivocally necessary.
We know about humanity. We know about the parts of the brain and civilizations of the past. We know about currency and how to perform a monologue. We know different languages and religions of the world. We know about prose and the pillars of our legal system. We know about conflict and discrimination and politics and painting and user experience design. We know about life. We know about people.
And if you don’t know about people, well, you get bad bridges. You get meaningless numbers. You get chemical compounds without any purpose.
Society as we know it could not exist without us and it will become better because of us. Because of you. The passion which you brought here today is the passion the world needs to solve our most pressing issues. We need you to question what we do about hundreds of missing and murdered indigenous women. We need you to evaluate and improve our mental health care system. We need you to create legislation and laws for governing our new technologically driven world. We need you to develop social programs that meet the needs of our growing elderly population, new immigrants, and even refugees.
Your future career path may not be obvious, and your next job title might not printed on your degree, but you have the ability to think critically about the world around us. You have the knowledge and the experience which make for better questions, better teams, better ideas, and a better world.
That is what you can do with a Waterloo Arts degree, but you already knew that. You knew it when you put on that gown and you’ll know it when you walk across this stage. Every page you’ve read, every project you’ve worked on, every paper you’ve written, every midterm you’ve passed — even if just barely — has not gone unnoticed. Every one of you has made a mark on this campus whether you were an executive in a society or simply by raising your hand in class you have already made an impact for future graduates. That impact I am certain you will carry out into the world.”
The Performative of Branding
The Performative of Branding is a work term report I wrote for the Department of English at the University of Waterloo as part of their co-op program. The purpose of the report was to connect my studies to my experiences during my internship at the Union Pearson Express during its launch. In this paper, I explore how J. L. Austin’s theory for the performative can be compared to branding, and how brands take on a life beyond words and images when executed well. I was awarded the Outstanding Work Term Report Award for Winter 2015, in the Senior category for this work.
Here is an excerpt:
J. L. Austin’s theory for the performative—words which not only state an action but embody said action—is very similar to the practice of branding as I have experienced it at UP Express. Set standards are outlined in the Brand Guidelines, just as Austin outlines rules of convention required for the performative to existed, and dilution (infelicities, as Austin calls them) will occur if not everyone applies the rules correctly. In fact, I will extend Austin’s theory to say that not only words or phrases can be performative but an intangible like a brand—made up of differentiating character traits, copyright, and associated colours and logos—can be a performative in-and-of-itself based on the branding principles, and their effects, as seen during my four month term at UP Express.
Austin’s Rules
In J.L. Austin’s “How to Do Things with Words” he describes sentences in which it is clear to the audience that “to utter the sentence… is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it” [emphasis in original] (2004, p.163). These he calls performatives. He cites as examples the practice of saying “I do” at weddings or telling another person you bet them something. In these cases, more than just words are being uttered; the action being spoken of is simultaneously taking place with the speech. Austin further outlines rules which must be fulfilled in order for performatives to take place:
(A.1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further,
(A.2) the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked.
(B.1) The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and
(B.2) completely. (2004, p.166)
Austin’s rules require that an accepted convention or procedure must already exist in order for performative to take place, including the social recognition of “appropriate” persons or circumstances during its invoking. Therefore, it is not possible for a new performative to simply come into being without consensus. Prior to becoming a performative, a decision must be made to make certain words or sentences so, followed by both repeated action of the performative, as well as unanimous agreement that it is such. This intentional and organized effort to establish meaning is very similar to creating awareness of a new brand; a process I became familiar with as part of the UP Express Marketing team. […]
More than Guidelines
However, it is not just how big the logo is sized or how the stationary is formatted. Branding can be very unpredictable as it relies heavily on the public’s consumption and interpretation of the brand, not just the people who set the rules. As Schroeder and Salzer- Mörling write, an “argument for a credible identity” for brands in the form of “guidelines for the look of the logotype and its application on different items—letterheads, brochures, vehicles, buildings, etc.” does not single-handedly control how a brand behaves (2006, p.126). As Austin outlines in (A.1) and (A.2), conventions or societal and cultural norms are what establish a performative, just as “neither managers nor consumers completely control branding processes—cultural codes constrain how brands work to produce meaning” (Schroeder & Salzer-Mörling, 2006, p.1). The UP Express Brand Guidelines can set a structure of conventions, but the interpretation of the actions may vary greatly consumer to consumer. Unless, the Guidelines themselves are established as the accepted convention by the public, and the only way of doing that is to ensure that the every expression of the brand is aligned with the values which we want portrayed and to avoid any brand dilution.
Infelicities and Brand Dilution
The purpose of a brand is to “identify one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers” and establish a unique identity to consumers as a whole, not with many various interpretations (Grewal, Levy, Persaud & Lichti, 2012, p.291). In order to do so, a majority of the consumers must come to the same interpretation of the brand. This is possible by consistently expressing the brand in certain ways and priming the public. In order to do so, the Marketing team as well as the public need to follow planned procedure totally and completely as Austin express in (B.1) and (B.2). He calls failure to comply with the rules or “the things that can be and go wrong” with performatives: “infelicities” (2004, p.166). By following the set guidelines, the UP Express brand can be made into a performative but failure to execute the set procedure properly results in infelicity. Any misrepresentation of the brand as outlined by the Guidelines, whether it is by a single member of the team failing to observe said rules or by not fulfilling a single element set in the guide, prevents the brand from performing properly.
The Cities of Tomorrow
The Cities of Tomorrow contest was a competition of student ideas for improving major cities in created by the Large Urban Mayor’s Caucus of Ontario. In 2015, I entered with a team of students and alumni from the University of Waterloo and McMaster with a policy innovation paper for improving housing for both senior citizens and post-secondary students. We were selected as finalists and in February 2016, we went to pitch our idea live to several big city mayors against two other student teams. We won first place in the Housing category.
I collaborated on researching, writing, and building the presentation for our report, Homesharing is Homecaring, which is one of my first major pieces written for a public sector audience.
Our project in the media:
Catherine Vendryes 
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