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Posts tagged ‘life skills’

Jan 31

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Life Skills: Renting an Apartment

Life Skills is a series of posts by former MiddBlog lead editors. J-term is ending, so we’re drawing this series to a close. Clearly, not many students are going to go out and put our advice into action immediately (except maybe you graduating febs!), but know that these posts remain here as a resource to come back to or as a place to start thinking about all these post-grad variables. As I said in my first post, this is a good time to “wean yourself off the good life.” Hope you’ve enjoyed the series and love to hear about what else you’d like from grads on MiddBlog. -Ryan Kellett ’09.5

So, you’re FINALLY moving out of your childhood room, huh? Nah, just teasing. For some, ma and pa’s house is a great place to live (not kidding) regardless if you have a job or not. But I’m assuming you’ve made the call that you want to move into a place of your own (and not a dorm room) and that you’re most likely in a city some kind. First, congrats! Renting your own place is one of the quintessential “growing up” milestones. Only one small thing — no one ever told you how to go through this process.

Oh, your apartment has a communal swimming pool, right?

Under Pressure

My own experience is one of always having to find a place to stay under pressure. My advice: don’t put yourself in a situation in which you have to find a place in mere days or even weeks. The best search is one where you can go at your pace, do your research, and feel comfortable committing to a lease. As such, you should try to buy yourself some time to go through the apartment search you want to go through. Ways to do that: stay with friends (but don’t overstay), stay at a short-term group house, stay with friends of family or family (for rent or not), airbnb, or house sit for a bit. All those tricks you pulled out for intern housing over the summer? Use ‘em again here. It’s not glamourous but this you might have to rely on the kindness of others until you can find your way apartment-hunting. Some say it’s a right of passage to live somewhere really bad before getting what you want, but I’d attempt to avoid it.

Getting started

Reality check: that dream apartment is not a mere click away on craigslist (or padmapper). Like most things, looking online is a natural way to solve your problem. But I’d caution that it’s not the only way. Just like getting a job, strategies abound: Facebook, workplace, network, etc.  Read more

Jan 30

Life Skills: Getting To, And Through Grad School

Casey Mahoney ’11 was MiddBlog’s co-lead editor in fall 2010 and spring 2011. He’s currently in his second semester of a year-and-a-half M.A. program in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS, official tagline: “A graduate school of Middlebury College“).

MA. MS. MBA. MPA. MPhil. PhD. MD. These are the degrees (and others) that going to graduate school will get you. Why bother? Ultimately, your second degree will be the sine qua non of the resume or CV that will land you an advanced position in your field.

Your Middlebury BA or BS can definitely land you a great first, second, third job – and it could certainly be that it’s the only degree you’ll need for life (no school again? ever?!) – but you might find later on that advancing in your field requires a second degree. Alternately, getting an extra credential right out of undergrad could give you the extra leg up that you need to start your professional career.

Know your goals and make the right decision

You can't just do it for the colorful robes.

The most important part about the calculus of the “to grad school, or not to grad school” question is knowing your goals. Where do you want to be in your career in three, five, and ten years? No doubt it will be challenging to answer this with a complete picture of the exact job you want to have in 2022, but you need to know the direction your headed in order to make the huge investment that graduate school is. Researching career options (use that MiddNet) is just as important as researching the graduate programs that will get you the degrees to get there.

Specialize vs. Generalize

Once you get (back) to school, you’ll likely be faced with a number of options as to how you can specialize even more in your Masters of Science in Nurse Anesthesia degree (MSNA - it’s real). Do I specialize to the max, or take a step back and do something more general? I don’t want to close off all my options… Do both.

We’ve heard that, supposedly, specialization is the key to success: the liberal arts will unlikely provide bread and butter for the majority of us forever (though they are a great place to start). I’d like to argue that both specializing and developing generalist competencies are important in grad school. You’ll find that there are opportunities for both.

Use papers and research projects to create your unique brand of expertise in your niche. At the same time, fill your space for electives with courses and activities that wouldn’t immediately strike one as relevant. Bridging this knowledge to your field will broaden your viewpoints and translate to marketable, professional capabilities – a purpose much more than general knowledge for general knowledge’s sake. Taking “intellectual risks” (“doing stretch-work”) is still worthwhile even after you’ve got your liberal arts degree.

Learn to live as a professional

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Jan 26

Life Skills: Cheap Art

JP Allen ’11 initiated the Arts Runoff series and spent Winter and Spring ’11 as a MiddBlog Lead Editor. He is currently working as a NYC Urban Fellow. Read all life skills posts here.

JP's ticket wall

We’ve all heard Middlebury is a bubble. Most arguments that begin there end urging students to burst out. While that is great advice, there are also plenty of incredible resources within the bubble that can be easy to ignore or take for granted until graduation.

The arts are one of the biggest. Think about it: at Middlebury, $12 sounds extravagant for a theater or dance show that features talented people and high production values in a venue five minutes from your room. You’d be hard-pressed to find that kind of deal anywhere else.

So here is some advice for the potentially more awesome but definitely more jagged and expensive post-graduate art world:

Pay for what’s good

Art is expensive. Recent graduates are (almost always) broke. In order to bridge the gap, I suggest going for quality rather than quantity. You can take risks on cheap events and save your big money for stuff that’s been recommended by friends. I had a grand plan to review a play a week in NYC, but I didn’t have the time or the budget. Instead, I splurged on one showing of Sleep No More and am still thinking about it. Just remember: paying money for experiences tends to make people happier than paying money for objects.

Don’t be discouraged by what sucks

Because some art just sucks. One of the first plays I saw after college—paid $18 to see—was godawful, pretentious, poorly acted and too long. It was like small-town community theater minus the feel-good message and cute children. People were getting paid to make this garbage? Middlebury can spoil people in lots of ways. But you can build a base of good arts options in your next setting without too much difficulty. One great way is to…

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Jan 22

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Life Skills: Lean Forward And Participate In The News

This post is part of the “Life Skills” series by former MiddBlog editors.

Creative Commons / Jessamyn

My two previous posts addressed the problem of keeping up with the news from a traditional perspective.  I described what to look for in the news and how to get the news to come to you.

If you only do what I describe in my first two posts, you’re engaging with the news in a way that is fundamentally similar to the way people have consumed news for centuries — you’re literally and figuratively sitting back and receiving information.

But this is the digital era and the Internet allows people to lean forward and participate. As citizens, we can now be active in analyzing, distributing and reporting the news.

This doesn’t mean starting a blog if you don’t want one.  And it doesn’t mean always aspiring for the standards of professional journalism if you decide to produce stories.

Instead, it’s important that we overcome the belief that there is a theatrical fourth wall separating producers and consumers of news.  This means participating in news decimation and creation as you consume it.

Recommend while you read  

The newspaper industry used to be based on bundling together content.  Newspaper front pages organized the day’s stories and all the paper’s content was held together by a rubber band.

Today, one of the many reasons the newspaper industry’s financial model is falling apart is the news has been unbundled.  Stories are viewed haphazardly online and there is no easy way to sell all of a newspaper’s content as one product. Read more

Jan 19

Life Skills: For the uncertain grad

JP Allen ’11 initiated the Arts Runoff series and spent Winter and Spring ’11 as a MiddBlog Lead Editor. He is currently in the thick of a year stint on NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Speechwriting team, where he was placed through the New York City Urban Fellowship. He will be giving a Professional-in-Residence session Friday, January 20th from 2 to 4 at CSO to talk about Urban Fellows and life after Midd. Stop by anytime! Read all the Life Skills posts.

At this point last year, I had no idea what I’d be doing at this point this year. I applied to short-term fellowships and jobs hoping to test some of my interests empirically (and save some cash) before investing in graduate study. It was a great plan, except that I had no idea how it would feel when I actually arrived at my next step.

Most during-college career advice centers on getting into jobs or schools or programs—but what happens once you’re in? Especially if you’re thinking of a fellowship or fixed-term tour of duty instead of grad school or a typical open-ended job, the moment when “what next?” becomes “what now?” is a tricky one.

Here’s a quick guide to what I’ve learned about working a real job that’s sometimes not exactly a real job—to help uncertain Middkids decide, and to help “program participants”-to-be prepare themselves.

#1: Defining your job is part of your job

Maybe it was because I was the first Urban Fellow to work for Speechwriting, but I felt like my office had some trouble figuring out what to do with me. I was thrown into an extremely busy group and given an ambiguous job title. The luck of getting to do more than menial tasks in my first “real job” was balanced by my uncertainty about what actually was appropriate work. Even over four months in, I still actively offer to take on much of the work I do. Learning to firmly but respectfully gain responsibility and define one’s role may occupy a bigger piece of your consciousness than you think. But if you can do it well (I’m barely starting to), it can help immensely, because those ambiguous situations are exactly the ones where you can change things, or move forward yourself.

#2: People and access are part of your salary

Positional ambiguity has advantages. A huge one: important people aren’t always sure where I fit into the system and may therefore be surprisingly open to contact and discussion with me. I am the youngest person in my office by seven years, and the most inexperienced by at least the same amount—and yet here I am, having conversations every day that make me amazed and thankful to be working where I am.

It won’t last: budgets in City Hall are rightfully tight, and my chances of being re-hired are slim. But the more I learn, the more people I talk to, and the better I understand the career worlds with which I intersect, the better prepared I’ll be to do more of the same or do well at something different. You may have less job security (and less money) when your fellowship ends, but you have the chance to spend some early time avoiding the grind of being at the bottom of the ladder, and that has its own benefits. (For an entirely opposite experience, talk to a paralegal at a big law firm.) Read more

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