{"id":3077,"date":"2015-10-18T23:00:14","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T03:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/?p=3077"},"modified":"2015-10-16T15:33:46","modified_gmt":"2015-10-16T19:33:46","slug":"the-career-knapsack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/2015\/10\/the-career-knapsack\/","title":{"rendered":"The Career Knapsack"},"content":{"rendered":"
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CC Betsy Street via Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

As a recent MA graduate in Arts Management, I thought I had lots of career plan steps under control. That was not the case. Though I\u2019d had a semester-long career prep seminar, a team of cheerleader colleagues behind me and a very clear idea of where I wanted to be, I could not answer the seemingly easiest question, \u201cWhere am I now?\u201d<\/p>\n

I found myself caught in career purgatory like a little gypsy with a collection of read-between-the-resume-lines experiences in my nomad\u2019s knapsack. I\u2019d packed a couple years of field experience, a slew of graduate level internships (that\u2019s a story of its own!), a whole bunch of research, a few hundred volunteer hours and lots of late night Socratic chat takeaways and expected to arrive at career mecca. I realized then that I wasn\u2019t actually missing pieces to the path puzzle, but needed a tool to put them together. For me, that tool was storytelling through values.<\/p>\n

By focusing on values of all sorts in each of the places I\u2019d been, I began to see the big picture for what it is- a matching game. I sorted my values into categories as if I were appraising antiques at a roadshow. They were labelled new, recently acquired, needs polish, needs total rehab, recently enhanced, needed for collection<\/em> and so forth. This way, I had a story to tell about my pieces and allowed them to be a source of confidence and motivation for my career search.<\/p>\n

I am happy to report that I ultimately found success right where I had left it through this value matching conversation with my new employer, The Kentucky Center Governor\u2019s School for the Arts<\/a>. I left this organization in 2013 to pursue graduate school and staved off regret for that decision sometimes. Now, I realize that you can only carry so much as a mindful wonderer – I had to offload some of my pack in order to expand what I could carry into the future.
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As a recent MA graduate in Arts Management, I thought I had lots of career plan steps under control. That was not the case. Though I\u2019d had a semester-long career prep seminar, a team of cheerleader colleagues behind me and a very clear idea of where I wanted to be, I could not answer the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":3078,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28,23],"tags":[623,629,567],"coauthors":[646],"class_list":{"0":"post-3077","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-conversation","8":"category-stories-from-the-field","9":"tag-career-paths","10":"tag-career-planning","11":"tag-values","12":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/60"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3077"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3088,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3077\/revisions\/3088"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3077"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/fieldnotes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}