As 2021 begins to come to a close, I figure it is a good time to reflect on this past Fall and reflect on everything that I have accomplished.
I feel like I have grown significantly and I think I can credit it with the Design Your Life book. Maybe it was not so much the book itself but rather what it represented. Don’t get me wrong, the book is great. But, I think recognizing the excitement and energy boost I would get working with the group of people I respect and admire is what did it. Being able to work with one another and build off of each other to learn more about myself and push me further was an experience I do not think I will ever forget. Thanks to it, I started recognizing my discontent with my current position. I applied for a role on the PLM team, then denied it, and discussed with my leaders what they recommended I do for my career. Those discussions led me to be able to create a role that I am highly interested in learning about, all while still pursuing personal development opportunities to help me in that role and feed into the potential of one day getting into consulting. It was a wild ride to get to this point, and I definitely would not have thought I would ever be here. So it just makes me excited to see what the future will have in store.
It was also a nice achievement to finish my Harvard Extension School classes. I still need to wait for my grades to come out, but I am excited to be done with this chapter. I feel like it also holds an important role in my life over this past year. I went to HES because I was interested in Innovation, but all of the courses implanted the idea of entrepreneurship into my brain. My class, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, had about eight books that I needed to read this semester, all of which taught about what it is like to have a start-up. Additionally, we were meant to create our own business and pitch it to someone that used to be in charge of Mark Cuban’s Shark Tank portfolio. Throughout the course, I learned how to build a business plan, and what investors are looking for to back a startup. Additionally, through the book The Lean Startup, I learned how to combine lean thinking, design thinking, and agile development all into being an entrepreneur. Even though the book is directed at people starting a business, it also shows that any leader within an organization can utilize these tools. I fully intend to use what I learned in this book for my new role. As I took this class, it caused me to think about utilizing small deliberate steps to get in the direction I need to go for starting my consulting business. Therefore, I figured – why wait? I think I can start a business with very little risk and have it focused on personal development. Who knows if I will find any clients, but it is something I can test and see what feedback I get. From there, I pivot or lean into what is valuable. Now the trick is to get that ball rolling before my MBA classes start!
The other class I took was Essentials of Management. I am not sure if it made me feel prepared to be a manager like I assumed it would. However, it did help me lean into consulting too. The class had a lot of writing assignments that focused on analyzing a situation and utilizing what we learned about the different areas of management to see how we would approach it differently. Additionally, we would hear what other people would have to say based on their ideas or even their own experiences. This class just helped empower me to understand that I already have the ability to consult based on my own ideas and beliefs, because in most cases even the ‘experts’ in these different fields would agree with what I would suggest.
The other great part about this class was meeting the TA. When he introduced himself, he said that he was an engineering undergraduate and was now getting his Ph.D. in psychology. I was pretty much looking at a version of myself in a few years with my TA. I knew I had to talk with him, and I am glad I did. He told me about his career trajectory and how he was working at a smallish Civil Engineering company. He was on a track to become CEO/ partner of this organization in about ten years. That is how he found himself at the HES management degree program. However, as he was taking the classes there and learned about Organizational Behavior, he realized that was what he was truly interested in. He also started a side business for consulting before he graduated. He told me that there was no need to look for permission to start a side business in consulting. As an example, he said taking a class in design thinking gave me the ability to teach that to some other organization or group of people if I so desired. The key was to go out and make it happen. It was a really good conversation and gave me a lot of inspiration. Even to the fact that I could potentially get a Ph.D. in psychology part-time if I wanted to. But luckily, I have a lot of time to think about that still.
As I finish up HES, I get to look forward to starting my MBA at UF. I was able to go see my brother Robby graduate with his Master’s Degree in Aerospace Engineering and it filled me with school pride and excitement for my own graduation which will come very quickly. At this point, I am nervous and excited about the opportunities that UF will provide me. I just have to hope that I can balance it all. I think if the amount of time and effort will be comparable to HES, then I will survive. What I do find interesting about the whole situation though is that starting with my new job, I will turn away from engineering. It has been about ten years since I decided that I wanted to be an engineer for the rest of my life. While, engineering will always be a strong part of my identity, it will not be true for me to walk around and say ‘I am an engineer’ anymore to people that I meet. I think for many people that I know, this is not a surprising situation, but it still is an interesting thing to think about.
Lastly, I recently decided to change up my crystal grid because the last one had stuck around for a long time. As I was cleaning the old one up, I looked at my last intention and it said “Finish Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate, figure out my career path, and get into MBA program”. It is cool seeing all of those things get manifested into existance!
