Photo Source: Flickr’s Andrea Schwalm
Guest Post By Dana Sitar
One difficulty in making your art your business is that often there are no clear-cut rules for how to act in that business. Norms kind of get thrown out the window when your greatest strength is your ability to be different. But that doesn’t mean that you no longer have to act like a professional — you just have to figure out exactly what that means in your profession. Continue reading
When I was little, I used to have one of those magic 8-balls. A lot of kids had them. Of course I knew that magic 8-ball wouldn’t give me the answer to my questions, but it was fun to pretend. Now there’s something better, there’s Google. You know how it goes. You type in your question and you get tons of answers.
How do I get rid of shin splints?
Can I wait till 40 to have a child?
Is the economy ever going to get better? Continue reading
Today’s jobtalk is with John Procaccini, who owns three restaurants in the Princeton area with his brother, Tino. Soon, they’ll add one more restaurant to their portfolio when their Kingston restaurant Osteria Procaccini opens its second location in Pennington.
I interviewed John Procaccini at PJ’s, which he and his brother bought this past August. Procaccini was manning the checkout when I arrived, and for a moment I wondered if he’d actually be able to talk to me or if I’d be having to get soundbites in between his ringing up customers.
Luckily, I did get to steal some of his time, and here’s what I found out.
By the way, check out a review of Osteria Procaccini in the New York Times.
Title: Restaurateur
Education: B.A. Business Management and Organizational Behavior (minor in entrepreneurship), Rider University, 1997
Age: 36
When did you start buying restaurants?
We bought our first restaurant in 1999. My brother was still in college at Rider. I had just graduated, but I also had a fulltime job. I was the director of International Operations at Sarnoff Corporation. I was in Asia every other week. I did that for 15 years while running a restaurant. Continue reading
Today’s jobtalk is with Patrick Shock, a recent college graduate who took full advantage of his college years to explore potential careers. Patrick has put a thought into his decision to pursue dentistry. Reading this interview will give you insight into the question that everyone asks at least once, “What makes a person want to become a dentist?”
Title: Future Dentist
Education: B.S. Neuroscience, University of Delaware, 2011
Age: 23
How did you choose your undergraduate major in college?
When I started college, I wanted to pursue medicine, so I thought that a good major would be biology. I was focused on doing the right thing to get into grad school. I wasn’t necessarily interested in biology, but I wanted to go with the quota. Continue reading
Career paths are highly individualized processes. Just like individuals are unique, so are career paths. Talk to five people who are in the same profession. You’ll hear five different stories about how they got to where they are today. Especially in 2012. This is great news, right? What it means is that just because you might not have gotten your MBA does not mean you can’t open a business.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you need to get a specific degree to do the job you want. Obviously, yes, if you want to be a doctor, lawyer, or teacher, for example, you do need to go through the proper channels. Continue reading
I’ve done over 40 interviews with people about their career paths (some of them are still on my Olympus digital recorder waiting to be transcribed). It’s not necessarily a big number. But it’s a big enough sampling of people that I’ve noticed some patterns about career paths. Continue reading
Today’s jobtalk is with Cristina Santamarina, a young woman who’s living in Berlin and is from Spain. Amazing how the Internet allows you to connect with people from so far away! Cristina is an example of a person who’s forging her career path without a college degree, though she did try college more than once.
Job: Employee at Cobot
Age: 23
I understand that you dropped out of college two times. What made you go back to college after you dropped out the first time?
My family was really unhappy when I dropped out. I finished high school, where I specialized in sciences, but did not know what I wanted to do. So I started studying political science. I always liked history and sociology so I thought it would be interesting to study it at college.
But I found a job at Regus, which I really liked, and decided I did not want to continue with college. It was a shock for my family. I always had good marks, and they wanted me to continue college. So I decided to go back to college and study business administration, which was related to the job I was doing at Regus. Continue reading
Today’s jobtalk is with Dan Bauer, who’s been doing public relations at McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey for over 2 decades. Dan got his start as an intern at McCarter in the literary department, and quickly realized the literary department was not the place for him.
Dan says that Bruce Cockburn’s saying, “Never let up, people are depending on you,” inspires his work ethic.
Title: Director of Public and Community Relations
Education:
B.A. Theater, SUNY Fredonia
M.A. Directing Theory, SUNY Binghamton
Age: Undisclosed
How did you wind up as the Director of Public and Community Relations PR for McCarter Theater?
My work study at Binghamton was working in the theater library. I was flipping through American Theater Magazine and saw an ad for a N.J. job fair. I was going to be graduating and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I thought that I could either send my resume out willy nilly or I could go to N.J. – where I had never visited – and go to this job fair and see what was available. Continue reading
JobTalk’s first post was on November 18, 2011 under the blog name Job Talk NJ. It’s only been four months, but I’ve learned enough that I thought I’d share. While this post is personal in that I’m sharing what I’ve learned, it’s all career-related. Hopefully some of what I’ve learned can help you! Continue reading
This jobtalk is with my former co-worker, Suzanne Cunningham. Suzanne’s an example of someone who is intelligent and hardworking and had no idea what she wanted to do after she graduated from college. Sound like you?
Allowing herself to experiment with different jobs and classes after college, Suzanne turned her love of gardening into a career teaching gardening at the Waldorf School.
I love this interview because it’s an affirmation to the notion that it’s okay to take time to find yourself – your career. It’s also an affirmation to the maxim, “Do what you love.”
Title: Gardening Teacher
Education: B.A. International Government, Smith College, 2007
Age: 28
I know that at one point in your life you thought you would follow in your father’s footsteps and become a lawyer. How is that you wound up becoming a gardening teacher?
People ask me that all of the time. I was interested in government and became interested in religion at similar times. For me, it feels like government and religion are inseparable even though we separate them.
In college, I got really burned out. I was ready to be done. I took a couple of years off here and there during college. It was a real struggle to finish. By the time I got out, I didn’t want anything to do with school again. Continue reading