ZOOM OUT--Don't Be Like a Vampire

ZOOM OUT–Duke Career Center Podcast

What do Blue Devils and vampires have in common? No reflection? As you make the transition from high school into college, and especially as college goes on, the importance of reflection is going to become apparent because decisions are going to be more important and a lot more in your hands. So what does it mean to reflect? Transcript: My name is Nathan Wilson, assistant director with the Duke University Career Center, and you’re listening to Zoom Out, the Career Center Podcast. What do Blue Devils and vampires have in common? They have no reflection.I don’t mean that in an accusatoryway, but a lot of the time it’s true. To get into Duke, you had to do a lot. The high school business model essentially was to overload on activities and organizations –everything you can possibly do, it’s just saturation. Arguably, it was quantity over quality. But the thing is, when you’re that busy, do you have time or even know how to reflect on the experiences that you’re engaging in? As you make the transition from high school into college, and especially as college goes on, the importance of reflection is going to become apparent because decisions are going to be more important and a lot more in your hands.So what does it mean to reflect? I think there are kind of two different ways that you can explain this based on the way your mind works, and so I can kind of talk you through the two ways I look at it when you’re really trying to figure out what the heck it means.If you’re more of a humanities person or more of a creative type –not so much of the scientific orientation –you can think of reflection as something that’s more like philosophizing, or in more of a philosophical sense: “who am I and who do I want to become? What do I want out of life? What’s my purpose? What’s my relationship to my community and to others around me?” Those are hard questions –hard questions to ask of yourself. I think a lot of that comes back to values because that’s the scary thing: “Who am I?” That’s a loaded question. If you use values, it gives you a concrete means to evaluate your own life and the decisions youmake and what you’re doing.Forbes.com had an article a few years back that talked about the importance of reflection for college students. One of the big things they talked about was that this is a time really to explore and to learn about yourself and,moreover, to discover yourself. You can’t really do that unless you’re taking time to think about what it is you’re doing and being intentional about the decisions you make. A lot of undergraduates, as the article says, have what they call an “instrumentalist” view of college. That it’s completely a means to prepare for a career and there is some truth to that, but your career fits into your life and not the other way around for most people. So career should coincide with the big life goals that you have for yourself. These may include starting a family or traveling, or it could be any number of things...giving back to your community. Maybe you want to start a nonprofit but that’s not going to be your means for income right off the bat. There are any number of things you could be doing but you have to think about what it is that will give you the most satisfaction in life, and that not always directly career-related.There were a couple of programs that this article mentions, one of them was the Stanford Reflections program. They talked about an exercise they did where it was all about values. In one of the sessions, students were given 10 values such as success, joy, wisdom, love, and they were given an opportunity to put in their own values in addition to the ones that they were provided. They start with ten, then they have to narrow it down to eight, and then to five, and then to three, and then down to two. Then they have a week to think about it and then come back to discuss. It turned out that a lot of the students came back that next s