Working World

I was on the Metro last night heading home from a dinner at Sherry’s house in honor of Giles Scott-Smith*, a funny and engaging British scholar based at Leiden University in the Netherlands, when I overheard a young man and woman near me talking about studying abroad. The young man said:

“You know, the best thing about study abroad was…”

At this I perked up and listened for what I thought might be a juicy, overheard-on-public-transportation endorsement of study and travel abroad.  He continued:

“The best thing about study abroad was driving my advisor crazy. At least that was the best thing for me.”

Fair enough. At least he got something out of it, I guess. Unfortunately I didn’t hear any more of his trenchant international insights, as the train pulled into my stop. As a pack of us were waiting for the doors to open, a different young man asked a different young woman why she was holding a huge stack of folders in her arms, each one branded with the name of a different university (I saw Yale and Johns Hopkins on top).

“I was just at a graduate school fair,” she replied.

“Oh,” he said. “I’m looking for grad programs in international studies. Who organized it?”

“Idealist.org,” she said. “Here, you can have this.” She handed the young man a flyer of information about the fair. “Go to the website. There’s lots more information about schools.”

“Thanks,” he said. They smiled and we all got off the train.

Ah, the randomness of public transportation, where international careers begin and reflections on international experiences apparently tend to be rather shallow.

*Among other thing, Giles has turned his scholarly attention to the International Visitor Leadership Program.  A few of his articles, on Margaret Thatcher and Nicolas Sarkozy’s experiences in the U.S. as young politicians, are in the NCIV library [scroll down to find them] and here’s his book on the IVLP from 1950-70.

Sherry pops up again in Minot, this time in a KFYR TV spot covering her visit to North Dakota and giving a nice Working World plug. [No embedding capabilities, so head over to the KFYR website to watch.]

Before I even had a chance to post on Monday about Sherry speaking on international careers in Minot, North Dakota, comments and emails started flooding in from the Minot High students who’d just heard her speak. They ended up in the comments sections of various, random posts, so I wanted to collect them here—not so much to give Sherry a big head (though I’m confident her talk was indeed excellent), but more to highlight the idea that young people all over the country, not just in coastal areas or big cities, can and should aspire to an internationally-oriented career. Now to the comments. First from Sarah:

Hey Sherry Mueller,
My Spanish 4 class just listened to your presentation today at Magic City Campus in Minot, ND. You more than likely would recognize me as the girl who did not look like she was paying attention at all during your presentation, but trust me, I was definitely listening. I really enjoyed the way you presented, it was very uplifting and fresh, and kept the attention of seniors who have a bad case of senioritis. Your story was very uplifting as well. You not knowing what you wanted to do with your life until you were older took a lot of pressure off of me. You see, I think I know what I want to do with my life, but of course I am not so sure right now. Hearing stories of people knowing and deciding what they were going to do with their life when they were in high school and then going on to either pursuit it and not be happy with it or changing their mind about a zillion times and still not finding what they want to do, has been scaring me and putting a lot of pressure on me. But hearing your story and seeing how much joy your profession brings you gave me more confidence and reassured me that it’s okay that I don’t know what to do yet. So thank you very much and from the bottom of my heart for that reassurance and confidence booster; it is much appreciated. And although, I don’t think I want to pursuit language in my future, your speech was very interesting to listen to and an eye opener. Thank you once again, and thank you for coming to little old Minot, ND 

Then Wyatt:

Hello Sherry and Mark,

My name is Wyatt from Magic City Campus in Minot, North Dakota. I would like to thank you very much for giving your time to speak with my fellow classmates and me about what it takes to work in a foreign country. I was quite intrigued by the wide variety of careers that a person might be able to pursue while working internationally. Although you spoke with our group for nearly an hour, I didn’t believe it was near enough time for all of the questions I still have for you. I would like to say thanks again, and hearing more from you would be great.

Thank You,

Wyatt

And Mercedes:

Hi Sherry Mueller,

I just listened to you today ( 09/14/09) at Magic City Campus. I enjoyed your presentation. It was very enlightening and I wish we would have had more time because there are many questions I wanted to ask and many things I wanted to tell you about my trip to Argentina and how that trip has changed my mind. I have decided that I want to work internationally. It was nice to hear first hand from a person that has experience in working around the world. Thank you so much for coming, you have made me more excited to get into working. I have decided I want to work internationally as a pediatrician so I can help children and use the Spanish I’ve been so diligently learning for the past four years. Thank you again.

Sincerely Yours,

Mercedes

After the jump, a few more.

(more…)

I’ve passed this billboard at the corner of New York and 7th, NW, in Washington many times over the past month, always intending to take a picture of it (I finally had a good camera with me a few days ago) and always puzzled by its intended message:

What exactly are they trying to say here?  My guesses:

—”At the FBI, we’ll help you make that final transition from unsightly native garb to smartly tailored business suit”; or

—”At the FBI, we’re so culturally advanced that we have Ethnic Dress Fridays”; or —and I really hope it’s this one—

—”At the FBI, we want you as an undercover operative who frequently changes disguises, like Fletch.”

I suppose they’re trying to make the point that the FBI is a culturally diverse place to work and that no matter where you’re from (or where your parents are from?), we’re all on the same team, working for the same goal. Fine, I guess. But this ad doesn’t succeed in taking us directly to that point, if that is indeed actually the point. Not only is the text clunky (my girlfriend called it “hideous—can the FBI not afford editors?”), but the duel images of young, attractive, indeterminately South Asian-looking woman in suit and head scarf raise more questions than they answer. Why is she wearing both kinds of clothes? Is she meant to be American, getting in touch with her roots? Is she meant to be foreign, now Westernized by the FBI? Are these actually two people, identical mirror twins like the evil Crimson Guard Commanders, Tomax and Xamot? And as a broader point, should it even matter what style of clothes someone is wearing while working for the FBI, or any other agency or organization for that matter? The FBI ad department could use a few tips from Don Draper and Co.

Now to a less confusing and much funnier ad that I actually saw broadcast during a football game this past weekend. A beautiful riff on the celebrities-with-fists-clenched-for-a-cause sing-alongs of old. For the people, USA.GOV!

James Fallows questions the NYTimes’s “the Chinese streets are paved with gold” hypothesis:

We have this story last month, which suggested that if young Americans couldn’t find jobs at home, all they had to do was move to China and they’d shortcut into positions of responsibility. I’m here to say: Well, sort of.

Is China exciting enough that people should go there? It sure is. Can young people with no background in China or Chinese find work quickly? Probably so — if they’re willing to teach English. (And can get a visa — whole different topic.) And if they stay and learn the language, lots of other opportunities often do turn up. Really, for Westerners in their 20s it’s hard to think of a better investment of a few years than going to China, learning what it’s like, becoming comfortable with Chinese ways and Chinese people, facing its discouraging realities but also sharing its sense of possibility.

But the idea that many non-trained grads will find “good” jobs — eg, ones where the Chinese employer regularly pays them? Or that it’s realistic to go from zero to “highly proficient” in Chinese language in a short time? Or that young foreigners will be insulated from the, ummm, idiosyncrasies of typical Chinese accounting and business practices? Those all seem a stretch. This kind of “land of gold!” account of today’s China has a touching parallel to the “gold mountain!” accounts of prospects in America that have historically drawn Chinese migrants across the Pacific. Both are accurate in spirit, but potentially misleading on details.

My first reaction to the story was that if you’re young and looking for an international, “character-building experience,” China’s never a bad way to go. My English teaching experience there continues to serve me well, in those non-specific, character-building ways (i.e., not the Chinese language skills I learned but rather the intangible skills that I was forced to develop: adaptability, confidence, resilience, the ability to succeed despite language and cultural barriers, etc. etc. etc.).

But I’d have to agree with Fallows in his assessment: Going to China to teach English or study the language is one thing, but going to find permanent employment is a whole different ball game. How do you even begin? I would have no idea. A great point from one of Fallows’ readers currently working in China:

The NY Times article you mentioned is basically treated as a joke here within expat circles. Laughed at and dismissed. As you mention, you can become an English teacher immediately. Anything else takes luck, work, and contacts. (Your own or others; I know a guy who did get an architecture job here fast: he’s best friends with one of the most well-connected people in Beijing. There may be a connection.) I know [one of the people]  mentioned in the NYT article: She speaks fluent Chinese, has a Yale education, an impressive resume, and works 20 hour days. She’s not some gal who just showed up in China because she couldn’t find a job in the States.

I’ve been here for a year now and am very aware of how my poor Chinese hampers me. Even though I’m a senior-level copywriter and my abilities are much needed, my rudimentary Chinese keeps me from being hired full time (fortunately, I want to be a freelancer). I’ve been told that the whole [major advertising] group requires now that all new hires speak Chinese reasonably well — which means none of my clients could hire me if either of us wanted that…

The other issue is contacts, which seems to be the way work is handled here. Now that the economy is improving, or seems to be, I’m suddenly busy — but it’s taken a year of going to networking events, writing talented designers out of the blue, and being friendly at parties to get to this point. I’m sure people who are more gung-ho and social than me…  could get well-connected faster that I did, but I’m skeptical of a know-nothing recent graduate with no special skills and knowledge to offer being able to connect quickly with the right people and then get a good job.

I’ve never worked in international aid, and more and more I realize that the realities of being an international aid worker in the field are very much different than doing many other kinds of international work, largely because of the security concerns and other extreme difficulties that arise when living and working in the dark and dangerous parts of the world. Thus, I’ve been trying to highlight, via links to those who know and who’ve been there, what it’s really like to be an international aid and humanitarian worker. Michael Bear in particular does a great job—he’s been chronicling the realities of a number of the big aid agencies, and yesterday posted on the myths about international aid work. Surely you can’t really know what it’s like to be an aid worker until you’ve done it—but if you’re considering a career in aid, I think it’s terribly important to be aware of the realities of before diving in.

This made me laugh (both the exchange, as well as the clarification that we are indeed meant to find it “humorous”):

“How many people work here?”

“About half of them.”

—Answer, to a journalist, of an American ambassador regarding the staff at her embassy; anecdote meant to be humorous

From John Brown.

I’ve had this post in my queue for some time now, but have continually neglected it—partly because as the pace of things slowed down here in DC during August, the pace of my posts followed suit, but also because I began to rethink what I wanted to say. The post was prompted by an article from several weeks ago from the BBC: in an effort to give unemployed graduates something to do, the British government is paying 500 people under 24 to travel abroad and take part in projects “such as building schools”:

It comes as graduates face an increasingly tough job market. Forty-eight graduates are chasing every job on offer this year, according to a study by the Association of Graduate Recruiters.

The 10-week expeditions – to Borneo, India, Costa Rica and Nicaragua – will enable graduates to work on community and environmental volunteering projects in remote communities.

Reflecting on this story, here’s what I initially wrote, again, several weeks ago:

“It’s no surprise that I agree with one sentiment behind this initiative—that abroad experience is good prep for our careers, international and otherwise. But my main query to the organizers of said British government program would be: how well have you thought this through? Harkening back to our various debates of the merits of international volunteering, I think it’s fair to ask what the benefits of this program will be, beyond giving graduates in a rough economy something (worthwhile) to do. That is, how will the program benefit the communities in which these graduates will serve? Have the programs been fully fleshed out? Or will these 500 folks just be plopped into their host countries and given a hammer, with little consideration as to the local workers they may be displacing and the learning curve inherent in any development project that may make their efforts, while well-intentioned, potentially fruitless? The following comment from Wes Streeting, the National Union of Students president, doesn’t give me hope that much of this has been considered:

Funding opportunities for skills development is surely better than the soul destroying experience of sitting at home, watching Jeremy Kyle, on the dole.

While I have no idea who Jeremy Kyle is and am only moderately sure I know what ‘on the dole’ means, the sentiment that we might as well plop our youth down in poor places since they’ve got nothing better to do seems a bit ill conceived. Gaining valuable skills and career preparation by working/living abroad? Very nice. Giving no thought to the community you will be working in while gaining that experience? Not as much.”

For some reason, though, I was hesitant to push the publish button. I realized this was because I wasn’t sure I agreed with what I was saying. I thought back to my own volunteer experience in China, an experience I decided to plop myself down into, yes, partly because I wanted to learn Chinese and add another abroad experience to my resume and help a community, but also, I can admit, because it sounded a lot better than the alternative (which for me, at that time, was the soul destroying experience of working as a real estate sales associate for a grocery store corporate office). So how could I condemn people for doing what I had in fact done?

So: On the one hand, I do generally think it’s a bad idea for volunteers to be blindly plopped down where they may not end up accomplishing the good they hope to accomplish, or even end up harming locals by taking away jobs, etc. On the other hand, though, getting plopped down in a spot that you know very little about and being asked to do work of which you have very little experience can be incredibly rewarding, for both the volunteer and those in the local community. This belief comes from my personal experience: I showed up in the Yanbian region of China to teach English with zero knowledge regarding Yanbian, China, or how to teach English. Yet my struggles with language, regional culture, and how to be an effective teacher were an indelible learning experience and have benefited me enormously, personally and professionally. And I believe I ended up being an effective teacher (and even a role model) for my students, despite my initial struggles (I still keep in touch with several of them and they have commented how I was their first foreign teacher and our classes for them were formative in their study of English—I take great pride in comments like these).

The particular nature of the volunteer assignment, as well as the length of time spent in a place, can affect all of this, of course. Some assignments can be learned through on-the-job training and experience, especially given enough time (say, a year, as in my case:  a TESOL-certified teacher may have been “better” out of the gate, but I think I eventually morphed into a quality teacher). Others require more specific training and skill and couldn’t be learned on the fly no matter how long you keep at it (if I tried to volunteer with one of the international environmental evaluation projects my friend Derek works on, I’d be horribly lost and would probably do more harm than good).

The conclusion is, per usual, that there’s no cut and dry answer. And while I tend to agree that good intentions aren’t always enough when it comes to a volunteer project, especially an international development one, I still heartily believe that arriving in place with everything to learn can be a formative experience for all involved.