This week, I’m celebrating my cousin, Devon’s, graduation from Santa Clara University (woo!), and like the good student that I am, I’m preparing by watching some of this year’s commencement speeches. I *love* a good commencement speech. A well-crafted speech can be inspiring, emotional, and give you insight into the struggles that even celebrities face in between moments of dazzling success. And maybe I’m partial to the art of the commencement speech because its objectives are very similar to my goals for “When I Was 17.”
 
One of my favorites this year was Mindy Kaling’s address at Dartmouth, particularly the end:
 
"I will tell you a personal story. After my daughter was born in December, I remember bringing her home and being in my house with her for the first time and thinking, “Huh. According to movies and TV, this is traditionally the time when my mother and spouse are supposed to be here, sharing this experience with me.” And I looked around, and I had neither. And for a moment, it was kind of scary.
 
[…]But then, that feeling went away, because the reality is, I’m not doing it by myself. […] And the joy I feel from being with my daughter, Katherine, eclipses anything from any crazy checklist.
 
I just want to tell you guys, don’t be scared if you don’t do things in the right order, or if you don’t do some things at all. […] If you have a checklist, good for you. Structured ambition can sometimes be motivating. But also, feel free to let it go. Yes, my culminating advice from my speech is a song from the Disney animated movie, Frozen. I’ve covered a lot of ground today, not all of it was serious, but I wanted to leave you with this: […] Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something, but especially not yourself."
 
I also cheered the feminism invoked in USA women’s national soccer team member, Abby Wambach’s, speech at Barnard (shared with me by my recent interviewee, Cecilia Mason):
 
"Like all little girls, I was taught to be grateful. I was taught to keep my head down, stay on the path, and get my job done. I was freaking Little Red Riding Hood.
 
You know the fairy tale: […] Little Red Riding Hood heads off through the woods and is given strict instructions: Stay on the path. Don’t talk to anybody. […] And she does… at first. But then she dares to get a little curious and she ventures off the path. That’s of course when she encounters the Big Bad Wolf and all hell breaks loose. The message is clear: Don’t be curious, don’t make trouble, don’t say too much or BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN.
 
I stayed on the path out of fear, not of being eaten by a wolf, but of being cut, being benched, losing my paycheck. If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing it would be this: “Abby, you were never Little Red Riding Hood; you were always the wolf.”
 
BARNARD WOMEN—CLASS OF 2018—WE. ARE. THE. WOLVES.
 
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for."
 
But my all-time favorite commencement speech is Steve Jobs’s Stanford address from 2005. I would very much encourage you to spend the 15 minutes it takes to read it, but in case you can't, here is the part that always gives me chills:
 
"[A]ll of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. […] So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
 
[…]Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. […] Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
 
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. […] Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later."
 
I’ve talked about this speech before, but it’s worth bringing up specifically in the context of “When I Was 17.” I’m not encouraging people to drop out of college, or spend all their parents’ money to attend a prestigious university. But I am encouraging you to leave a little space in your education, in your career, and in your life for mystery. Read any one of these interviews and you’ll see that the greatest moments of growth, insight, and success happened when people didn’t know exactly what was going to happen next, or when they took an unexpected left turn away from their plans. These moments are often the most unsettling, but as Jobs points out, looking back, they make perfect sense. 

Katie Chambers is a tax lawyer at Chevron, an A+ aunt to her five nieces and nephews, and one of my favorite people to run into while out walking my dog. One of the first things I remember noticing about Katie is how clearly she loved her work. People make a lot of jokes about accountants (particularly tax accountants), but Katie is the perfect example of the idea that the key to a fulfilling career is not doing what other people think you should do - it’s following what makes sense for you.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
When I was 12, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. In grade school, I had wanted to be a teacher, and then I wanted to be a stewardess. One of my mother's cousins was a judge and another cousin was a lawyer. I watched them, and I went to a trial with one of them and I was very intrigued.
 
How did you decide to attend Rider College (now Rider University)?
 
I knew I was going to law school, and so I decided to commute up to New Jersey [from my parents’ house] to save money. And so Rider was one of the options where I could do that.
 
I loved Rider. It was a great school, I met a lot of great people, and I got a really good education. I also started a peer counseling center. I had done a lot of tutoring in high school and college, and I’d read some articles about it. So we got space in the student center and got some peer counselors and started it up.
 
I remember going to the Dean of Students, and I told him that I wanted to go to a peer-student counseling conference in Peoria, Illinois. He told me he knew I must be really committed to the project to want to go to Peoria, Illinois [laughs].
 
How did you choose your major?
 
I started as an economics major, and then after the first semester I switched to accounting. I was always good at math, so it was a natural fit. And I decided it would go better with a law degree. And probably because around that time, I decided I wanted to be a tax lawyer.
 
I liked tax law because there is a pattern, a series of rules that you follow, and I'm a rule follower by nature. I strongly believe in a defendant's right to a trial, but I knew that I couldn’t defend somebody. And I thought, with family law, I'd get too engaged in all the family’s problems and child abuse and neglect, and I wouldn't be able to shut it down when I went home. But tax law is very technical, very logical, and it’s constantly changing and evolving.
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
 
After I graduated, I went directly to the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law [in Sacramento]. I’d wanted to go there ever since I was 14 or 15. I never totally understood what drew me to McGeorge. I was born in Sacramento, so I had a bond there. And when my mother's mother died, one of her sisters told me that she had gone to McGeorge. So I think on some subliminal basis, I had a tie there.
I got a really good education there. Law school just teaches you how to think differently. I remember before I went to law school, everybody told me that something happens between the first year and second year when suddenly, everything makes sense. In my first year, everything was still hard. I would read a case three times and I still wouldn't get it sometimes. But in the second year, everything clicked.
 
I got internships at a few local law firms in New Jersey where my parents lived. I liked them, none of them was really big on tax law so I didn’t think it was long-term. When I finished law school, I got a job working at KPMG in their tax department in New York City. For the first nine months, I commuted from my parent's house, which when everything worked, was two hours each way. That was a horrible commute. And then I moved to northern New Jersey, and it only took about an hour to get in.
 
I worked in that office for four years. It was intense and a lot of hours. In the tax department, I would look at a client’s transactions and look at the tax expenses, and them advise them on what they could do differently. You can change the amount of taxes that way. If we had a client going through an IRS audit, I would go through the IRS assessment and then figure out how to prove to the IRS that they're wrong and my client was right.
 
After New York, I worked in Cincinnati for a little less than two years. I had been in New York City for a while, and I didn't really want to stay there. And the client I was working for was based in Cincinnati, so that’s why I went there. And then the Cincinnati office had some partners leave and I said was willing to transfer, so I went to the San Francisco office for a year.
 
I loved San Francisco, but I was tired of KPMG. A man that I worked on a big client with at KPMG had gone to FedEx and established their tax legal group. He called me one day and asked me if I was interested in coming to work for him. So I moved to Memphis and worked for FedEx.
 
Memphis is a hard place to not be from. Most people who live there have been there since day one. It was really hard to make lifelong friends, but I do have some amazing friends after being there for 13 years.
 
FedEx is a great company and I had great experience there. I got to do some amazing things from the tax perspective. Like I won a major case against the IRS that went to the Sixth Circuit Court and established tax law in whether or not something was a repair cost or an improvement to an asset. I’m really proud of that.
 
So I was with FedEx for 13 years. I was working constantly and I had no life, and I didn't know if I could change that there. I felt like I needed a break. I had gone to a spa after I had decided that I was going to leave. I wrote down how I envisioned my life, and I wanted to live in a place where I had really good friends, I wanted to live in a place where I could walk to Starbuck and walk to lots of places, I wanted to be able to sit in my bedroom and look at water and birds. So I wrote all of this down, and after I got the job at Chevron and I came back to California, I looked back at it six months later and I realized that everything I had written had come true.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
I would say that it’s important to set boundaries. It is okay to have a life. You don't have to solely do work. And it is important to be well-rounded. You don't want to say at the end, "I missed all this stuff because I wasn't there." One of the things that I am most proud of in my life is being an aunt to five wonderful children, and now, young adults, as well as the numerous friends, whose lives I've been allowed to be a part of over the years. It has enriched my life immensely and it's a great thing.

Cecilia is a fiduciary with her own small business executing the trusts and estates of a wide variety of people here in the Bay Area. Her story is my favorite kind, of people who didn’t find their calling until further down their career paths. But somehow, when you look back, the dots line up in such an unexpectedly straight line. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
Probably the most honest answer would be I had no idea, but my family was in the radio business, and my grandfather was retired editor in chief of the Columbus Ledger Enquirer in Columbus, Georgia. My grandfather was amazing. I had to write a paper about the person I admired most, and I wrote it about him. He wrote a column for the paper called “Our Town” until he was 86. He was just amazing. And my parents built that radio station from the ground up. So I felt like journalism would be my path, and I would do something in that.
 
How did you decide to attend University of Georgia?
 
I looked at about six schools, but I only applied to one  - University of Georgia. I grew up on Georgia football. Every weekend during the season, we would meet my aunts and uncles at the games. And Georgia was a good school and it was only 20 minutes from my house.
 
How did you choose your major?
 
I got accepted into the journalism school at the University of Georgia, and I did graduate with a degree in journalism. But I also got married and had my daughter when I was in college. I was very lucky that my father-in-law really wanted me to finish my degree.
 
My dad thought I should be at home with my daughter, even though my mother worked every single day. So I decided to add a minor in home economics. I learned sewing and took classes in decorating and art history. I was probably one of the only people to ever graduate with that a degree in journalism and home economics [laughs].
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
 
[My husband and I] moved to Winder, Georgia, and my husband got a job at a bank in Winder, and I went to work for Daddy. I scheduled programming for the station, and had a few little programs that I did. So I brought home a paycheck, but when I wanted to do something, I could. And my mother was probably the worst promoter of "Celia, we're not going to work this morning. We're going to go do this." So, it was more like charity I think at the time. But it wasn't my calling; I knew that it wasn't where I wanted to be.
 
And I knew my husband was miserable working at the bank in Winder, Georgia, and that he did not want to stay in Winder. So as much as I loved having a built-in babysitter all the time, we ended up moving down to Thomasville, Georgia three years later. And I fell in love with Thomasville, and ended up just having the best time ever there.
 
I immediately got a job working in Family and Children's Services for the State of Georgia. My first position was determining eligibility for food stamps. I learned and awful lot, and the people I worked with were awesome. I still have good friends from that I worked with there.
 
We also had two more children while we were in Thomasville. Once I got pregnant, I left Family and Children's Services. It just wasn't going to work with two and then three kids. By this time, my husband had decided that he didn’t like working in a bank, and that he was going to be a dog trainer working on a plantation. I didn't care – I was fine being a plantation worker's wife, and the home was provided. But we were not wealthy. So I took part-time jobs doing whatever I could to bring in money.
 
I ended up working for the 1979 pre-list census, canvassing an area and finding households, so everything was ready for the next year. I was a supervisor, so I hired staff and sent them out to canvas the area and meet people and have them fill out the forms. It was all done by hand, on foot.
 
Then, my husband finally took a decent job. The dog training didn't last very long, so he took a job working for a company called Davis Water and Waste. They made everything that goes under the roads and up to the house for gas and water. He flourished there, and after 10 years they transferred him up to Raleigh, North Carolina.
 
I was just devastated because I had so fallen in love with Thomasville. My mother and father-in-law lived there, and they were always there for us with the children.
But my motto is “bloom where you're planted.” I have felt that way my entire adult life, and I made up my mind I was going to be happy wherever I was. Because it is a choice.
 
So we moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, and my husband had a great job, but I was still floundering and looking around and trying to figure out what to do. I went back to my experience working for the Department of Family and Children Services, and
I was working in what you would think of as the welfare. I started out as a fraud investigator, finding and prosecuting the cheaters. And I just fell in love with law.
 
I was thoroughly enjoying what I was doing, and then one of the cases I worked on, my boss ordered me to prosecute a 96-year-old woman who was on welfare because her brother had stolen money from her. Technically, she was ineligible, and he insisted that I recommend prosecution, and I refused. It was against my morals.
 
So then I went to the head of the nursing home eligibility unit and asked if they had a position for me. They put me in as a supervisor over the division that determines eligibility for benefits while in a nursing home, which sort of leads me to where I am and what I've been doing.
 
I worked for Social Services for five years, and I loved it, but the legal part was still nagging at me because I had fallen in love with it. There was something in me that, found it very intriguing. I decided that I was going to take a leave of absence to go to paralegal school.
 
I went to Meredith College, a girl's school in Raleigh. I was probably the oldest in my class, but I was also the top of my class. My specialty was trust and estate administration. One of the professors saw something promising in me, and he really helped me along. Years later, he actually came to me and said, "I want to retire from teaching. Will you take my classes?" So I ended up teaching paralegal classes at Meredith.
 
When I graduated, I went to work for a law firm, which I loved. The first job they put me in didn't have anything to do with trust and estate administration; they had me researching real estate titles in the courthouse. Every day I went all the way downtown, and I opened up the real estate deed vault and turned on all the computers for the people that worked there because I always got there early. The more difficult ones were the ones I just loved. The title searches just led me to so many places.
 
I did that for a while, and then they put me in domestic, which was divorces.
Only, I was going through a divorce at the same time and it was overload for me. I went to them and said, "You've got to transfer me." They decided they were wasting me since I was considered the estate and trust specialist all over the county, so I finally got to go into estate and trust administration, and I loved it.
 
Under the supervision of an attorney, I could settle estates after somebody passed away or handle a trust and what the document says to do in that trust. It just opened up a whole new world for me. Every estate was different. You learned something about that person and what they did. There could be a shopping center in the trust, and you had to manage the business side of the shopping center. I absolutely loved that kind of work.
 
But there was a drawback. After five years at the law firm, I couldn’t go any further. I wasn't getting any retirement. By that time, I had gotten a divorce. I had nothing that was going to build for my future; everything up to that point was building for our future, for my husband's future, not mine. I went to them and I said, "I've got to have some kind of a retirement. And they said, "Okay. We will put money in a CD account in your name, but you have to keep it a secret," so that none of the other paralegals would catch wind of it. But I couldn't do it, I couldn't go that low.
 
So I found a job working in the trust department of a local bank and worked there for five years. Many times in that five years, I would have a trust client where we were handling her trust because she was old and couldn't handle paying her bills, so I did it. I started thinking, these people need somebody to hold their hand. They don't need a trust officer that's just going to pay their bills and not pay attention to them. They need somebody that's going to be right there.
 
So I got this idea for starting my own business. I knew I couldn't handle a trust or estates without being under an attorney, so I couldn't go out and hang my shingle up and say that I was a fiduciary. But I incorporated, I did everything totally by the books, and started a business where I would go into people's homes and take care of their affairs. I called it Personal Administrative Service, and I looked at it as I was the one in the middle with the client. I helped the client interface with the attorney, the CPA, the trust officer, the insurance agent, all the important people in their lives.
 
I ran a successful business for 15 years, and I had five employees at one time. I was in an association called National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO). I served as treasurer for three years, one year as vice president, and one year as president. I became pretty well-known in the area, and I had attorneys that would turn to me for estate and trust advice. It was a wonderful experience running my own business.
 
And then I met Bob, we got married, and we moved to California. I had to shut my business down. I had two ladies that I had mentored as part of NAWBO who I was able to turn all my clients over to. Before I moved, I found out that California has licensing for fiduciaries. Meaning I could handle trusts and estates without an attorney, which is a really good thing because I had 25 years of fiduciary experience working at the law firm, the bank, and on my own.
 
When I moved to California, I immediately got in touch with the Professional Fiduciary Association. I joined and then started learning about the licensing and started studying for it. Within six months, I had passed both the national exam and the State of California exam and became a licensed fiduciary. I hung my shingle up for the first time in my life. It gave me great satisfaction to be able to say, "I can do this and I can do it on my own.”
 
I joined a mentoring group, and my first client came from my mentor. She was a wonderful woman, she taught me so much about the specifics to California because each state’s estate and trust laws are different. I did have to bone up on probate laws in California, but I'd done that before. I knew what to do. And the legal side is still a big part of what I do.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
I have so many times wished that I could have gone to law school. But the only reason I was able to go to paralegal school was because I inherited just enough money, and I also had a daughter that was starting college at the same time, and two other children. So it was just not possible.
 
I think early on I probably would have looked out for myself a little better. I just never thought that I would find myself single again, and I would have looked out for myself a little bit better. I would have been more cautious of, like when I worked at
places like Family and Children Services, I would have reinvested the retirement into something just for me. I would make sure that my future was a little more secure.
 
And realize as you are changing jobs that every single thing you do is for a reason, and there will be eventually some benefit on the end. For instance, with me, everything I did led to coming to California and finding out I could hang out my shingle. Every new job, every move, it completely calls for a reinvention. Every job I had, everything I did as a mother, everything leads me to where I am today.
Every single little detail.

Kathy Rentsch is the assistant vice president of Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester, Massachusetts. I was introduced to Kathy by my mom, who was friends with Kathy in high school. When they reconnected on Facebook a few years ago, I was always interested in hearing about Kathy’s work, especially as a fellow member of the education community. I was equally fascinated to hear her story and her thoughts on the current state of higher education. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
I don't think I gave it a whole lot of thought. My dad got an associate’s degree after World War II, but I was really the first in my family to go to a traditional college. My mom worked from when I was about three, so I had that example of a woman that worked. If I were to think about myself back then, I think I was interested in a helping profession like social work, but I wouldn't have known it by that name. Generally the women that I knew that were working were teachers, nurses, those kinds of traditional jobs. I didn't really have a view of what else might be out there.
 
How did you decide to attend Boston College?
 
I went to a Catholic high school and I don't think I applied to any schools that weren't Catholic, but I don't think that was conscious. My family wasn't even very Catholic, so I'm guessing that was influenced by my guidance counselors. I looked at liberal arts colleges and I definitely wanted to be in a city. My top choice was Georgetown - that's where I really wanted to go. I had made some visits to various schools and I just fell in love with Georgetown. But I got waitlisted there and got into BC, which was my second choice. I thought, “Well, if I'm waitlisted, they don't really want me as a first choice,” and my parents didn't have the experience to give me any perspective on that, so I just decided to go for BC. In the end, where you go probably doesn't matter as much as the significance we place on it, right? But, boy, at that point in your life, it seems like everything.
 
How did you choose your major?
 
When I started college, I thought that I would be pre-med and go to medical school. I started in biology, and I found out really quickly my first year that if I had to go through all that chemistry and everything to get to medical school, I was never going to survive. I wasn't enjoying it. So I moved into psychology, but I think the thing that shaped me more than anything in college was a program at BC called PULSE, which was a service program, but it was more than that.
 
I took courses in philosophy and theology and then I did service in the community, and every week we brought that service back into the classroom in the context of what we were studying. And BC is a Jesuit school, so there was a lot of emphasis on social justice and action.
 
I had some really powerful experiences with people who challenged me to understand what our commitment was to people who didn't have as much, who hadn't had justice in their lives. It really opened my eyes. We weren't a terribly wealthy family, but I had not experienced that kind of thing growing up. I did PULSE all four years, so even though it wasn't a major, all the other courses I took were built around that.
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
 
I got a job in human services and I almost immediately realized that I wasn't going to go far unless I had more education, so I decided that I needed to go to graduate school. I got into the BU School of Social Work, and just by happenstance - I don't even know where I met this woman - I talked to somebody who had just graduated from the BU School of Social Work, and she said, "Don't do it. I have a lot of loan debt and I'm not really being offered any more salary than I was before."
 
Now, I'm sure her career path was probably stronger, but that really woke me up to whether I wanted to do this. And although BU was a good school for social work, I'm not really sure I was ready to make the commitment. So I didn't do it. I took a job in personnel at a biomedical instrumentation company, just to do something different. And then I decided to have [my daughter], Jess, and that took me off on a different pathway.
 
At that time, having a baby that young was not really what people were doing anymore. I left my job after my maternity leave, and for six months I didn't work at all. When we moved to Worcester, I applied for a job teaching English as a second language part-time at Quinsigamond Community College, where I work now, where I've been on and off.
 
One of the things I did with PULSE was I got very, very involved with a faculty member who was working to resettle about 80 Southeast Asian families who were refugees from Laos. She needed a lot of help getting families acclimated, where to buy food, how to use the T, getting them to doctors and social services and all that. So I got very involved with her, and I really thought maybe I would go work in refugee camps after I graduated. But by that time, they didn't really need just another English speaker. They needed Southeast Asians who had been in the country to come back and help. But I had done a lot of English teaching, so that was an easy transition for me to make, and it was fun.
 
I taught several different ESL classes and at that time, there was a lot of grant money for adult education, English as a second language, and programs where you bring literacy programs into the workplace. So the college got one of those grants, and I got hired to be the coordinator for the first program. We were very successful at getting grant money, so over the next eight or nine years, we had multiple grants and I was coordinating all of that. And we had lots of opportunities to present at conferences and talk about our work, and it was all kind of cutting-edge at that time. We were building something that didn't really exist, so there was a level of creativity to it, and I worked with a really great group of people. It was fun to be a part of that.
 
During that time, I did my master’s in adult education at the local state college here, Worcester State College. And then I was ready to do something new, so I
took a job with a public education foundation, the Alliance for Education. It was a nonprofit, and we did a lot of fundraising for public education. We did partnerships between businesses and schools; we did different programs that brought attention to the education reform stuff that was going on in the state at that time, and how people in the community and parents and corporate partners could become involved and support that.
 
That was an awesome job because I got to meet a lot of teachers, guidance counselors, principals, and some of the key superintendents not only in Worcester, but also in the surrounding communities. And this was while my daughter was in elementary school, and then eventually [my son], Anthony, as well. I felt like I knew so many people in the school system, and that was valuable at so many levels. I felt really strongly about committing to public schools, and having your kids to go school in the community where you live and work. That's something I really grew to appreciate through that work.
 
Then I had an opportunity to go back to Quinsigamond. There was a local vocational institute that they were going to close. And Quinsigamond was the only college that stepped up to say, “We think we can make some of those programs into certificate or degree programs.” So the vice president of academic affairs was looking for somebody who could do a lot of the data gathering and write the document that we had to present to the state. I had never worked on a project like that before, but over the course of a year and a half, we introduced 11 new degree or certificate programs at the college. It really expanded our repertoire.
 
People believe the only route to a solid future is to go to a four-year, prestigious institution. I think the Obama administration did a lot to help community colleges strengthen what they were doing and really create opportunities for people who were not college going or who have been traditionally underserved. And I think what people don't realize is that community college is not the end. It's a step in a journey, and people will continue to go back to school and go back to school. If we can get people to understand that that four years is not the beginning and the end, or that that two years is not the beginning and the end; rather, it's the beginning of a process of figuring out how you're going to manage a career and your skills and your knowledge for a lifetime.
 
So at that point, I was the director of this special project, and then the state offered an early retirement and the college saw a huge group of people retire. I agreed to take on the dean position for the business and technology area for a year as an interim. They went through a search, and I saw a lot of candidates that were going to use our college as a stepping-stone to something they saw as bigger and better. There was nobody that expressed any real interest in staying here for any length of time. And by then, I had gotten attached to this group, to what we were doing. So when the college decided to reopen the search, I applied and was appointed to the position. I did that for 14 years.
 
We started a lot of new programs, we opened a new building, we did all kinds of good stuff. And then we just had another big retirement, and it was time to reorganize. So six months ago, I moved into the role of assistant vice president, and I have responsibility for the adult ed program where I first started, all of our workforce development programs, our career services, and then this kind of amorphous thing called “innovation.”
 
The one thing that we all felt is that we were trying to start a lot of new things, but it's always managed by a committee where everyone's responsible and nobody's responsible. So in this role, my goal is to be that point person, the one that's shepherding things to make sure we go beyond pilots and actually get them working.
 
I've also been in a doctoral program for five years, an education doctorate focused on higher ed administration. I started it after my son went to college, and I think that was a really good time in my career to do this, because I have enough experience to have context for what we're reading and writing about. For my dissertation, I'm looking at the role of community college academic deans as middle managers when there's a planned change in the organization. I've been interviewing my colleagues about this experience, and it's pretty amazing to have that opportunity to talk to people.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
I love what I've done and I love working with community colleges. It kind of brings together that sense of the helping profession from way back when and all of my work with the refugee families, because we work with so many of those same people. But there are a couple of things that I wish I had done. I really wanted to move to Washington, D.C. when I got out of college, but there was no Internet and I didn't actually know how to do that, how to look for a job. So I stayed in Boston, but I met my husband, so that was something good.
 
I think maybe I would have been a little bit more daring about moving around, about traveling a little more and not getting so serious about work right away. But it was the 80s and when we graduated from college, everyone got jobs at the big eight accounting firms, they went into management training for programs at the big banks, people just went to work and then worked ridiculously long hours. So I don't regret anything, but I might have been a little bit more adventurous.
 
I think there are an enormous number of opportunities now for people that didn't exist back when I was 23 and first getting out of school. I would highly encourage people to take advantage of all the offices at the college you're at to get internships, to study abroad. Go find something that is just a little hard to do. Go off and do all those things, because there's not a better time in your life than your 20s to do all of that. And it goes by really fast. 

​When it comes to choosing a major in college, there are two options: liberal arts and pre-professional. Liberal arts has something of a stigma as people assume, first, that it has something to do with fine arts, like painting or sculpture; and second, that it’s impractical [insert underwater basket weaving joke here]. Pre-professional majors, on the other hand, get a unanimous thumbs up from dads everywhere who use phrases like “return on investment” when discussing their child’s college education. Many of my students ask me which path is better, and the answer really depends on what you’re looking for.
 
First, some definitions. Harvard College explains that “in [a] liberal arts program, students are broadly educated in the social sciences, the natural sciences and the humanities.” So while that does include fine arts, it also covers history, physics, sociology, and English, and much more. The vast majority of people I’ve interviewed for When I Was 17 have received liberal arts degrees, like Brittany who majored in applied mathematics, or Sari who majored in economics and sociology, or Blaine who majored in Latin American studies. In fact, the vast majority of colleges in the US primarily offer liberal arts majors.
 
A pre-professional program is one that leads directly to a profession (although it may require an advanced degree). This includes pre-med tracks, where you can officially major in anything but you have to complete certain prerequisites for medical school. Nursing, physical therapy, and pharmacy are other common pre-health programs. Engineering and computer science are especially popular pre-professional degrees right now. And to some extent, business degrees like marketing, accounting, and finance fall into this category.
 
Both types of degrees come with pros and cons. A liberal arts major can feel like a big question mark after you graduate, without a clear arrow pointing you toward specific jobs you should apply to. But that openness can benefit you in the long run, giving you the flexibility to pursue fields that are just emerging, or even starting something of your own. Many of the biggest names in business, tech, and politics hold liberal arts degrees:

• Cory Booker, Senator from New Jersey – political science and sociology
• Marissa Mayer, former CEO of Yahoo - symbolic systems (a combination of philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and computer science offered at Stanford University)
• Elon Musk, Tesla + SpaceX – physics and economics
• Barack Obama – political science, international relations, and English
• Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook - economics
• Howard Schultz, Starbucks – speech communication

 
A pre-professional degree can lead more directly to a lucrative and stable job right out of college, which is something many parents are understandably more comfortable investing four years of college tuition for. But if the industry changes and your work becomes automated or outsourced, you may have difficulty pivoting to something new with a narrower, more specialized degree.
 
Ideally, you’d be able to study whatever you love and then turn that into a satisfying career where you make enough money to live the life that you want. But in real life, you’ll probably have to make compromises in your major or your profession depending on your priorities and goals at that time. The best advice I can give is to stay open and flexible, take initiative to get involved with things that interest you, and make the most of the opportunities that present themselves. Whether liberal arts or pre-professional, basket weaving or data entry, those things will always lead to professional success.