​Bethany Buchanan is a newly minted realtor, a writer, a world traveler, a burro racer, and one of my best friends from our master’s program. She also wins the award for most unusual interview location, chatting during reflexology foot massages. Because Bethany and I overlap so much educationally, it has been exciting to see how she has forged her career path, taking different risks that have opened her up to different opportunities. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
I thought I wanted to be an ambassador or a diplomat. I thought I wanted to work in the foreign services. I don't know that I really knew what that was. It was probably just an idea that I had, sort of James Bond inspired, with all the ambassadors and diplomats you saw in those movies. I was in student government all through high school and I knew that I really wanted to travel internationally. It seemed like that was the most direct way to do that. And I liked the idea of contributing to some greater good through diplomatic action.
 
How did you decide to attend University of Colorado, Boulder?
 
My parents were not that involved; they just wanted me to do whatever made me happy. But I had a mentor who was very invested in helping me figure out what school I wanted to go to.
 
I was the student representative to the school board, so I would go to all the school board meetings and they were sometimes boring, and sometimes very cool. I got to influence votes and influence policy and help make major decisions, and I got to be friends with all the school board members. One of the school board members was kind of a renegade; I sat next to him and we would pass notes and stuff. He gave me this big book of colleges, and made some recommendations. And two of his recommendations were William & Mary and Georgetown
           
My parents and I went out to William & Mary and Georgetown, and toured them. Coming from a small town in Colorado, Georgetown being in Washington D.C. was very exciting, but also kind of scary. Then we went to William & Mary, and it was kind of sleepy and we stayed at this funky motel. It was really pretty and I really liked the teachers. They did a great tour and they were good at wooing students there. Those were the only two out-of-state schools I applied to.
 
I also applied to Colorado College, CU Boulder, and Denver University. I got waitlisted at Georgetown and then I got into William & Mary. I got into this cool volunteer program at William & Mary that had its own curriculum and its own little community. I also got selected to be a part of this student leadership foundation at William & Mary, which was really cool. There were some really interesting students that wanted to make a difference who were really involved in various causes on campus.
           
So I had some really good experiences at William & Mary, but overall it was not a great fit for me. There was a little bit of a clique atmosphere among the in-state students and I was a fish out of water. I had a hard time finding my niche and finding my people at William & Mary. And I was always a straight-A student and I loved school, but the emphasis on academics was almost too much. There wasn't enough of a balance of social activities and school activities.
 
So I ended up transferring back to CU Boulder, and at the time it seemed like this huge decision, like it was going to change my life and it could be really bad. But once I transferred to CU Boulder, it was really positive, it was really fun; I didn't have any regrets. It made me realize that we spend so much time spinning our wheels and stressing out about what school to go to, and in the end, it's an important choice but you can always change your mind and you can make the most of wherever you are.
 
How did you choose your major?
 
As soon I got to CU Boulder, I realized that the foreign affairs classes that I would need to take were really boring to me. And if the classes were that boring, then the career was probably not right for me.
 
I always knew that I wanted to major in English because I loved reading books. And then I had an extra spot in my schedule that I could fill with anything, and there was a costume technologies class where they taught you all about sewing and you got to be in the costume shop stitching the costumes for the productions. I took that class and loved it.
 
I had inherited both of my grandma's sewing machines, and I had been sewing things for a really long time. My mom and both my grandmas were amazing seamstresses, and I sewed my own wedding dress. But at that point, I just knew how to sew, but I didn't understand it on a technical level.
 
They taught us how to make beautiful headdresses and make a pattern off of a dress form and dye fabric and mold a felt cap to someone's head. It was so fun and I wanted to take all of those classes, and the only way to do that was to be a theater major so I did it. I got to hang out in the fashion shop, and I got this balance of analytical English people and then really creative, fun theater people.
           
We got to design an entire show, so I chose to do an Arabian Nights version of Romeo and Juliet in which the Capulets were the Moors and the Montagues were Spanish. For my final project, I did a 1912, Titanic-era evening gown; I got to build the corset and all the undergarments and then the dress from scratch, which was really cool. And then for one of our other classes I got to build a Vegas showgirl headdress with all these sequins and rhinestones and ostrich feathers. It was really cool.
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
           
At the end of my senior year, I was applying for the Peace Corps. I really wanted to go to a Spanish-speaking country, but I got into this disagreement with them about whether I was fluent in Spanish or not. Which I am, because I had lived in Spain when I was 16. They told me, "We would love to place you in Eastern Europe like Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, or Africa, but you can't go to a Spanish-speaking country unless you can prove that you speak Spanish." So basically I said, "Alright, well then I'm not doing the Peace Corps."
 
So I found this other program through the Ministry of Education in Chile called English Opens Doors, Inglés Abre Puertas. I got certified to teach English as a second language and then I went and lived in Pichilemu, Chile. I taught there for six months, and then came home and got my first job in the travel industry.
 
I still wanted to go international, so I got a job as an account manager for very, very wealthy people that were part of this vacation club. My region was the Northeast, so New York, New Jersey, Boston; for the first few months, I remember thinking that people were calling and just yelling at me, but that's just how they talk. And then the economy skydived, and the industry I was in was built on real estate, so they laid off half the company.
 
I really didn't know what I was going to do, but something logical in my brain said, "This recession's going to be for a couple years and a safe harbor might be getting another degree." So I applied to grad school to get my master's in English. The plan was to go to whatever school was the cheapest, which I assumed would be CU Boulder, but Boston University came through with a really generous scholarship and stipend package, and I went and got my master's at Boston University.
 
I loved it. We had this amazing cohort of like-minded English nerds that were really cool and it changed my life. I guess for me, it provided me with a lot of confidence. I learned that I'm really good at reading texts and seeing patterns and pulling them out and then putting together a compelling argument from those things. It gave me this sense of accomplishment and purpose. And it made me realize how important and valuable it is for me to have this really strong, vibrant, stimulating, social community. It was very empowering.
 
I had worked at Outward Bound right before I went to BU, and then I went and worked for them for a while again. It was very low stress and I got to go for really long runs every lunch break. And then I did a half marathon burro race with a donkey, which had always been a life dream.
 
And then I went and taught community college. I worked at three different schools, which was really rewarding but also very challenging. I think the adjunct professor arrangement is inherently flawed in that they have a huge load and they’re not well compensated and they're not well supported, so it makes it difficult to succeed.
 
I had always told Outward Bound that I wanted to write for them, and I'd done blog posts for them. They approached me and said, "Hey, would you be interested in helping us with our main collateral?" And I said, "Yeah, I'd love that." I got to work directly with the executive director. He was really smart and creative, and they gave me a lot of creative license to put together their beautiful main collateral piece. I realized writing was lucrative and fun and I thought, "If I can get enough work as a freelance writer, I could make that my career." And then I got more freelance clients, and one of my clients, Inspirato, ultimately hired me full-time as their marketing manager.
 
I also had a business reselling vintage clothing. I'd always loved vintage stuff and my mom is an old hippie. I loved going to thrift stores even in high school; I felt this sense of achievement when I could get something really cool that nobody else had. And then I saw people out in the marketplace really succeeding, and I saw this explosion of small shops and little artisan companies in Denver. And Etsy was already pretty well developed, so that made it so easy to sell things online.
 
I started taking pictures of vintage cowboy boots and dresses from the 50’s in my backyard and putting them on Etsy. I got a ton of sales and then I got a logo and branded everything and had a social media presence and started going to these markets. It was really fun and I learned so much about what it takes to run a business. I couldn't keep doing it once I was working at Inspirato because I didn't have time, but it was a great learning experience.
 
I worked at Inspirato until this past June. I have an 18-month-old little boy, and my husband and I realized that we were on this hamster wheel that we couldn't get off of: dropping my son off at school, going to work, leaving work, rushing to pick him up, getting home at 6:30, feeding him, putting him to bed, and then doing the same thing five days a week. I definitely could have kept doing it, but it wasn't the life that I really wanted for myself. And then I got pregnant with our second, and I knew something was going to have to change.
 
I've always been really interested in real estate, especially in the Denver area. There are a lot of interesting neighborhoods, and I'm a hunter-gatherer; I love to research things, I love to find things, I love to share things with other people. So I got my real estate license and signed on with a broker and I've been dipping my toe in the water of trying to be a realtor. We moved out to the mountains from a small, historic neighborhood just outside of Denver. We have deer and mountain lions and bears and beautiful trees; it was a big change for us and I would love to specialize in helping other people make that change, especially with a growing family.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
I have to say that one of the most positive things in my life has been working. When I was 14 or 15, I got a job at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. I didn't have my license, so I rode my bike. I worked there all through high school and I had to show up and be somewhere and be responsible and I loved helping the customers. I got to be a manager and I had keys and I got to order stuff and I got to help with choosing who they hired and I loved it. It gave me so much self-worth and confidence. The time I spent working, making money, developing my people skills was excellent.
 
I feel like it's easy to get really worried about the impact that your decisions are going to have in the long term. But the truth is, you have a really long life and you can make decisions, you can change your mind, and you can change your mind again.
 
I've been lucky to have someone who supports me both financially and emotionally so that I can take risks like changing my career and pivoting. But even when I was in college and my parents weren't paying for any of my stuff after I graduated, it still wasn’t that big of a deal. I've changed my mind about 10 times. I've done a lot of different things in terms of my career, and it has all been okay. You don't have to make the perfect, exact right decision all the time. As long as you are taking good care of yourself and the people that you love, it's all going to be fine.

​Lexis Hanson is a software engineer at Salesforce, a job I had always assumed required at least a specialized college degree. So you can imagine my surprise when Lexis casually mentioned that she spent a year and a half teaching herself how to code while working full-time, so she could make the transition from consulting and customer success to software engineering. And that’s only one example of Lexis’s initiative and dynamism. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
At that time, I felt pretty certain that I was going to do something like financial advising. The reason I was interested in that, I think, stems from when my dad passed away, and my mom had a lot to handle at that time in terms of our household finances. So she started working with a financial advisor, and she would bring home these documents. It always caught my eye when I'd see these charts saying, "If you'd invested $10,000 in 1990, this is what it would look like now," and it was always this exponential amount. I thought that was so fascinating that you could just put your money somewhere and do nothing with it and it would become more money. So I had this idea in my head of wanting to help people do that.
 
At that time, I was also in a marketing competition organization called DECA. I was very competitive in DECA and was kind of evangelizing it at my school. I was one of seven or eight people leading DECA for the state of Arizona my senior year, planning and speaking at all the competitions. It was a blast. I traveled so much during my senior year within Arizona, and also to Atlanta, Washington, DC, LA, as well as Lake Tahoe. I was exposed to a whole bunch of experiences I never would have been able to do.
 
How did you decide to attend Arizona State University?
 
I actually only applied to one school, which is kind of silly in retrospect. I had the plan to stay local, because I have three younger sisters and I wanted to stay close to them while they were growing up. Looking back, I wonder what kind of schools I could have gotten into, even if I wasn’t going to go. But I got into Arizona State, and they offered me a full scholarship, so it was a no-brainer for me to go there.
 
How did you choose your major?
 
I applied to the finance program and I got into the W.P. Carey School of Business outright. I stuck with finance for all four years, but I ended up adding a second major of marketing, particularly because I had been exposed to a lot of marketing stuff through DECA. So I ended up with a BS in finance and a BS in marketing.
 
I actually worked at Bank of America all through university. I started off as a teller inside of a grocery store banking center. It was the perfect job actually, because I could get a lot of hours in, and depending on the semester, I could do classes in the morning and work in the afternoon, or vice versa. Then I went into a role working the chat bot. But it wasn't a bot - it was me. It was a fun job. I didn't have to really do much selling, and I could have my homework on the screen too when it wasn't busy.
 
But I was realizing in college that the world of finance wasn't exactly what I thought it was. When you study finance, there are two major paths you can take, which is to go to New York and slave away working 80 hours a week. But I'm all about living a balanced lifestyle and feeling like I'm worth something. Or, of course, you can go into financial advising. But I was realizing that it's much more sales than anything else. I graduated early, so I was 21, and I was thinking, "What person on the edge of retirement is going to want to give 21 year-old me everything they have saved in their life?" Not that that's an impossible stretch, but I felt as if that was going to be a lot of work, to build up a book of clients.
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
 
I had always been interested in tech stuff, but I didn't have the skills to go and be an engineer yet. So one thing I looked into was analyst tech positions. Since I had the finance background and I could do Excel things and sales ops, I applied at SAP when I was getting ready to graduate. I happened to know somebody that was a sales manager. Her husband used to lead DECA for the state of Arizona, so that connection very much came full-circle, which was awesome. She was my referral and gave me glowing recommendations.
 
I applied for what’s called the Inside Sales Academy, but I had zero interest in being a salesperson. This woman that I knew there, Alison, insisted, "Don't worry about it. It's a very flexible role. We're just trying to bring in younger talent, and we'll adapt the position to whatever you need." I was a little skeptical, but I went in for the interview anyway, and I more or less came out and said, "Hi, I'm right out of college and I don't want to do sales, but you should still hire me." Of course, I framed it much better than that. But I found out that they had a role that was helping with the operational side of this inside sales team.
 
It was a smaller team at SAP at the time, and they didn't have somebody to help their salespeople keep everything in order. And what would happen is that, as they got close to the end of the quarter, there would be something wrong with the contract, or the right products wouldn’t be on it. So I basically pitched to them that I could fill that role and it worked. That was my first job out of college.
 
I did that role for about a year and a half. Then I was in Pennsylvania at our corporate headquarters. I dived deep and ended up learning a lot, so I was giving a presentation on these really small bits of minutiae that don't seem to matter but they were really important for what we were doing. There was this VP, Robert, in the room doing internal consulting, and apparently he was really impressed. He took me aside and said, "Hey, we're looking for somebody on our team. I know you're young and you're new to a lot of this, but I'm really impressed with how you think." It was mostly centered on, it sounds like such jargon now, but business process engineering. What they basically do is talk to different executives within the company across different functions and help them analyze problems, come up with solutions, and implement them.
 
I was really excited about this conversation. The team seemed great. He said there were certifications they wanted people to have before they joined the team. I immediately started looking at it when I got home that week. Luckily, all of the content I needed to know was available online or through internal channels, so I went ham and crammed for five days, signed up, and ended up passing the test.
 
I sent Robert a screenshot and said, "Hey, here are the test results." And he replied, "Lexis, this test is supposed to take two months of studying before you take it." I’m not saying that to brag. But if I look back at my experiences, that was the biggest moment I’ve had when I realized, if you don't have preconceived notions that something is hard or something is supposed to take X amount of time, you might just blow your mind.
 
It took about six more months because of internal politics and such, but I eventually got onto that team. I was on this team, and they asked me, "Do you want to go to Philly or Palo Alto?" And I chose Palo Alto because there's sunshine, and I think I've scraped ice off my car all of once in my life, and I never need to do it again. Arizona kind of breeds that into you.
 
It was a blast. The project that I consider my baby that I worked on the most was with our sales team in Mexico. It was such a weird experience because I was 23 at the time and there were directors and managers that were very seasoned, they had been working at SAP or in the industry for a long time, and I was up there presenting my PowerPoint slides like, "Here is everything that is wrong with what you're doing."
 
It wasn't just me, which was good. The other guy I had co-leading with me was one of our colleagues in Germany, and he was an amazing human being, very nice, very patient, and he had a German accent that was really lovely to listen to. It was super international, which was also a really good learning experience.
 
Around the time I was closing out that project, I was starting to look at other things in the Bay Area, not because I was running away from SAP - I actually had a really good experience there - but it was my first job out of school, and I was looking for some income growth and just to experience something different.
 
So I was looking at startups, and I ended up going to a company called Chameleon.
I was the first hire, so it was a super small startup. I worked there for about six months. Basically, it wasn't what I had signed up for. I had this expectation that I was going to be doing product management and customer success and some marketing as well. I ended up doing a lot of social media blog posts and stuff. It was not my jam.
 
So I thought, "I'm not happy. I'm learning a lot, but I don't feel excited to go to work every day. This isn't for me." And I wasn't doing much of the things that I really wanted to be doing. I was in a position where I didn't need to be anxious about going to work, so I made the decision to quit without having a backup. In January, I started applying, and I applied online cold to Salesforce IQ, and they responded to me. I interviewed for a customer success manager role, which is a fancy way of saying account manager, and I got it.
 
When I joined, it was a company called Relayed IQ that had been acquired by Salesforce. The company was still operating independently, so there were 200 or so employees. And we still had our own CEO. That was the part that excited me, because it was still a small-ish team environment, which I still feel like I hadn't had the experience of at the time. And the product was changing really fast, which was exciting.
 
They had already been acquired, so I knew that I was going to be integrated eventually, and I was evaluating, "Would I still be happy working at Salesforce?" And the answer was absolutely yes. The culture is amazing here, the work-life balance is really nice. And the customers that I was working with were really special too.
 
When I joined Salesforce IQ, because it was this small-ish environment, we had lunch together every day. We would sit at these really long communal tables, and I befriended a lot of engineers really quickly. Again, I had always been interested in technology, but switching to engineering never felt attainable. One of my friends pointed me to some resources online, and there was a really good website, TeamTreeHouse.com, that was the catalyst for everything. After going on the website every night for two months, I decided, "All right, I'm going to do everything I can to make the switch and make this happen with engineering."
 
I didn't have much of a plan, but I committed to spending 15-20 hours on it every week outside of work. I thought about doing a coding bootcamp, but I would have had to quit my job, and I didn't want that uncertainty of not working for six months. And I took some pride in trying to figure it out myself.
 
I split my time between reading, watching videos, coding my own projects, and then eventually working on an open-source project. That project I worked on was instrumental in my success. It allowed hiring managers to see the code I’d written, and it helped me prove that I was capable of making this transition.

Networking was also a key part of me making this transition. I put myself out there in uncomfortable ways, and set up informational interviews to better understand what hiring managers were looking for when they brought on new engineers. These connections came full circle by the time I began my job search for software engineering roles. Roughly 80% of my conversations were with managers and recruiters that I already had a previous connection with. And in May of this year, I switched to software engineering at Salesforce.

In spring of 2016, I attended Google I/O tech conference, and they gave all the attendees a Google Home that year. When I set it up at my apartment, I tried to ask it for the price of Ethereum (a cryptocurrency), but it replied with, “Sorry, I’m not sure how to help with that.” Given that I was making progress in my coding at the time, I thought, “I’m going to build an app for that!”

It took longer than I expected and involved many nights trying to solve for bugs I could barely wrap my head around, but in August of 2016 I launched CryptoPrices, an app for Google Assistant that lets users ask for the prices of various cryptocurrencies. It turned out to be a hit! It was published in the Google Assistant store and I was eventually given an award from Google for the traction it gained.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?

It partially frustrates me that I made a career transition in my late 20’s and I don’t feel like I have as many “technical chops” as others my age that studied computer science. At the same time, I have a lot of experience that’s unique on my team, and I get to bring my other skill sets to the table.

Some people are lucky enough to know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their lives. I envy them. I’ve felt for the last 10 years that I’ve been trying to “figure out my major.”  But I think it’s important to know that there are way more jobs out there than you’d ever realize. Jobs with titles like “Customer Success Manager,” “Chief Equality Officer,” or “Supply Chain Analyst” are careers I never thought existed when I was 17.

Unless you know that you passionately want to be a lawyer, nurse, teacher, etc., my advice would be to pick a major, courses, or internships that give you a variety of options and learning experiences. The more color you have in your story, the easier it will be to sell yourself in those jobs you’re eventually really excited about.

It also never hurts to pick up some technical skills, whether you navigate toward courses in mathematics, coding, finance, or something else involving formulas and logic. These might not always be the easiest skills to add to your resume, but they’re really helpful to have when you’re looking for a job. Employers love when candidates have skills that can be objectively measured.

This is not a political blog, and I am a college counselor, not a political activist. But we don’t live in a vacuum. And I am a person with feelings, and this week has left me feeling awful. 

On my drive home last night, I was listening to the podcast series The Wilderness, and in the final episode, host Jon Favreau interviews his former boss, President Barack Obama. I felt a little better listening to someone I admire talk calmly and optimistically about the future. That’s the feeling I want to amplify here this week: optimism. But I don’t know Barack Obama, and I think it’s unlikely that I’ll ever get to interview him for this series. 

However, I do know a whole bunch of incredibly perceptive and thoughtful people who have shared their insights with me over the past year and a half. And because I need a little pick-me-up, I thought I’d collect some of their wisdom here as a reminder that it’s hard to see the end of the story when you’re in the middle of it. 

SARAH HAMAN
“We’re still interested in figuring out parts of ourselves, [and] at 32, people would say that that should be done by then, but there’s always time to do that. You can make mistakes and allow yourself room to breathe and room to experiment.”

MELISSA SMITH
“It sounds super simple when I say it now, but it wasn’t simple at the time; it was very difficult. I don’t know if I’ll ever be the type of person to do something for the first time and not be afraid. But I think through all that I’ve learned, I’m not afraid of being afraid anymore.”

PHIL BELLEAU
“I think a lot of it is just being patient. Putting your head down and putting the work in. Even if you’re the hardest worker, it’s still going to take a ton of time. Maybe your whole life.“

JULIA SCHROTH
“Other people’s opinions of you really don’t matter. You want to be a good person, but you’re not going to get along with everybody. And wanting everybody’s approval can give you a certain amount of anxiety. One of the things I appreciate about getting older, is really coming to that realization.”

AMY BUKOVICH
“We lie to ourselves more than anybody else, saying we’re happy in our current situation. I’m able to read my emotions more quickly [now], and that’s something you don’t learn in school. Just listening to myself more has helped me realize that certain things don’t make me happy just because there are dollar signs associated with them.”

CHRISTOPHER KEMPF
“Trust your heart rather than what you ‘should’ be doing or what someone else says you should be doing. The most important contributions to Western society, I think, the things that make life worth living, that help us live the good life, aren't things that corporations produce or that money buys. They're Beethoven. They're Emily Dickinson and James Baldwin and Joan Didion. Be that contribution to the culture of our species.”

​Igor Hiller is a comedian, or rather a person who does comedy. My conversation with Igor raised an often ignored but vital question about how our careers play a role in the way we define ourselves, for better or for worse. It made me wonder whether this desire for classification contributes to the pressure we feel to choose our careers before we’ve really had a chance to explore. We didn’t come up with any answers, but just asking the question feels valuable. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
I was going to be a corporate lawyer. When I Googled lawyers, they made the most money, and it seemed like a very respectable career and people would think I was very smart and knowledgeable. I liked to read, and making logical arguments seemed sort of within my grasp. And also my dad loved this show called The Practice with Dylan McDermott. So I was going to go to Harvard Law School.
 
How did you decide to attend University of California, Santa Barbara?
 
Because I was going for law school, I did some research and learned that they don't care so much about where you go so long as your GPA is stellar and your LSAT scores are stellar. So I thought I would save money and applied to all the UCs and a couple of the best California State schools. The two "best" schools that I got into were UC Santa Barbara and UC San Diego, and I visited them and Santa Barbara was just unbelievable. I instantly thought, "Well, this is where I should go," and I have no regrets about that. I really loved my time at Santa Barbara.
 
The unique thing about Santa Barbara, and the reason that it has such a reputation for being a party school, is that the vast, vast majority of students live adjacent to campus in this unincorporated township called Isla Vista, which is basically a 10 block by 10 block beach town of 15,000 students. It is a utopia of sorts (maybe it’s some people’s nightmare), but what it taught me is the value of community and what the opposite of loneliness looks like. Every single day, as I was biking or skating back from campus, I would pass six friends out on their front lawns playing beer pong or tanning or studying, and by the time I got home, I'd have four invites to hang out.
 
When college ended and we started our regular lives in regular society, and the way that we've set up living separately from each other, the difference in loneliness was astounding. And it just showed me that there is no substitute for being physically near the ones you love. It was odd because that was definitely not the lesson that I expected to learn from Santa Barbara.
 
How did you choose your major?
 
I had two majors. One was very traditionally pre-lawish, political science, which I’ve always been interested in politics. And then I started taking Russian classes, because I have a Ukrainian background and I wanted to learn the grammar and how to write. I studied a semester in Moscow, and that turned into a second major. It's funny because if I was actually in politics now, I think having those two degrees would be very valuable.
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
 
I kept on that law school vision in college, and I spent a summer interning for a Stanford law professor. I did a lot of LSAT prep and I graduated summa cum laude with the grades I needed to apply to Harvard Law School. When I was prepping for the LSAT, I just took every practice test that I could find and was getting 99th percentile scores. And then I finally took the LSAT and I think I got a 92nd percentile score, which is fine but it's not Harvard quality. And it really gutted me, because I had worked so hard.
           
Then when you apply to law school, there is a common question that I think pretty much every law school asks which is simply, “Why do you want to be a lawyer?” And I realized that my answer had not really changed from when I was 16, which is that I wanted to be rich, respected, and thought of as very smart. And then I realized that these reasons had nothing to do with the actual work of lawyering, and it was sort of a bizarre, grueling path to get money and attention. So I had this crisis where I thought, "Well, this isn't right," and I started binge-watching every possible commencement address and graduation speech giving advice to young people. And the thing that I kept gravitating toward was comedy, which I've always loved but I was terrified of.
 
I did like a couple of standup sets in college. And I had a "Dear Igor" column like "Dear Abby" in my college newspaper. That was the first time that I had done something publicly comedic, and it went well but I'd never really allowed myself to give it a shot. And I had this vision of myself in my 50s, coming home from work late at night, sitting on the edge of the bed and turning the TV on, and seeing some late-night talk show and thinking, "Wow, I never went for it." So I decided that I would move to LA with the idea that I would become a writer's assistant at Family Guy, because Family Guy would be a good place to learn jokes.
 
I didn't know anyone. And there is no application process to become a writer's assistant. It's not on LinkedIn or Monster.com. There's a “chicken and the egg” issue in entertainment, which is that you need experience to get hired, but you can't get experience without getting hired. The way around that issue is to know that you want to do entertainment when you're in college, and then you do internships all four years, so then people know you and you have an entry-level job waiting for you when you're done. Of course, I didn't do that, so no one hired me and I took a job as a market research analyst.
 
My job basically entailed double-checking Excel spreadsheets to make sure the math was correct, and going through online surveys making sure there were no bugs, calling people for follow-up answers, and eventually, if you work really hard for years, then you can be promoted and you can design market research surveys for Forbes 500 corporations. Man, I did not do well in that job. But it gave me a salary and it gave me the opportunity to start taking improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, which was founded by Amy Poehler and three other less famous but great comedians, and that got me into the comedy community.
 
I also started doing stand-up, going to open mics when I got to LA. That, I think, is the hardest thing to do entertainment-wise, because it is grim. It is going alone to open mics at either cafes with people reading in them, or bars when the sun is still up, and there are two people inside, and waiting for an hour or more to do three to five minutes max in front of other comedians who are looking at their notes. And you do that for a while.
 
Stand-ups are by nature individualists, I think, but improv, by definition, is a group dynamic, and you need to support each other in order to succeed. In meeting these improvisors, I thought, "Wow, these people are so nice and so fun,” and what I wanted was to find a group of people who cared about comedy as much as I did and wanted to just joke around all the time. We would have these improv potluck parties with 40 of us in someone’s living room, performing for each other, and I thought it was just the bee’s knees and I couldn't believe that I got to be a part of it. Maybe that sounds lame, but some of these people are probably going to be on Saturday Night Live in a couple of years, so it’ll be cool to tell these stories then.
 
Comedy is one of the few skills that can only be worked on in front of other people. I will never know if something is funny until it hits someone else. It was also an opportunity to get over the fear and to get our reps in because that's the only way to do it. It was also integral to building relationships that later turn into jobs, because in entertainment, the way you get hired is by somebody saying, "I just saw Igor at that potluck, and he did that funny scene. He would be great for this."
 
So I'm working in market research, and I'm doing these classes. And then I heard that a production company that makes some shows that I really like was hiring unpaid office interns, which is like the entry level of entry level. I had a little bit of money saved up, and I quit my job that day, and they were mad at me because apparently, office jobs like when you give them at least two weeks or something, I don't know. I start working in the production office of this company, and I thought this was going to be my way in and I was thrilled.
 
My day-to-day was stapling, collating, and making coffee. And something that I didn't realize is that, they shoot the show in one place and then they have the administrative production office in a different place, so the only people that I was interacting with were a couple of accountants and a second-level producer. I started getting a little twitchy because I quit my job for this unpaid job. So I start nudging them asking, "Can I have some more responsibility?” And they were like, "No."
 
I finally got switched to being a set intern, and I thought, "This is great. I'm going to be able to meet the people that make the show and the writers are there and I'm going to meet them and it's going to be awesome." But a set intern is the lowest on the totem pole. I was placed outside of set, and my job was to make sure that no one wandered in to set. Sometimes I was posted on a different floor to make sure that no one pushed the elevator button.
 
So I was in the building, but again, I got twitchy and I started feeling like I wasn’t making any relationships and I wasn’t getting any experience. So I started getting a little, some would say out of line, and I started wandering into what's called video village, where the director and the writer and the executive producer sit, looking at the monitors when a scene is being shot. I started standing behind them, not very close but just close enough to where I could almost overhear what they were saying, because that to me was the most interesting place. I wanted to be there so badly. But I can't tell you how inappropriate it is for someone to do that. It's just not okay.
 
That space, video village, no one is allowed to go there. And what it led to was me being essentially fired. I had a brief conversation with a very impatient and annoyed line producer who said, "Look, the way things work is you get hired to do a job and for you, that was being an office intern. You do that job until the person above you gets promoted and then you get their job, and you stick around long enough and then you can be in the places where you want to be. That is how it works." I asked her to give me another chance, and she said no. That did not feel good. That spun me out as you can imagine, because I thought, "Oh my God, I'm never going to work in Hollywood."
 
It was such a shock and it pissed me off and I thought, "That's crazy and I don't want to participate in that." And that's what led me and some friends to start a sketch video group. And over the years, that led to opportunities to be hired to write a web series, and that led to writing and producing videos for Lionsgate to promote their film Dear White People, which has now become a TV show, which led to me developing a relationship with the creator of that, who then hired me to be an actor on that show which led to lots of jobs. That came from the experience of working with a group to make our own videos, developing producing skills and writing skills and acting-quickly skills and shoestring-budget skills. And then that opportunity ending gave me space to start helping a friend with a book that he had coming out.
 
This friend, Joel Stein, and his wife, Cassandra, I would count both of them as mentors. Joel was the humor columnist for Time magazine for 20 years, and that was the only thing that we subscribed to when I was growing up. Every week, his column was my favorite. When I was college, I found his email through too much Googling and I sent him a cold email and asked if I could interview him. He responded the same day and said, "If you're in LA, you can come over and I'll be playing with my son, and we can do the interview in person.” So I lied and said that I was in LA when of course, I was in Santa Barbara. I got there like four hours early and he was lovely, and it was incredible meeting him.
 
The other part of it is, I think it's so important to treat with respect and be curious about the wives and husbands and partners of famous people, because the reason that this relationship grew over the years and turned into true friendship is because of Cassandra. Joel and I were talking about career stuff, and she was just coming home and she was curious about what we were talking about, and I involved her in the conversation and didn’t ignore her, which happens all the time.
 
So fast forward to I've just gotten fired, and Joel had written his first book and he needed help with marketing and website stuff, and Cassandra said, "Why don't you ask Igor?" So I assisted him, and then later on, one of their friends who is one of the top TV comedy writers needed an assistant. And he didn’t post it on Craigslist; he posted it on his personal Facebook. They sent me a screenshot and recommended me and I got that job.
 
I assisted him for three years, and I got to learn a lot. It was basically the job that I had been looking for when I moved to LA. My boss, Dan, was the showrunner for a season of the show Last Man on Earth, so I got to be in video village with him. And he wrote a movie with Seth Rogen and Even Goldberg, and I got to go to these meetings and take notes in Seth Rogen's office and see how they developed an idea. And I got to go to pitches with them and see them practice a pitch. And I got to go to premiere after-parties where I got to see all my comedy heroes.
 
When I stopped that assistant job with Dan, and I started putting effort into growing my social media. I saw Instagram as less of a place to post photos for my friends to see, and instead as a place to post comedy videos that I had made, like a resume really. My followers grew by a factor of 10, and that led to a job as a cast member on a sketch show on the Internet with this company called Fullscreen. That was the first time that I was a cast member on this long-running thing, acting professionally every week, and it was really fun. But they ran out of money after a year. And then something happened in my brain where I didn't really know why I was doing it.
 
I sort of forgot what it was about making random comedy videos that I liked and that was of value to people. A lot of the videos that people liked were really, really dumb. It was me dancing like an idiot in public places. And I just started feeling like a bit of a monkey or something. At that point, I wasn't with a group and that show had ended, so I went on a beautiful unemployment. Thank you, the government. And, I guess, thank you, all of you, for paying into it. And me too.
 
Right now, what I’m doing for work is I have a friend who was on an improv team with me for five years, and he has become famous for being the voice of one of the characters in this video game Overwatch, which is one of the most popular video games in the world. So every once in a while, he's invited to these Comic-Cons around the world and I go with him, help him out at the booth when people come and get autographs, and we travel around together.
 
I'm surrounded by supportive, loving people including him, who say, "We love you and we want you to make stuff and when will you be making stuff?" And I don't know. You’ve found me today and in these months in a place of searching and also a bit of a withdrawal from social media. I don't like the effect that it has on me, and I don't like that most of the things that seem to rise to massive popularity come from a fight or a crisis or hypersexuality. I do know that what I love is making other people feel better about themselves and empowered and more able, and I just think it's ironic that I can't do that for myself currently.
 
There is a writer/thinker/marketer that I love named Seth Godin, and he talks about seeing what you do as giving a gift. I understand that intellectually, but I don't really understand that in my heart yet. It would be nice to treat creating things, whether it’s something written or a video or a talk, as a gift, where it's not really about how it's received.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
I think we tell ourselves stories, and if you are going to tell yourself a story, aim for the more hopeful one, the one where whatever you're scared about is more likely to turn out in your favor. Because we don't know which one is true, so you might as well go with the one that ends with you saying, "Wow, I did it."
 
In this last year or two of this kind of challenge for me, part of the pain of it was detaching my sense of self from my career. I felt completely one with my career - I am a comedian. And when that wasn't going anywhere, the pain was unbearable and I had to start prying those two pieces apart. Now I see myself as a person who sometimes does comedy, and it's really helpful because I feel so much better equipped to take care of myself whether things are going well or poorly in my career. And I no longer think that the answer to the problems of my life is a perfect career. 

As a classics major, I am very familiar with the comedic oeuvre that is mocking so-called impractical majors. Not to mention that half the people I share this detail of my life with think majoring in classics means learning how to read heavy books while wearing tweed blazers with elbow patches.  But after doing some research, I learned that classics isn’t even in the top ten of weird college majors, an honor that definitely belongs to University of Connecticut’s BFA in Puppetry, or Texas A&M’s program in nautical archaeology. Yes, some of these majors sound a little goofy, but if you scratch beneath the surface, it’s clear that they’re academically rigorous programs that teach people the essential skills they need to create things we all value.

Fermentation Sciences at Appalachian State University + Viticulture and Enology at Cornell University 

It seems obvious that there’s an enormous amount of chemistry involved in brewing beer and making wine. But these programs also prepare their students to run successful breweries and wineries with courses in marketing and business management. They also teach their students to think critically about these products, with a course on the “moral, ethical and legal aspects of alcohol production and consumption.”
 
Entertainment Design and Engineering at University of Nevada, Las Vegas + Theme Park Engineering at California State University Long Beach
 
You certainly don’t need one of these specific degrees to design roller coasters or develop the technological systems that drive a casino or a theater. But these programs combine a solid foundation in material science and kinetic structures with their respective proximities to Disneyland and Las Vegas to give students hands-on experience with the current issues in their field.
 
Recreation and Leisure Studies at University of North Texas
 
Okay, this one definitely sounds like a made up major, and I’m sure you’re picturing students lounging by a pool or playing guitar on a grassy hill. But in fact, someone had to design that pool and lay out that park, and that person might have majored in recreation and leisure studies. Students combine courses in human anatomy; facilities planning, design, and maintenance; fiscal administration; and inclusion and diversity to prepare for a career overseeing all the places we go to have fun.
 
Packaging at Michigan State University
 
While not the sexiest major on this list, packaging is quite possibly the one that impacts us all the most. Packaging technology plays a role in everything from child-proof containers for medications, to properly sealed food that prevents bacterial growth, to the absurdly large boxes Amazon uses to ship a single pen (true story). And beyond practicality, there’s an artistry to packaging that no one knew better than Steve Jobs, a fact I’m reminded of every time I lift the smooth, white lid of an Apple box and see a perfectly coiled set of ear buds settled in its own nook. 
 
...and in case you were wondering, underwater basket weaving is in fact a class you can take at Reed College, UC San Diego, and Rutgers University. It turns out, the reeds are actually more pliable when they’re wet.