A lot has changed in the 18 years since I first met Amanda Gelender, but what has stayed the same is that she continues to be one of the most thoughtful people I know, engaging with her passions in a way that inspires everyone around her. Amanda currently lives in Amsterdam where she runs her own consulting company, Medusa Global, working with tech companies to foster diversity, inclusion, and social change. And thanks to the progressive policies of her new home, she’s recently started offering legal, guided psychedelic experiences through her other company, Psychedelic Exploration. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

When you were 17, what did you want to be?

I always knew I wanted to do social impact work, I’ve felt that as a driving purpose since I was very young. At 17 I was organizing on civil and human rights, including death penalty abolition and an end to the war on drugs. I was leading my high school’s Amnesty International club and working for a non-profit organization that connected young people in the US to grassroots social change projects happening all over the world at a really local level. My role was teaching young people how to be organizers and leverage their financial resources, educate their peers, and advocate on international human rights issues. I was active with many different mission-driven political organizations at the time and each resonated with me deeply. 

But I didn't know how my social impact work was going to manifest into a career. I had a lot of different ideas - maybe a lawyer, an executive director at a nonprofit, a movement organizer, a writer, or a teacher. I was very fortunate because I had models all around me. My parents were long-time activists, my mom was a teacher, my older sister to this day works at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California where I was a youth organizer as a teenager. And I had the almost unheard of opportunity to be a paid intern at a nonprofit when I was in high school, which is how I connected with my mentor Nicole Sanchez, someone who is still my close friend and collaborator to this day. So I had a lot of people in my community who had built their lives around social change, but I didn't have a concrete idea of what my career would look like.

How did you decide to attend Stanford University? 

I never thought I could get into Stanford. It really wasn't even in the realm of possibility for me. I had decided I was going to a college nearby which has this really unique program on performance and social justice, two critically important disciplines to me.

I remember I received my acceptance letter to Stanford on April Fool's Day. My mom called me when the envelope arrived, and I didn't think she would prank me, but I thought, “There's no way this is real.” I decided to go to Stanford because frankly I thought it was too good of an opportunity to pass up. I just thought the people I would meet and the caliber of education I would receive would be extraordinarily, and it was. But I know it also would have been great at many other institutions - I think there are a lot of different paths I could have taken and each would have been transformational in different ways. 

While I was at Stanford, I delved deeper into a wide range of political organizing. One key issue that I worked on was Palestinian rights. This is an interesting issue for me because like many Jewish people in the US, I was raised with a unwavering commitment to Israel. I never questioned what I was taught about Israel until a Jewish classmate in college who I was doing labor rights organizing with sat me down and basically said, "You're wrong on this issue." At first I was defensive but as I looked more into what she said, I came to understand that the Palestinian struggle for freedom is a human rights struggle, period. I’m regretful that it took me so long to come around but I'm really grateful that she had that conversation with me. We ended up organizing fellow Jews around Palestinian human rights, working with a phenomenal coalition of student organizations pushing for Stanford to divest from companies profiting from human rights abuses in Israel and Palestine. 

I also co-founded a social change theatre organization at Stanford, and I got to work on so many different political issues with that company. We partnered with dozens of activist organizations and engaged in everything from street social protest theater in the vein of Augusto Boal to full-stage productions on everything from queer rights to racial justice to environmentalism. I got to dip into all these different incredible coalitions doing such interesting work, some of which I ended up joining as an organizer, like the No on Prop 8 campaign. It was pretty wide-ranging, invigorating work.

How did you choose your major? 

I knew from the get-go that I wanted to double-major in Political Science and Drama. I was an actress and activist and I just didn't know how to live without one or the other, I didn't want to. I think performance and social change are always in conversation with each other, and in this political moment that conversation is more relevant than ever. If you look at films being created now like Sorry to Bother You and Get Out, these incredible pieces made by Black creators, you're seeing the way in which performing arts moves and shapes culture in a profound way. I think that more and more artists are looking for how to best leverage their creative urges to craft a more just world.

With the way that many of us instantly access media and culture in 2018, other creative mediums can move and adapt more quickly than theater, but theater definitely still holds a very important space in the culture conversation. Creators like Lin-Manuel Miranda are breathing life into theater and making it relevant for younger generations by creating brilliant pieces like In the Heights and Hamilton that center Black and Brown people.

With regards to my majors, something that did change is that I started out studying political science with a concentration in US national politics, and I ended up switching to political philosophy. I connected with a mentor and advisor in that field, Rob Reich, and I became enraptured with the theoretical underpinnings of political systems and our role within them as individuals. 

How did you get from college to where you are now?

My last couple years in college were really, really challenging. I had a psychiatric hospitalization, and in the psych ward doctors gave me a bipolar disorder diagnosis. They put me on a very strong cocktail of medications, I was on antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, sleep drugs...and the meds and doses were constantly changing, wreaking havoc on my body.

I started to not be able to recognize myself. I was so dazed and lethargic I needed help getting out of bed and going to class every morning. I had severe physical side effects from the meds including vomiting, hives, and migraines that would leave me incapacitated for days. Before the meds, my brain was a sponge. I could easily pick up a whole script, perform in multiple shows at once, it felt so easy. On medications my brain slowed down to a halt. I stopped being able to memorize lines, which is why I stopped performing. I feel like medications ripped theater out of my hands. I did a fifth year at Stanford to finish my degrees. 

Somehow I managed to graduate and receive a Fulbright scholarship to research social protest theatre in Bangladesh. But I didn’t end up going. I don't even know how to describe my last year at Stanford; it’s such a blur. It was like a long race was finishing, and somehow I had to drag this body across the finish line. I was a hollow shell by the time I graduated, which was so scary for me because my brain and passion were everything. Being engaged, driven, taking a full course load, having three jobs, running clubs, doing theater…that’s what I knew, and suddenly it was gone. I graduated with a pile of awards and honors, and then I really fell apart. 

For three and half years, I was basically down for the count. I was surviving. I rarely left the house, I stopped driving, I stopped connecting with friends, I was just managing symptoms. During that time I went through the grueling process of coming off of all my psychiatric meds. As I shed each medication I started to feel a bit more like myself. Coming off of meds is not right for everyone, but it was right for me. I started replacing them with other tools like peer-support group therapy, acupuncture, and cannabis, which was perhaps the biggest game changer for me. I can say in no uncertain terms that cannabis helped save my life.

By the time I started to emerge from this murky haze of meds and symptoms, I thought all my peers had passed me by, that there was no chance I could access the passion and drive that I used to have, let alone have a successful career. That was hard - coming to terms with this new self. But I was very lucky that I had supportive people in my life and a safety net. As I started to gain my energy back, my mentor Nicole said "I think you're ready." I built up my stamina, and I took her up on a job offer working on diversity and inclusion in the tech sector. And when she started her own firm, Vaya Consulting, I was her first hire. These positions were my first foray into working on organizational culture and social impact in the tech industry.

A lot of company leaders and HR teams look at their workforce and recognize that they have real people problems, “We're overwhelmingly white and male, we’re bleeding talent from underrepresented backgrounds, we’re getting external backlash for our practices.” And they don't know how to fix it. So companies bring us in to help them with everything from redesigning hiring processes to crisis remediation to training managers and executives on building inclusive teams. One of our first clients was a startup in the Bay Area, and we enjoyed working with them. They kept asking for more and more of our time and ultimately, the CEO asked us to come in-house and run the diversity, inclusion, and social impact work for the company. 

I got to do a lot of really interesting and exciting work there. I was tasked with overseeing the company’s commitment to ConnectHome, a President Obama initiative to close the digital divide in public housing. I worked with a dynamic team to provide free and low-cost high-speed broadband wireless Internet connections, devices, and tech training to young people in low-income housing communities across the US. Our goal was to support students in becoming not just consumers of technology but tech creators and innovators. The pilot program impacted 250,000 families in 28 public housing communities.

I also oversaw international flagship social impact programs, working with a broad coalition of partners across the continent of Africa. Part of my role was to identify and support innovators who were building open source technology for social change around the world. I also worked on the internal culture at the company, and started one of tech's first affinity groups for employees with mental health challenges. 

When I work with tech companies on culture change, I always remind them that diversity and inclusion are not abstract concepts disconnected from the products they are building. Teams that are not diverse build products and initiatives in a vacuum, and they struggle with problem identification and understanding the ways their work can and will be used by different populations. This inevitably comes back to bite the company. The alternative is building diverse and inclusive teams in which members bring their unique life experiences to the table and build more innovative, accessible, and viable products. 

This is a crucial moment for the tech sector. So many people from underrepresented backgrounds in the tech sector are looking at the state of our industry and saying, "Tech leaders, what are you doing?" The same systems of money, power, and exclusion that run our government run the tech sector. The Trump administration has shifted the US into an even deeper state of crisis. Tech has an incredible opportunity in all this - human and civil rights violations need tech products to work. If you're going to have mass deportations, detention camps, police surveillance, tracking dissidents...that runs on technology. We don't have enough workers and leaders in the tech sector saying, “We're not going to be a part of this anymore.”

In 2017 I relocated to Amsterdam, and in 2018 I started my own company, Medusa Global, here in the Netherlands. I consult with tech companies on diversity, inclusion, and social change with a specialization in building mental health into team culture. I also work as a strategy consultant for individuals and organizations around the world looking to level up their operations and vision.

I also just launched a new service, Psychedelic Exploration: legal, guided psychedelic experiences in Amsterdam. Psychedelics have been a vital wellness tool for me over the past three years, and I have a unique opportunity to offer this service living in the Netherlands, a country where people can legally purchase psilocybin in the form of mushroom truffles. I work with clients who are brand new to psychedelics as well as experienced psychedelic users to provide the set and setting for transformational experiences.

On an individual level, I’ve seen how psychedelics can help people explore and heal their own psyches, come to peace with their bodies, hone intuition, build mental wellness and fortitude, delve into creativity, and connect with consciousness and spirituality. On a collective level, I'm very interested in supporting social change agents in using psychedelics to level up their work, access untapped power and energy, and identify new creative pathways to implement social change. I've done years of therapy in a single psychedelic session. Psychedelics have also provided me with incredible insight and clarity in enhancing my social impact work at a time when all people of conscience need to dig deeper to maximize our collective impact.

Psychedelics have a long history in indigenous communities throughout the world, dating back thousands of years. Inextricably linked to the current practice of psychedelic use is colonization, the violent economic pillaging of Central and South America, spiritual tourism, the racist war on drugs, and widespread ongoing state violence against indigenous people. I’m particularly excited to collaborate with psychedelic explorers and practitioners of color working at the intersection of decolonization, mental wellness, and social change.

My strength and curse is that I have a million things I'm excited to do at all times. I don't know where my work is going to lead, but I know it's right for right now and that I’m building relationships with brilliant collaborators around the world. That's really enough for me. I want to stay agile, I want to stay responsive to the political moment, and I want to jump on opportunities where I can leverage and expand my impact. That's served me well over the years. I'm excited about the work I do now, and I think it'll only grow. 

Looking back, what seems clear to you now? 

A lot of people told me when I was younger, "Slow down. You're going too fast. You're doing too much, and this isn't going to serve you." I think it would have benefited me to hear that, but I didn’t, I was too stubborn. I think the best advice, had I taken it, would really just be to try and stay embodied through the experience. 

I think for much of my life I've been disembodied, always churning out ideas and working a mile a minute. I think if I hadn't disconnected from my body that would've served me. Coming back into my body after so many years has been a really painful but important process. I remind myself often to try and relax and stay grounded for the ride, because this is the body I’m going to have for my whole life. 

A piece of advice I would give younger people is to identify the things that you could do for hours and hours and be in complete creative flow. Keep those close to you. Whether those practices end up being part of your career or not, that feeling of creative flow is your power tool, so don’t discard it because it seems impractical or a waste of time. What you actually end up doing as a career will probably change many times, and that’s great, that’s part of the journey. But having a creative outlet will serve you for a lifetime.

​Before I made my visit to Whittier College last week, I spent some time at Loyola Marymount University. At the beginning of the tour, all the students shared one of their academic or extracurricular interests so our (delightfully quirky) guide could be sure to touch on it during the tour. As the students went around, I heard all the usual subjects: biomedicine, mechanical engineering, business, and apropos for a school in the middle of LA, theater. But at the very end, I heard someone say, “History.”
 
As we made our way to the first stop, I couldn’t help myself and told this random teenage boy how cool I thought it was that he was considering history. We humanities geeks have to stick together. He responded with enthusiasm, telling me how he’d gotten really into it over the last two years, and how excited he was for the vast array of history classes he’d be able to take in college.  And then he said the same thing people always say about humanities degrees: “I don’t know what I’m going to do with that though.” To which I replied, “Anything you want!”
 
Yes, that is a bit of an exaggeration. You’d be hard-pressed to find a lot of rocket scientists or CPAs that have history degrees. But it would not be shocking to find a brain surgeon who majored in history, let alone the scores of writers, lawyers, politicians, and teachers who hold history degrees. See the CVs of comedian Larry David, writer Salman Rushdie, and business mogul Martha Stewart, not to mention three pretty diverse US presidents (FDR, Nixon, and Bush the younger).
 
So it’s clear that you can do practically anything with a degree in history. But what makes it challenging is that, aside from teaching, there’s no obvious thing you should do with a degree in history. STEM degrees tend to have pretty straight paths from major to career, giving these students a clarity and confidence that humanities majors might envy. But if your field shifts significantly, or heaven forbid - your career interests, the linearity of a STEM degree can leave you with fewer ways to pivot if you need to make a change.
 
Anyone who tells you that a humanities degree is impractical is wrong. That is a hill I will die on. But the ambiguous nature of building a career from a degree in history or English or classics is not for everyone. Like anything, it’s a choice, between the clarity of knowing exactly what you’re going to do next, and the flexibility of getting to take great opportunities as they come along. So if you’re a budding engineer, great! Your job prospects and earning potential are better than ever. But if you’re considering a degree in something that makes people furrow their brows in confusion, don’t be discouraged. You can pretty much do whatever you want – you just have to figure out what that is. 

This week I’ve been hopping around Southern California visiting friends and touring colleges. I’m exaggerating slightly, but all the kids I work with want to go to school in Southern California, so it was starting to feel ridiculous that I’d never seen Loyola Marymount University or San Diego State University. But my biggest takeaway came from Whittier College (my new favorite school, mostly because their mascot is a Poet).
 
During the information session at Whittier, the assistant director of admissions pulled up a slide with this statistic: “By 2025, 50% of today’s jobs won’t exist.” Whittier was citing this statistic to make a case for the value of a liberal arts education that prizes critical thinking and creative problem solving, the types of skills that are least likely to become automated as our technology advances. This is something I fiercely agree with, but as a classics major, I’m a little biased. So I decided to dig into it a little more.
 
The statistic comes from a 2014 report, “Fast Forward 2030: The Future of Work and the Workplace,” commissioned by CBRE, a commercial real estate and investment firm, and Genesis Rehab services, a China-based healthcare company. And while the statistic makes for a pretty compelling headline, I was heartened to find out that the report’s conclusions were more hopeful. In particular, they point to the fact that, “Losing occupations does not necessarily mean losing jobs – just changing what people do.”
 
Just as Whittier argued, creativity, interpersonal skills, and the ability to consider problems from a variety of angles will become the most important skills in our shifting economy. And in an ironic twist, the jobs that seem to have the best prospects are the same ones that have long been maligned as “impractical,” jobs like artists, directors, fashion designers, and photographers.
 
And most optimistic was this point from Jonathan Grudin, principal researcher for Microsoft: “When the world population was a few hundred million people there were hundreds of millions of jobs. Although there have always been unemployed people, when we reached a few billion people there were billions of jobs. There is no shortage of things that need to be done and that will not change.”
 
But the moral of this story is not to pick one of the professions on that list of top 20 jobs least likely to be automated and aim squarely at that. The lesson is to focus on cultivating complex skills, and be prepared to evolve when necessary. Because the reality is, there is no completely safe career. We can’t predict the way the economy, the environment, or our society will change; we can only invest wholly in the things we do best as humans: imagine, connect, and communicate.  

Johann Koehler is a PhD candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Law, working on his degree in the field of jurisprudence and social policy. As such, he is one of my favorite people to discuss Supreme Court decisions and the prison-industrial complex with. But criminology wasn’t an obvious path for Johann whose story also includes an unexpected foray into comparative literature and an admittedly youthful dream of being a rock star. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
I'm not joking - I wanted to be a rock star. I was really into playing the guitar, and I was pretty good for my age. I was raised in a somewhat musical household, in the sense that my grandmother was a professional musician. She was a radio cellist, which was an acceptable job for a woman in 1960s, 1950s Ohio. She continued being a radio cellist up until the point when my mum was an adolescent. So much so that it inspired my mum to look to be a professional musician, so she ended up going to a very good music conservatory at Oberlin.
 
Mum originally wanted to be a concert pianist, and she showed up to the conservatory and within two weeks she’d been told by her professor that her hands are too small. And, secondly, she was walking down the corridors of assorted rehearsal rooms, and she thought to herself, "Well, if these people are the ones I'm going to be going up against, and a lot of the people coming out of here, even they struggle, what hope do I have?" She didn't give up in that moment - she ended up getting a degree in piano performance - but she double-enrolled at the accompanying college and got another BA in music history.
 
She ended up doing a Fulbright, moving to Germany, becoming a musicologist, meeting my Dad, and having me. And some 15 years or so later, she finds her youngest son, me, sitting across from her in the living room, with a cracking voice, and a pubescent disposition and attitude, and associated impetuosity, asking about whether I can go to this newly established, unaccredited, wholly disreputable music school in the south of England, that is marketing itself as a school to turn people into rock musicians. To my knowledge, no one of repute has graduated from that place in the intervening years. But she put the kibosh on that idea.
 
Really what they said was, "Johann, you're going to go to college. You can continue this, and your music is a passion that's really important to nurture, but it's a part, rather than the whole. Bring that enthusiasm with you, but bring it to college." And so, I got to college, and the first week I was there, I was sitting at a party talking to a guy who ended up being one of my best friends, who revealed in our conversation that his big passion was playing blues music. We spent the rest of the night playing with one another, and ended up having a band that was probably one of the most memorable experiences in my college trajectory.
 
How did you decide to attend Haverford College?
 
Haverford is a microscopically small, liberal arts college just outside of Philadelphia with a Quaker tradition. My family, back in England, is Quaker and that's how we heard about Haverford. And true to form, I even had my own brief dalliance with Quakerism while I was at Haverford, but I couldn't get over the God stuff. It turns out, the God stuff is actually pretty central and it was all the fringe stuff that I liked.
 
I went to one of those private high schools in London that imposed an expectation upon you that you go to a respectable, household name institution. And I never fit into any of that. It always felt somehow alien to me. I think there was something in the choice to go to an obscure college that was not just deliberate but, in fact, central to its appeal. Haverford isn't a place where anyone gives a crap about what your grades are, or certainly what your grades were, so you just don't talk about them. That was a really great palate cleanser after the stuffiness that characterized where I went to high school in England.
 
How did you choose your major?
 
I was pretty committed to doing a foreign languages and literature major. I'm thinking about how to frame this as a strength, rather than a weakness - I was more committed to my community than I was to my studies when I started college. Academically, the idea of charting a path of not least but maybe lesser resistance seemed really appealing to me. I’d had plenty of training in different languages and I was pretty literarily minded at that point, so I was going to do some kind of Romance languages major, French and Italian and German, some combination of white people studies.
 
I realized, somewhere around sophomore or junior year, that I really hated a lot of the literature that I was being assigned to study. It just didn't do anything for me. At the same time, I was beginning to associate with a bunch of people who were sociology majors. I decided to take a sociology class, really kind of on a whim, and started getting hooked. Then, by dint of Haverford having one of these consortium agreements where I could take classes at Bryn Mawr or Swarthmore or UPenn, I ended up taking a couple of classes at UPenn where they had a criminology department.
 
I remember sitting in a class with a professor who had this extraordinarily seductive way of selling the material. As a 19 or 20-year-old, being told, "Here is a serious policy problem. Here are some things that you can commit yourselves to to fix some of those policy problems," that will seduce any 19, 20-year-old. And I was not an especially politically engaged late-adolescent.
 
But, the next semester, I found myself taking a class on religion and prison in America, for which I was making regular trips to Graterford Prison. Graterford is Pennsylvania's largest, oldest, most secure super-max, just outside of Philadelphia, and we would go hang out with a bunch of guys who had been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. These guys, at least then, before the Supreme Court overturned the ruling, were going to die within those walls. And I, for the first time probably in my life, had a sense of professional, purposeful meaning.
 
I went back to that Penn professor and told him, "I'm interested - what do I need to do?" And he encouraged me to pursue this stuff at graduate school, which took me back to England.
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
 
I went straight into graduate school studying criminology at the University of Cambridge. So sociology takes as a premise that we are social beings, and in order to understand behavior, we have to understand, first and foremost, that social feature. There's an old saying that the psychologist will study what's between your ears, and the sociologist will study everything else. It comes from the belief that there's a remarkable patterning to the way people interact with one another. Sociology is the study of those patterns.
 
Criminology is, as it's originator first put it in the 1920s, “the scientific study of lawmaking, lawbreaking, and law applying.” It originates from the idea that criminal justice, like every other domain of public policy, is an institution that operates within an environment of scarce resources. So let's subject it to some kind of analysis where we can help figure out how people break laws, how we apply those laws, and how we help make society more just. Nowadays you have people who are interested in becoming cops or correctional officers or probation workers, and you also have people who are interested in trying to help refine the system, and people who are trying to ask questions about whether those tools of control are, themselves, the problem.
 
The department that I found myself at was very much committed to that same approach to thinking about the justice system that had first resonated with me while I was an undergrad. It was very committed to helping its students acquire the tools necessary to do that work of refinement. I completed my master’s degree in the summer of 2009 when the recession hit. So I had a really nasty time getting a job straight after that.
 
I was applying for jobs in nonprofits, civil service, think tanks, research institutes, essentially any kind of job that would allow me to use those kinds of tools that I had just picked up during my graduate education. So I found myself adrift for a year, before I eventually got a phone call, deus ex machina, saying, "Hey Johann, I've got some money for a research assistant working on a project helping build probation and parole systems across Europe. You want in?" And I said, "Absolutely," and, lo and behold, I found myself back at Cambridge.
 
In this instance, I was working to refine the operations of a bunch of Eastern European countries, which, in some instances, had no probation or parole system to speak of. You had kids being sent to prison, having awful things happen, and being released, having no connective bridge back to their community. There was no infrastructure or resource apparatus to speak of. So I got to be part of a project that helped advise how to go about starting to build systems like that from scratch.
​
I worked there for three years, and I still stand by the work I did on that project. But, it didn't occur to me at the time that there's something really strange about a 24-year-old kid sitting across the table from ministers of justice, counseling them about the direction that their justice policy should take. It didn't even occur to me in the moment that maybe there was something problematic about that.
 
At some level, this sparked a tension in my thinking, that maybe the style of policy reform that I was working to advance was somehow incomplete. What seemed not to add up at the time, was that the kind of work that I was part of viewed the justice system as a series of inputs and outputs, and that if you refine each little cog, each input, you get a better output. It's incremental, it's steady, but it's also very slow. And I was unsure about what are the questions that we're not allowing ourselves to ask? Like, for example, is this the machine that we actually want to be using? That seemed to me, at the time, not really a question that this whole style of policy reform was allowing me to ask.
 
And it was the growing sense of unease about the exclusion of different ways of thinking about the justice system, that ultimately led me to a point where, when my boss walked into my office and said, "Johann, I can't promote you any further. You need to get a doctorate. The question is, do you want to stay here in England?" I did not want to stay at that department, because I wanted to go somewhere that would allow me to think about criminal justice using a few more tools than the tools I was committed to at the time. The department that I find myself in now [at UC Berkeley] is one of very few departments that are equipped to help its students ask questions that seem less immediately exigent to a policymaker. For example, "Who's sitting at the policy table?” because that, too, is a political question. The degree program itself is called Jurisprudence and Social Policy, and it’s one of only two PhD programs housed in law schools in the United States.
 
Academia is a really strange profession in that it front-loads the hardest thing you do as the first thing you do. You basically have to start your career writing your first book. After that, everything just gets easier. I'm at that stage where all I have left is to write the dissertation. My dissertation takes as a premise that history works by accidents. That it could have very easily been the case that we didn't find ourselves in the position that we currently do, where it seems natural and inevitable that questions of justice policy, tax policy, homelessness, education, these questions seem like scientific questions to us.
 
But it could have very easily been the case that we think of those not as scientific questions, but instead as political ones. That we're making decisions about who we are in our decisions about justice policy. We're saying something about ourselves, our justice system, our values. And what's most ingenious about that move is that that's still a political maneuver; it just doesn't look like one. That's the thrust of the dissertation.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
Something that I've been thinking about a lot in the past few months is the sense in which so many things that occupy me over the course of the day are a commitment to leaning in to all of the stumblings that I spend the rest of the day trying to understand. It's as though those stumblings are, themselves, the feature, rather than some kind of incidental byproduct.
 
To set that in contrast to what isn't a stumbling are those people whom we all encounter who seem to have all of the answers ready. Like the way I was describing myself across the table from those ministers of justice; beware the 24-year-old that thinks he has the answers. Where I am now, it's all of those stumblings, all of those uncertainties and indeterminancies, that's the only bit that's fun. That's the only thing that I'm here for anymore. Value the discomfort. It's the only place where growth happens. 

Lindsey Vay is a third grade teacher at Uncommon Schools in Rochester, New York. When I wrote about the Holland Codes and the Strong Interest Inventory a few weeks ago, I realized that I had somehow never interviewed anyone who works as a teacher. So I thought, who better to talk to about the one profession we are all probably the most familiar with than my cousin, Lindsey. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 
When you were 17, what did you want to be?
 
That's probably when I first started to think about it. I liked science a lot, but I knew the doctor thing was not for me, that was not what I wanted to do. At the time, I taught religion classes and Sunday school so I wouldn't have to go to church (my mom made me go), and I taught dance as well. Those were some of the experiences I had already had teaching children. So when I started to think, “What can I do? What do I think I'd be good at?” those popped into mind.
 
And then I started to think about the teachers I knew. My family friend, Patty, is a teacher, my Aunt Colleen is a teacher, and I thought they had pretty nice lifestyles.
So I started thinking maybe I could be good at this, and that it would give me the flexibility in my life that I wanted. I wanted to be challenged and have a good career, but I really didn't want to be a workaholic.
 
How did you decide to attend Canisius College?
 
I applied to a bunch of places, mostly in the northeast, because I didn't want to go super far away, but I also didn't want to stay in Rochester. My final two choices were Canisius College and University of Vermont. I really liked Canisius’s campus, first of all; it was beautiful. It’s a private school, so they can spend a lot of money on that kind of stuff. But I decided on Canisius because it was in New York State, and getting my New York State teaching certification would be more beneficial than an out-of-state one. New York’s is one of the top tier certifications that you can get, and it’s accredited in a lot of different states.
 
How did you choose your major?
 
I went in as an education major, but when you’re in education you also need to pick a concentration. That could be science, history, literature, math, any of those subjects. I started as a science concentration, but I realized I was really interested in the history classes I was taking. I switched to history after taking a few science classes.
 
There are also a lot of different certifications you can get for teaching. I got two different ones in my undergrad, early childhood and childhood. I decided I wanted to teach all of elementary school, and the childhood certification only covers grades two through six. The early childhood certification covers kindergarten through second grade. So if you're not certified in early childhood, then you can't teach kindergarten or first grade; teaching early literacy is very different from teaching older students.
 
I considered tacking on a middle school certification as well for seventh and eighth grade, but I decided I liked the younger kids better. They’re really sweet, really cute. They love you for no reason. They still like school and want to please you. I really like when they're still sweet and innocent.
           
There's a lot of different coursework that you have to do, starting with observations and then going into classrooms two days a week. And then the further along you get in your education, the more you do in your classroom. And then finally, your last semester's all teaching. And then you do student teaching, so you basically take over the classroom. You ultimately have two classroom placements, and they try to get you into a mix of rural, suburban, and urban, different age levels, etc.
 
How did you get from college to where you are now?
 
I graduated with my bachelor’s degree, and then I had to do a bunch of tests and submit portfolios and stuff like that, and then I got my initial certification. After that, to get professionally certified, you need to do three years of mentored teaching and workshops, and you also need to get your master’s degree within five years. Then you can apply for your professional certification.
 
So I got initially certified, and then I was like, “Shoot, I don't feel like I can teach.” I was just nervous, and I didn’t know if I could teach by myself in the classroom, so I applied for grad school and I got on a bunch of substitute teaching lists. And I'm really glad I did it that way because I was still in school mode. I powered through my master’s faster than anyone else I know, taking six classes a semester and working all summer long. And I subbed full-time, but it was really manageable. A lot of times they gave me study hall, so I could do my school work when I was there too.
 
I got my master’s done in a year and a half. And I got it in special education, so that was a new certification. I took my graduate degree very seriously. I aced all my classes, I did all my work, I put my best effort forward. I also was in more of a professional mindset at that time compared to my undergrad, and I just felt more confident in myself.
 
After that first year of grad school, I started applying for every single job out there. Every suburban school, every catholic school job, every private school job, every city school job, and radio silence. It was a really tough time to get a job. And all of my friends were having similar experiences. I looked from spring to February, and I got my job in February. So, it took a long time.
 
I got hired at the Uncommon School, which is part of a pretty big network of charter schools in the northeast. There are a lot of misconceptions about charter schools because there are so many different kinds. All charter schools are free, and every single charter school is based on their charter. Our charter specifically states that we will service students under the poverty level, so we have 100% freedom to do that. So we take those kids and address that gap. We do long school years and long school days, and we have a very rigorous curriculum and very high expectations of our students.
 
They offered me a job on the spot, and I started working a week later. I got hired at the end of the school year, and I started as an apprentice teacher. I subbed for teachers, I did small groups, I co-taught. Then the next school year, we opened a brand new elementary school and I started a kindergarten classroom. And when we went to open the third grade, they asked me to run that grade level. So I manage all the teachers in the third grade. I coach new teachers, I travel for professional development and then I bring it back and then teach the other teachers.
 
I’ve been there a little over five years now. Because I'm a founding teacher at this school, I've been given a lot of support and a lot of opportunities to advance my career. And it's really nice that they invested in me. I feel like if I was at a more established school district, I wouldn't have had so many opportunities to move up, so I am appreciative of that.
 
Looking back, what seems clear to you now?
 
This is advice that I got from my sister, Kailly. During that time when I was searching for a job and coming up empty-handed, it felt so terrible and I stressed so hard about it. And she told me "You will find a job. Enjoy this time. Keep doing what you're doing, don't stop looking. But don't be so hard on yourself. Enjoy this time prior to when you enter the workforce because this will never happen again.”
 
Also, start every day new. This is always what I tell myself if the day before was bad or stressful for whatever reason, just start with your fresh, best self every single day and don't be too hard on yourself or others.
 
And I would say, think about what you think you'd be good at, and then think about what would make you happy. It's one thing to be happy with your job, but it's another thing to be happy with your life outside of your job. I love having time off with my job, always having Christmas off, having time off in the summer to spend with my family and friends. And I knew that teaching would give that work-life balance to me.