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. My grandmother 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 the music conservatory at Oberlin.
 
Mum originally wanted to be a concert pianist. She showed up to the conservatory and within two weeks two things happened. Firstly, she’d been told by her professor that her hands were 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 could go to this newly established, unaccredited, wholly disreputable music school in the south of England, that was 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 my parents 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. He 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. Some members of 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 what’s clear to me now, in hindsight, was really just 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 LWOP sentences for kids, 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 its 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 have people who are interested in trying to help refine the system. You also have people who are trying to ask questions about whether those tools of control are, themselves, the problem.
 
The department at the University of Cambridge 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 with 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’ll 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. Like, 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.

The other day, my sister sent me a text saying, “I used to think that 22 was crazy old, and now I’m 21.” No doubt she was thinking of the Taylor Swift song “22,” which came out when Summer was a mere 15-year-old. And at 15, it is hard to imagine being 22. But I think there’s universal agreement that 22 is very young. Today is my birthday, and I’m turning 33 years old. I feel pretty good about being 33, but birthdays inevitably make me feel somewhat reflective.
 
33 is old. I’ve completed my bachelor’s degree and my master’s degree. I’ve been working in my chosen field of education for a decade. I’ve lived with roommates and had the opportunity to live alone. I’ve traveled to as many countries as years I’ve been alive. I’ve fallen madly in love and had my heart properly broken. 33 years is enough time to have a lot of experiences.
 
But 33 is also young. There are lots of things I haven’t done yet. Like write a book, or have a baby, or grow my business, or buy a house. I talked to my mom who, at 57, is a lot younger than many of my friends’ parents, but who’s also had two and a half more decades to live life than I’ve had. And in reflecting on her own life at 33, she could see how far she still had to go before getting to her life as it is now, from having her second daughter, to moving twice, to getting a second master’s degree and building a completely new career.
 
I think about this a lot as I interview people for When I Was 17. Some of the people I talk to are in the beginning of their careers, and some are at the end. And many people were not settled in their lives at 33, just like I am not yet settled in mine. It’s hard not to look forward and make predictions, to envision the success you’ll have and the feats you’ll have accomplished in the next year or the next decade. But I’m grateful to have been able to take my time in getting to where I am at 33, and I look forward to having new accomplishments to aim toward every decade from now. ​