Building Something One Person At A Time
Posted on 18. Aug, 2009 by Jared Degnan in Careers, Rants
I recently had an encounter with some undergrad business students that I thought would be awesome to pass on – particularly if you’re looking for ways of giving back on a professional level. It happened on a recent trip back to Washington DC for my business fraternity’s bi-annual conference.
The trip made sense on a couple of levels, including the fact that the last time the conference came around was right before the start of MBA orientation. Since then, I really haven’t had that much time to dedicate to the organization. This irked me a bit, particularly because I before business school, I was an advisor to Howard University’s chapter, allowing me to lend a hand to bright, ambitious students looking to excel in the world of business.
Now that school’s over with and my MBA diploma sits patiently in a moving box until I figure out what to do with my life, I decided to really try to evaluate my options for getting back involved. Going back to advising a single chapter is appealing, but ultimately I wanted something bigger, something grander; something that would allow me to work outside a single geographic location.
The answer came to me not in one of the numerous conference sessions or even networking with some of the more established members of the organization. Instead, it happed right after dinner when I was chilling out in my room and talking with some students from Louisiana.
One of them was a general management major and was worried that, even going into her senior year, she really didn’t know what she wanted to do after college. As I talked with her, I couldn’t help but think of all of the things I wish I new going into my senior year.
Though I was wary of trying to dole out any particular advice, especially since I am still in the final stages of the job search, myself – I did want to communicate to her the questions I wished I had asked before I graduated. In particular, I told her I wished I asked about what job titles should I be looking for and how I could start building my resume with independent projects for firms similar to those I would want to work for.
Soon enough, I realized that this was it – this is what I want to do. If I could make it a point, every day, to help just one aspiring mind around me – I could be happy. In fact, even after she left, the excitement about this particular revelation continued to evolve in my head as I sorted out the particulars.
It wasn’t another blog and it wasn’t another media mention that did it for me – it was in the passage of knowledge that I found a much more inexhaustible excitement.
If I left the conference with anything, it was with this feeling that I had tapped into something really interesting. I had re-discovered the simple power of one person making a difference for another. Lastly, if there was one thing I wanted to with my involvement in the organization, it is to pass on the excitement and encouragement of knowing what one student could do with just one person’s knowledge.
That being said, here’s my call to action: get involved and find a place you can share your knowledge with even just one person. That is the surest way to make an impact and who knows…even change the world?
