Your next chapter begins tomorrow

Today I’m sitting in a lecture hall looking at the faces of my students as they attempt what is, for most, their last exam ever. Some look self assured, some look nervous, all would rather be somewhere else.

It makes me think back to my last exam ever. It was a macro economics exam. Let’s just say, with a marketing degree and a submajor in tourism and PR, I was not an economist.

There were tears for the final half an hour as I struggled to wrangle my answers into something, anything, that made sense. I had this awful sense that I wouldn’t get through – despite studying hard in the lead up. I silently begged the university gods to take pity on me and let me scrape through.

Suffice it to say that I made it through that one last exam – just! The first time. After 7 years (a degree change and a lot of part time study), I was out!!

And my new shiny career awaited me on the other side.

Shiny but terrifying

To be honest, that was almost as terrifying as the economics exam. Actually, possibly worse. Because at least, if I didn’t succeed at the exam, it was only another 3–4, albeit awful, months to redo.

But a new career was infinitely scarier. We were talking about the rest of my life here. I didn’t want to stuff that up.

Not quite what I was expecting

As it turned out, within a month of that final exam, I got incredibly lucky. I found a tiny advert (yep, it was the olden days) for a grad to work part-time in a PR firm. It was small, just 2 people in the Sydney office and a team of about 6–8 in Melbourne.

The role was not sexy – it wasn’t full-time, or extremely well paid, but it was great. And, it was exactly the start I needed.

Within 4 or so months, I was full-time, working on tourism strategy for a foreign government, working with the senior partner on a thought leadership program which then turned into a merger & acquisition plan for another client. I was 2IC on everything I worked on. Turned out that small teams are amazing for delivering great hands-on experience.

I moved from account manager to account director to senior account director. I led new business and I loved it. The work I did was instrumental in a much lauded Golden Target award.

In fact, two years later, when a much larger firm tried to head hunt me for a lucrative role with a pay bump of $40K, I turned them down. Well, for the first two phone calls anyway.

Opportunities often arrive in disguise

So why am I telling you any of this?

It’s to say that opportunities often arrive much differently to what we expect. A non-sexy part-time gig didn’t look terribly flash, but it turned into one of the very best experiences I could have had. I’m still in contact with my old managing director some 20 years later and I’ll be eternally grateful for everything he taught me.

There’s no luck about it

Was it just luck? Finding the ad maybe – although I was looking hard.

But being prepared to go for the interview wasn’t. Being prepared to accept a part-time job as a foot in the door wasn’t.

Neither were all the hours of hard work I put in along the way. Nor all the extra curricula reading of my industry journals I did along the way. And my preparedness to learn from my first very crappy attempts at serious ghostwriting by lining up what I’d written and what the editors actually printed, marking up the changes and trying not to make that mistake again. Don’t think you’d call that luck either.

A few parting words

So graduating class of 2017 – I wish you all the very best with your careers. I hope that you found the beginnings of your calling as I did, at uni. And that your calling fulfils you in ways you can’t even imagine at this point.

Be prepared to fail. Be prepared to suck. Be prepared to continue learning – forever!

And just remember – ability counts. Effort counts more. Attitude counts most of all.

Go forth – be awesome.

Kristin Austin is a long-time lecturer at The University of Notre Dame Australia where she heads up the Public Relations degree. She also runs KAMCT – a marketing agency that specialises in bringing big company marketing strategy and implementation to small professional services businesses and global healthcare companies.

She can be found at www.kristinaustin.com