Connecting passion and school in 3 stages
Connecting your hobbies to your studies can boost your interview skills — and why NOT combine the things you love?
1: What are hobbies good for? 🤷
When school becomes overwhelming, I turn to my hobbies.
When I’m stressed, I break out my Inkbox freehand kit and give a friend a new semi-permanent tattoo. 🖌️ Creative design and the methodical use of my hands to bring it to reality soothes my nerves.
If I get overwhelmed, I hop on my bike and ride through local forest trails. 🚲 Nothing clears my head better than fresh air and adrenaline.
When I’m so bored of studying I can’t focus anymore (so pretty much every day of exam season), I take a break and jam out on the guitar. 🎸 After a couple songs, I feel tranquil and focused and I’m ready to get back to work.
The point is, all these little activities provide diverse ways to escape school work when it gets tedious. Of course, they’re also plain enjoyable!
Hobbies help you get jobs, too. 🏆
The very first question I was asked in my interview for at Uber ATG was, “Do you have any hobbies?”
I asked my interviewer-turned-manager Benjamin Himes, Autonomy Hardware Engineer @Uber ATG, why this question is so important.
He explains, “first, it disarms and helps to cut the tension; second, it helps to establish who you are as a person […] and helps with estimating how you’ll fit in with the team. Very few great things are created by a single person; a team that fits together well tends to be much more capable than a group of more-apt individuals who don’t mesh.”
“[… T]he technical aptitude of everyone I was interviewing was all quite similar, so it can help with edge cases.”
2: Why connect hobbies to school? 📒
Linking what you love with what you’re studying has a couple key benefits: you’re more likely to work on side projects when they’re more enjoyable, and it shows recruiters that you’re passionate about what you’re doing.
In my interview I listed my hobbies as expected, but since I had made the effort to tie them to my degree (mechatronics 🤖), I was able to expand deeper and touch on how each of them support my work skills.
I mentioned the semi-permanent tattoo robot I built with my talented classmates Urban Pistek, Krishn Kiran Ray, and Kathrine Von Friedl, and touched on the thrill of flying on the ice and the satisfaction of playing as a cohesive team in hockey.
3: Creating the Connection ✅
The best way to make your hobbies work for you is to actively develop projects related to them, like my tattoo-bot. However, entire projects require a lot of time and work.
One strategy to make this easier is to repurpose class projects that are mandatory anyways. The tattoo-bot was a summative project for one of our courses, where we had the freedom to decide what we wanted to build.
Even if you don’t have time to hobbify your projects, your hobbies can still make you stand out. In interviews or whenever a recruiter asks about your hobbies, instead of simply listing them, explain briefly WHY you like each one and why they should care.
For example, I loved being in EngPlay 🎭 because I got to try something new (I had never acted before) and because of how proud we felt when the production came together. Rehearsals ended up being far more time consuming than I had planned, so I had to adapt and improve my time-management a lot that term.
In those brief sentences, I’ve given a bit of insight into what motivates me: learning new skills and project completion, and I’ve hinted at a soft skill: time management.
To figure out why you love something, think about how you feel while doing it; what aspect are you most excited for? When do you feel happiest? 🥰
To discover the employable skills hidden in every hobby, think of what you overcame to pursue your hobby. Was there ever a time you were stressed because of your hobby? 😰 What was causing the stress, and how did you handle it? Essential soft skills like time management ⏳, conflict resolution 🤝, and creative problem solving 🔧 are great examples of skills you can develop while pursuing your passions.
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I wrote this as my first contribution to Augment Official. Be sure to check out our page! If you’re looking for more intern-focused media and spaces, check out intern.club, too.
