A Terrible Time to be a Generalist
I am twenty-two, a recently graduated engineer, and thinking of buying a van to make into a mobile beer truck. I’ll drive it across Canada, serving cold ones and providing complimentary lawn chairs, sanitized after each use, for some socially distanced socializing. Any investors?
I had some plans, as did everyone, for my time after graduation. My itinerary was to work at a hospital for the summer, travel with friends, then head to Asia through an incredible opportunity with the Cansbridge Fellowship. A big adiós to those dreams, and I have returned to my family home during this pandemic. I am currently sitting on the couch on which my dog used to people-watch through the window. I’ve picked up a similar habit — the mail should be by any time now.
My ideal internship in Asia had been to work for an NGO in healthcare. I thought of the internship like a polar dip; I was hoping to dive in deep, hit that freezing cold reality shock of “What the hell am I doing?” and hopefully coming out with some insight like “Wear a wetsuit next time, ya spoon”. Comparable to the wetsuit knowledge, I was hoping to gain insight into my next career defining steps through my Cansbridge experience. Would I learn a career in Global Development was for me? Sustainability? A Masters in Business? However, due to the circumstances, instead of being tossed solo into India or Cambodia to gain some of this Gandhi level insight, I’ve been doing some at-home career searching.
My mind has been flipping between an ever-growing list of careers ideas. I’ve spanned fields of global engineering, public health, medicine, sustainability, conservation and business. I’ve also grown a small garden and learned about all the ins and outs of hands-on carpentry by helping my parents renovate. Turns out it takes exactly 2 engineers and a lawyer to change a light bulb.
I am interested in everything. Yet, it is “a terrible time to be a generalist”. A wonderful mentor of mine tossed this advice in a chat we had last week. She also mentioned that advanced degrees are essentially required to work in the fields I’ve locked my eyes on. I feel like the squirrels being launched from Mark Rober’s “Squirrelapult” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFZFjoX2cGg&t=1s check out 16:35 and also the whole video). I have personal goals that stay consistent, like the importance of genuine impact and working in teams, but how do you choose a path?
After a month of these circular thoughts, I have gained two important insights.
1. As my little brother likes to say — “Calm down.”
To me, that sounds like I’m going to have to bully him into the backseat of the car to restore the natural hierarchy of siblings. Yet, grudgingly, it has some insight. I have consistently put myself under the stress of figuring out my life. Eventually, I started considering pathways I didn’t even want to be going down. So, I took a day off. No technology, no career analyses, no cover letters. I zoned my focus to what was right in front of me — a coffee, a good book and a beautiful day. The effect was huge. Emphasis was restored on the roots of my values, realigning my sense of direction.
2. Having a focus does not eliminate peripherals, especially in an increasingly complex and interconnected world.
My last class of my degree is an elective called the ‘Social Determinants of Health’. These are defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “the conditions which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life” (WHO | Social Determinants of Health, n.d.). The course stresses that good healthcare does not equal good health. Health inequities are the source of the poor health of a population, encompassing income, education, housing, employment, gender, racism, and childhood development. Consequently, becoming an expert on any determinant with a respective career pathway would supposedly achieve the goal of improving a population’s health. Throughout the course however, the edges between these variables blurred. Each determinant seems to connect. A relevant example was given in ‘13th’, a documentary streaming on Netflix recounting the racial effects of the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. The documentary shines light on the ‘Three-strikes law’, ‘Mandatory Minimums’ and the 1994 ‘Federal Crime Bill’ which led to mass incarceration that was “overwhelmingly biased towards people of colour” (DuVernay, 2016). The racial injustice caused by these events may have, as well, led to a lower income for dependent families and resulted in single parent households. Implications branch, contingent with the social determinants of health.
These overlapping issues call upon us, as individuals, to be open to learn, to listen and to change. Becoming an expert in one field builds the resources, the knowledge, and the ability to contribute and lead within an industry. You become an asset, a necessity, instead of an extra set of hands. Having the ability to transform industries with knowledge of the foundation, using upstream thinking is essential to avoid surface level ideations. Further, pairing expertise with a broader set of knowledge, tying in connected fields, allows individuals to grow to be both impactful and well-rounded.
Our world is increasingly complex, growing equivalently with our accessibility to knowledge. In a looping search for where I may be most helpful — my takeaway to is learn with an open-mind, take breaks, specify in a field that grabs a strong interest and continue growing a broad foundation of knowledge that will, almost certainly, find relevance.
References
DuVernay, A. (2016, September 30). 13th.
WHO | Social determinants of health. (n.d.). WHO; World Health Organization. Retrieved June 15, 2020, from http://www.who.int/social_determinants/en/
