career development

Engineers and Scientists Need It, Too

Haig Chahinian

Today is the Storycorps-sponsored National Day of Listening, wherein Americans are encouraged to take an hour to record an interview with a loved one.  Coincidentally, earlier this week we interviewed our dad Leon for an upcoming episode of “Career Talk Live: And What Do You Do?” the weekly talk show on Manhattan Neighborhood Network. We learned so much about both his professional life and the world of work.

As a structural engineer, Leon was dedicated to creating new ways of analyzing structures. One of the crown achievements of his career was a paper he published in the Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics titled “Jacobi Method for Unsymmetric Eigenproblems.” We wish we could say more about what that means! In his own words, it was “a big contribution to the world of mathematics.”

Upon retiring from a multinational aerospace and defense corporation, he strove to continue building upon the paper he wrote. For more than ten years he worked tirelessly at it, and sought a Fortran compiler to help him through the project. As of today, however, he reports all but giving up on his endeavors. Why?

It turns out what helped him write this paper–for which he was credited individually–was the informal feedback and institutional support he received while working as part of a team at the aerospace company. The desk-side conversations, elevator chats and multiple technological resources the organization provided facilitated the completion of his paper. The lack of these elements in retirement have been a real barrier to accomplishing a follow-up.

So what can we learn from this? One: if you’re part of a work group, acknowledge the influence of your colleagues on your projects. Two: while you’re feeling appreciation for their input, go ahead and thank them verbally. And three: if you want to work during your retirement, seek social support to keep you on track.

We’ve had the impression that scientists and engineers can work in silos, that the bulk of their work is a product of their minds alone. According to Leon’s experience, this is not at all accurate.

Watch the complete interview when it airs in December. “Career Talk Live” can be seen Tuesdays at 6:00pm ET (GMT-5) on MNN2 at mnn.org.

How have your teammates subtly influenced your projects?

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: Books Revisited

Haig Chahinian

This feature is called “Books Revisited” because the titles are typically out for a while before we get to them.

In 2007, Daniel Pink spent two months researching the manga industry in Japan. Fast forward a year, and The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need was published.

We want to tell you about it because upon finishing the last page, we thought of about ten people to whom we’d like to give this book.  It’s what great non-fiction in 2010 should be: concise, insightful and from the heart. Yes, non-fiction from the heart!

We aren’t completely sure of Pink’s motivations — is he an avid manga reader? does he love comics in general? — yet a career advice book presented as manga is certainly novel. Plus he accesses his experience in Japan and uses it to interesting effect.  That he’s the first writer of a manga-inspired professional development book suggests the idea may be born from the heart, rather than the product of a trend.

Listen to what Pink reveals about Johnny Bunko on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show”:

We could repeat in this post the six (6) main themes the author outlines in his text. However, we’d be doing our readers (all 4 of you!) a disservice. Viewing each page comprises an emotional experience of processing the ideas presented, to the extent that you’ll likely retain them long after you’ve put the book down.

Have you read it? What do you think?

Layers of Identity at Work

Haig Chahinian

Dr. Pauline Park has an impressive professional history. Among many accomplishments, she co-founded the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) and the Queens Pride House, a center for the LGBT communities of Queens. She’s a trangendered Korean adoptee, and we’d say 100% American. Dr. Park’s path illustrates the way she has integrated into her career some salient facets of her identity.

We sure have alot to learn from her example.

Read the post in which she works with her gender, sexual, religious, ethnic and family identities: “Finding the Authentic Self: Coming Out as a Transgendered Korean Adoptee.”

[Photo courtesy]

Let’s Talk about Sex(uality)

Haig Chahinian

This story has legs — last week’s Village Voice featured Elizabeth Dwoskin’s cover story “Too Hot for Citibank?” about Debrahlee Lorenzana, a strikingly attractive young woman who claims to have been fired from the financial services firm for being too sexy. Since the story’s initial publication, the New York Post, Gawker and The Early Show (whose video is embedded above) have joined the discussion, and yesterday in The New York Times Maureen Dowd weighed in on how beauty can impact individuals in society.

Within all the chatter, however, a key question has yet to be asked: how can we work with our sexuality–rather than against it–in business?

According to Lorenzana’s story, it seems her physical appeal may have helped her build business. The Voice reports that in April 2003 the Municipal Credit Union named her “sales rep of the month;” in November 2003 the Metropolitan Hospital in Queens recognized her for “providing world-class customer service;” and in August 2006 she earned a Customer Higher Standards Award at the Bank of America.

At Citibank, she “went out every day and looked for business…then clients would come into the branch asking for her.” Yet in the office, ultimately her sexual energy was killed, as she was removed from the organization along with any potential new clients.

As human beings, we hold the spectrum of humanity within ourselves, and this includes sex. As a career counselor, I’m interested in how this aspect of our selves manifests in the workplace.

The complexities of Debrahlee’s story are difficult to acknowledge, since they hit on a number of hot-button identity issues. Dwoskin writes:

Lorenzana [is] five-foot-six and 125 pounds, with soft eyes and flawless bronze skin, she is J.Lo curves meets Jessica Simpson rack… [Her] mother is Puerto Rican and father is Italian [and she] came to New York from Puerto Rico 12 years ago. She was 21 and pregnant, and had a degree as an emergency medical technician from a technical college in Manati, a small city…

While the racial or ethnic identity of her colleagues is not referenced, it seems that we’re talking about working–or in this case, avoiding working–across differences of race, ethnicity, socio-economic status and gender.

It’s imperative for us to talk about how these dimensions of our identity come into play on the job, so that we don’t act on them unwittingly, and more important, so we can leverage all parts of ourselves to help solve the increasingly complex problems we face in 2010.

Lorenzana’s story contrasts with that of Danica Patrick, although there are significant similarities, to be explored in another post. As well, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” will influence how human sexuality impacts the world of work — also to be explored in an upcoming post.

What do you think about how we access and leverage our sexuality at work?