3 months living with Benedictine and Trappist monks – what could go wrong? Years back, in the early-after 9/11 era, I lived with Roman Catholic monks at Benedictine and Trappist monasteries from Canada, to South Carolina, to Massachusetts, to California. I started off the journey with a few weeks at an Ashram in Pennsylvania and finished it at a Buddhist…
Tag: Millennials
Life After College: Navigating the Road Ahead
You spent four or more years learning, studying, writing papers, taking tests, and achieving grades high enough to earn a college degree. Congratulations! But your journey is not over. In fact, now is when it really begins. After having professors motivate, encourage, and mentor you, now your fate is in your own hands. Next up is to navigate the world…
The Mindset of Career Transition
In the landscape of career advice, there’s tons of guidance out there on how to improve your resume, interview effectively, and how to stand out from the crowd of job seekers. While resumes and interview prep help professionals to market themselves effectively, when it comes to career transition, there are vital steps job seekers should ponder prior to perfecting one’s…
Cultivating Your Career Story
“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you now it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path. – Joseph Campbell Culturally, we are storytellers. We move through our lives listening to and narrating stories pertaining to our childhood, stories of how…
Priorities
Most of us tend to spend our days scrambling from one event to the next, be it work, meetings, or extracurricular events. We live in a time of slotting activities in and striving to accomplish our daily tasks. Although I attempt to let daily situations dictate my priories, whether it’s work, family, or play, often, the lines blur—is it more…
Hardwork, Hustle, and Grit
In life, we tend to see the finished product—a book, a presentation, a company that is successful, a car driving along on the road, runners crossing the finish line of a race. Unless it is your book, company, creation, or race, one rarely glimpses the effort or intensity of an endeavor. As a society, we are not privy to the…
On Being Great
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. – Mark Twain I’ve noticed a trend on social media these days in which some professionals regularly publicize how many followers they have, or promote their rankings, or note why they are…
Making College Years Count
(originally published in Huffington Post) Making College Years Count Years back, a college degree, which only a subset of society pursued, was the route to employment. If you obtained a bachelor’s degree, then you were almost guaranteed a job upon graduation, and that job was typically the stepping stone to one’s career. Times have changed. During the 2017-2018 school year,…
IMPACT
The past year, in my life as a professor, I asked myself daily before I walked into each class what my goal was. That kept it real for me. It helped me to get out of my own way, forget my to-do lists, and set the tone for each session. The goal, always, was to engage my students, share knowledge,…
Advice to Students: Dream Big
The end of the semester always makes me nostalgic and reflective of my own school days, when the promise of all that was to come was palpable. Throughout the school year, I’m privileged to be surrounded by college students, although some days, between teaching, office hours, and grading papers, the experience is reminiscent of trudging through quick sand. It is…