This essay was published in PsychTalk, issue 97, Sep 2020

The more reflective you are, the more effective you are!

– Hall and Simeral

The clock strikes nine. I look down at my train ticket – ‘Depart 09:00’ it reads. Already out of breath and filled with bitter desperation, I stand in the middle of Marylebone station. ‘I should have left earlier’ – I scold myself, while hectically looking for Platform 3. Then, I see my train. 700 feet away. I summon up all my strength and make a run for it. It’s so close and yet so far. With incredible luck, I jump on the train and breathe a sigh of relief. Despite the emotional intensity of these few minutes, my mind is immediately flooded with yet more anxiety: within the hour I will be arriving at the University of Oxford where I am to attend an interview for my MSc application. Three days later, I receive an email with a decision. After a minute-long feeling of stupefaction and with my heart pounding out of my chest, I open the email – ‘We are very pleased…’.

I have now reached another milestone on my career path. My feelings of uncertainty, trepidation and anxiety are tamed – for now. Although there is still a long road ahead, I have faith that the lessons I have learnt thus far are at the core of a mindset that can keep the monsters at bay. Here I reflect on the three most impressionable lessons from my undergraduate degree in the hope that they help us conquer the uncertainty of the future.

Lesson 1: Find your spark

Three years fly by very quickly. Before you know it, you will have to make a decision on what career path to take. I approached this decision by engaging with different areas of psychology to find what sparked my interest the most. I started off, as most psychology students, trying out clinical psychology. However, a volunteer experience quickly showed me that I did not have the qualities to handle that realm – the emotional toll was overwhelming. I then flirted with other areas of psychology – I explored health psychology, criminal psychology and social psychology. My explorations comprised of reading books, listening to interviews with experts and taking online courses. I also did volunteer research assistantships to get closer to some of the lecturers and ask questions. Attending (twice) the annual Careers in Psychology event, hosted by the British Psychological Society (BPS), was particularly valuable.

The lesson here is to engage with as many potential career paths as you can and do it quickly. Find your spark. You can read about an area, ask experts, volunteer, or go to career events. Your university might also have an employability office that can provide additional help – it is a great resource, so take advantage of it. In order to engage with different areas of psychology, however, you will need to go out there and seek opportunities.

Lesson 2: Be proactive

In retrospect, once I started exploring different areas of psychology, I realized there was another challenge: getting noticed by potential employers. What gave me an edge here, I think, was being proactive: not only did I have to find the opportunities but when I did, I had to go above and beyond what was expected of me so that I can unlock even more.

I started off contacting the headmaster of a private school and asking to volunteer as a teaching assistant during the summer after my first year. Later, in my second year, I secured two volunteer research assistant positions with two of my lecturers – Dr Oliver C Robinson and Dr Josh P Davis. Whenever I was given a task, I executed it with extreme urgency and utmost attention to detail. I consistently sought additional workload. The more work I had and the quicker I finished it, the more often I could report back and spend some time with my lecturers to draw on their expertise. Some months later, I discovered that the BPS offers an Assistantship Scholarship to lecturers to fund an undergraduate assistant to work with them on a research project. I wrote up a proposal and offered Dr Robinson to apply. Because he knew what I was capable of, he accepted zealously, and I ended up gaining research experience, which culminated in a poster presentation at the BPS Annual conference (Petrov & Robinson, 2019), and a follow-up essay for The Psychologist (Petrov & Robinson, 2020). However, I did not stop there.I kept seeking opportunities, and after Dr Davis spotted my consistent enthusiasm, he offered me not only a paid research assistant position but also involvement in a major international collaboration project, due to be submitted for publication with me as a co-author in the summer of 2020 (Davis et al., 2020).

Lesson 3: Embrace humility

One thing that sticks out in my proactive exploration of different career avenues is that a lot of my early opportunities are volunteer ones. Volunteering, I feel, seems to be explicitly encouraged, yet implicitly, it is interpreted as unpaid work. In retrospect, what helped me overcome this mismatch was a high dose of humility.

The humility was manifested in adopting a specific mindset. As an undergraduate with an almost empty CV, I did not have any skills, so employers, professionals or lecturers had no reason to pay attention to me. Indeed, I considered it costly for any potential employer or a mentor to invest time in me as the time they would spend training me to complete a task would be higher than if they did it themselves.

To get around my lack of skills, I leveraged a strategy of overpromising and overdelivering. I promised I would do things I didn’t necessarily know how to do within a deadline that I thought would be impossible to meet. These overly ambitious promises, combined with a desire to stand out, furnished an impetus in me to develop new skills efficiently and effectively.

Once I started developing valuable skills, volunteering started to make sense economically, which, in turn, made the unpaid work part of the equation evaporate. Specifically, with my newly developed skills and attention from potential employers/lecturers, I could now ask or seek paid work. For me, volunteering not only led to paid positions down the line but also the lecturers I volunteered for have been eager to provide me with more opportunities even to this day.

The bottom line

One distinctive feature we have as a species is that we know of the existence of the future and can plan accordingly. It was obvious to me from the start of my degree that there would be a lot of pressure to find a career after graduating, so I took steps to alleviate that. I explored different career paths to find my spark and adopted a proactive and humble attitude. These steps facilitated the process of developing key skills that would increase my career capital in the long term. For me, this is a liberating conclusion: adopting a mindset, based on the three lessons highlighted in this meditation, can make my future self’s life just a little bit easier.

References

Davis, J., Petrov, N., Donald, C., & Donald, F. (2020). Face Identifications in the Wild. Manuscript in preparation.

Petrov, N., & Robinson, O. C. (2019, May). What do dreams really mean? The relationship between dream content, age, recent experienced emotions and crisis episodes in adults. Poster session presented at the British Psychologyical Society Annual Conference, Harrogate, UK. tinyurl.com/up6y7tk

Petrov, N., & Robinson, O. C. (2020, April). Dreams and their relationship with waking emotions. The Psychologist, 33, 48–51.