I was invited to be part of the anthropology career day on April 13 at my old faculty in Leiden. Despite the fact that I had planned to eat cake all day (due to some serious birthday-reasons), I took part and was given a great gift: INSPIRATION!
I started blogging about anthroprofessionals because of my own quest to what distinguishes me as an anthropologist. What will I be able to bring to a / any workplace that makes me stand out? I never took time to reflect on this and it was never stimulated to think outside the academic box. But, for the future anthropologists times have changed, hurray!
Here’s a little recap of the day (photo credits go to Simone van Dijk, thank you!)
The day began with some workshops about, for example, pitching and building a decent résumé. I tuned in for the speeddating part of the program. I can’t deny I felt a tiny bit intimidated when I received the list of other speeddaters. All of them where a few (or a million) steps ahead of me in figuring out their career path. ‘But hey, at least the students will have fun when they arrive at my table’
The speeddates were very inspirational. Why did the students choose anthropology? What were their specific interests and how were they planning to translate all of this into a career? I hope to have shown that you can apply anthropology in many different careers. I work at Effectory, a company that specializes in employee satisfaction research. With my background I approach ’employees’ the same way as I would approach a group of indigenous people. How do they give meaning to their work or what types of relations are at stake and how could this be improved? As an anthropologist you can always add value by putting your anthropologists’ eye to work. So search for that angle and you will always have an interesting story to tell. FLAUNT IT!
And of course there were drinks afterwards! I’ve met some great alumni’s during the ‘borrel’, more on them in later posts