Your Career and You: "There is no 'I' in 'We'"

The thought hit me tonight as I was mentally reviewing projects that I'm involved in that I'm not the only person with some "skin" in one or more of these "games."

The reason I mention this is my feeling that some of my own friends are feeling a little lonely as they pound the pavement in search of a job or an internship or whatever.

It's easy to feel like there's no one else in the immediate galaxy who you can turn to when you either are unemployed after having worked a while or are just embarking on that foray into the professional working world.

But you're not in this alone, as I try to reassure my students both at Curry College, where I oversee the undergraduate Public Relations concentration and teach most of the PR courses, and at Regis College, where I teach part-time in the graduate Organizational and Professional Communication area.

Don't get trapped in the "I can't find/don't have a job" quicksand. Instead, try to think of it as a team effort in which you can and should turn to your friends/teachers/mentors for some help/advice/reassurance...how can we help you get through this?

Why? Because, again as I've said a bazillion times before..."We care."

I love it that a friend/former student connected with me a couple of days ago to ask my advice on a cool job offer that she's considering. It's moving her into a little higher level of involvement on the PR side of things, and she just wants to make sure she's heading in the right direction with some ideas she has.

Sure, she could just wing it and hope that she gets it right...and she most likely would. But she's thinking like a professional and asking others... members of her extended "team"...for advice.

It's funny (not "funny ha-ha"..."funny strange") how we so often tend to think after completing a major life-step like graduation from college that the connections we made...the friends we so treasured...the teachers for whom we developed respect...are no longer valid.

They belong to "then," not to "now."

Nothing could or should be farther from the truth. In my world at least, a "friend" is someone I can turn to half a century later for advice. Should be the same for you.

So get out of the "I am in this all alone" syndrome and accept the "Together, we can get through this" mantle of reassurance.

We're a team here...and there is no I in we!

"You don't live in a world all alone. Your brothers are here too."
Albert Schweitzer, On Receiving the Nobel Prize [1952]