Nurture the Intra-preneur Within You

Being either corps members or alumni of Teach For America, we represent a new generation of professionals that embodies the independent work attitude:

• creative
  
• risk-tolerant
  
• unafraid of authorities
  
• seeking meaningful work
  

These are the same entrepreneurial qualities that many self-starters and intra-preneurs possess. Rather than letting these qualities go to waste, we can sharpen them and apply them to make us more successful in our career endeavours. When I was at University of Wisconsin-Madison, I attended a week-long summer entrepreneurial boot camp program (Ref. 1) that was designed for graduate students in sciences and engineering. With its densely packed daily schedule and a mountain of reading material, this boot camp felt like the Summer Institute. I learnt a great deal during this week-long program:

• doing quantitative market research
  
• writing a business plan
  
• presenting an elevator pitch
  
• reading financial statements
  

It whetted my appetite for more. In the semesters following, I took an entrepreneurship class at the business school and competed in a state-level business plan contest. While I don’t currently own any start-up businesses, I still apply those same entrepreneurial principles at work to improve the quality of training service that my department provides internally and to customers. I also freely offer feedback and assistance to anyone who is interested in starting a business.

If you are interested in learning the ropes of business development, you have many resources. For example, the Kauffman Foundation offers three FastTrac courses (Ref. 2) that help entrepreneurs to hone their business skills. Business schools near you offer entrepreneurship and management classes as well, and these places are great starting points for business networking.

References:
1. Wisconsin Entrepreneurial Bootcamp: http://www.bus.wisc.edu/web/
2. Kauffman FastTrac: http://www.kauffman.org/entrepreneurship/FastTrac.aspx

(Originally published on 27 May 2011 on TFANet)

The Career Fair Phenomenon (for STEM)

Teach For America-Atlanta hosted an opportunity fair to provide alumni and corps members with insights on various career opportunities in and outside the classroom. Being an advocate of spreading TFA influence across all career sectors, I volunteered to talk to attendees about pursuing a science/engineering career post-corps commitment.

I should have done my due diligence about the opportunity fair. Every other presenter was representing a public or charter school and arrived with banners and signs, brochures and T-shirts; I was the only presenter working outside the education community, and I only had my business cards. Hardly any fair attendee saw me or wanted/needed to talk to me.

At that moment, I rediscovered three lessons that I had previously learnt empirically:


1. If you want a career in engineering, technology, or sciences, you need to apply to graduate school.

Engineering and technology firms will never send recruiters to a TFA career fair. It is simply not worth their investment to come to a TFA fair when they can easily pick up several hundred eager applicants' résumés from a university career service center (although Cisco lets hired candidates defer employment while they are in Teach For America, you don't see Cisco recruit corps members at TFA opportunity fairs, do you?). To get the attention of a company that you want to work for, you need to put yourself where the company casts its net.


2. Start planning your exit strategy from teaching and build your professional network.

Teachers attract teaching jobs like magnetic south poles attract north poles, because highly qualified teachers are hard to recruit and retain. Therefore, opportunities that present themselves to you at fairs and conventions will ALL be education related. Lucky for you, no matter what field you choose after your corps years, someone else will have done that transition. Opportunities absolutely exist for you that are outside teaching. You only have to seek out the people who have done it and ask, "How did you do it?" and "What advice could you give me?" Look around: this is what the career blogs and the Career and Leadership Center are for.


3. Speak up for what you look for and pitch the hard skills you possess.

I don't believe all that every fair attendee wanted was to teach in a new school or to start a new charter. Why were there only education organizations showing up at the opportunity fair? The answer is all in the balance of demand and supply -- your demand and our supply.


If you don't ask to meet alumni or recruiters in the field or the company you want to get into, then we won't know to come to you. At the same time, your opportunity fair is a networking event, not a hiring interview. Pitch yourself, ask for advice, and build connections instead of brochure collections. Even if I don't know what opportunities I have for you, I might know someone else who does. Making referrals was how I got into graduate school; it's also how I am at my current position.

(Originally published on 23 March 2011 on TFANet)