Internships and Vocation

Mr. Miller is a lot of things: financial advisor, parent, hunter, Christian. He’s the father of one of my best friends at Wheaton, and was kind enough to entertain the idea of mentoring me for this management class.

While I knew Mr. Miller before this project, he was extremely helpful in answering questions I had about vocation, the subject of this first blog post. To paraphrase our conversation, I pressed him as to when he knew what he wanted to pursue a career in financial management and what his career trajectory looked like post-college. His answers were interesting, largely because I chose business-economics as my major for its ambiguity (in tandem with marketing and accounting classes). Our experiences thus far have been somewhat similar (we both made money growing up through seasonal arbitrage, and always had an interest in financial analysis), but differ in that he assumed the latter would largely factor into his career choice, and I have no such premonition.

One thing that struck me as particularly interesting was the rapidity with which the world has changed since Mr. Miller attended college—when he entered the workforce, many job postings were found in the newspaper, jobs were low-commitment for employers (classes were often paid for out of pocket, and salaries were based on commission), and regional firms dominated financial management. Some things haven’t: college students still have no idea what they want to do, assume they’re locked into the same job for life, and believe that they’re prepared to succeed in the real world through application of theory they’ve spent the past four years learning.

Mr. Miller’s recommendations were simple: decide what types of things interest you, and be willing to put in the work. If your career path is something interesting to you, life is good. A book he recommended, “What Color is your Parachute?” should help narrow the search, he offered. We chatted about internships (I’m looking at an out of major job to facilitate growth), and he mentioned that Chad (his son) and himself were looking at unpaid opportunities, as smaller companies offer meaningful work out of necessity and baptism by fire provides a fantastic opportunity to see the inner workings of business. Right before we ended the call, he offered a resource I’d encountered in “Tools of Titans,” by Tim Ferriss—a website called angel.co (AngelList). AngelList offers listings of notable venture capital firms, a fantastic resource for finding companies that would love free help, despite not having the time or resources to market “internships” online. He also mentioned SCORE (service core of retired executives), whose free consulting services are targeted towards small, struggling companies, other companies in great need of cheap support.

In short, I don’t know what line of work I want to pursue, and that’s ok. The best we can do is explore, jump into the fray, and build up relevant skills in the process.