Doggy Paddle: Transitioning from the Undergraduate Pond to the Seas of Corporate America

By Shilpi Chakrabarti

Transitioning from a student into a professional is not an easy task. I made a lot of rookie mistakes when I started my career. I'm here to tell you all about my mistakes so you don't make them when you enter the Corporate World!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626759749

Book preview

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Prologue

I’m not the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg. There are times when I aspire to be them and then there are times when I’m happy to be just me. Know that this is not one of those self-help books written by famous billionaires who tell you the secrets to their success. To begin with, I’m not a billionaire. I think I have about a hundred dollars in my bank account. Every time I read books like Good to Great or Rich Dad; Poor Dad, I patiently sit through the first few chapters, then wonder why I’m not rich by the fifth chapter and, finally, contemplate setting the book on fire and throwing it over my balcony, hoping it hits somebody on the head. So to reiterate: this is not a self-help book, I’m not a billionaire or famous, and I like to set things on fire.

I graduated from Carnegie Mellon in the year 2006 – a great year for the Steelers! As I walked the snow-laden streets post Super bowl and saw people flipping over cars and setting them on fire, I wondered about entering the real world. What is Corporate America like? What are people’s expectations of me? Will it be hard to not have a summer vacation anymore? Am I ready? What can I do to prepare?

I majored in Electrical and Computer engineering in college. I spent years sitting in a lab coding and debugging. I rarely saw sunlight and I spent more time with my lab partner than I did with my boyfriend at the time. When it was time for me to choose a career path, I decided not to be a developer because I was a social creature and I didn’t think a developer’s career path necessarily involved things like client interaction, presentations, sales, marketing, etc. Okay fine, I also sucked at being a developer. So I went into consulting—specifically, Information Technology.

Thus, I am your average working professional. I am in the exact same boat as you are: I’m building my career out and hoping that it goes to greater heights. I cannot offer you inspirational advice like Sheryl Sandberg can. But simply because you and I are in the same boat, I may have something to offer you that Sandberg might not. I’m not that annoying elitist who tells you what to do or what not to do. I don’t even know what elitist means.

But as I look back in my career, I often wished and hoped that I had a mentor to warn and guide me through my initial professional years. Sandberg lucked out and got Larry Summers as her mentor. But who do we have for mentors? Jack Daniels and Jose Cuervo don’t count. So allow me, your friendly colleague, to take you through my heady successes and debilitating failures (ok fine, mostly the debilitating failures) so you may look out for yourself when you start on this journey through the Corporate World.

Chapter One

What I Wish I Had Known

Today, I find myself stopping and trying to look back at that fork in my life where I chose to go towards ‘what is’ instead of ‘what could’ve been’. Thoughts are creeping up; a noisy, clamorous litter of ‘what ifs’ and ‘buts’ that are the offspring of Retrospect—what a wonderfully useless thing retrospect is in the present.

I’m in my late-twenties, I’ve been successful, I’ve failed, I’ve survived, I’ve excelled, I’ve learnt and I’ve forgotten. My backpack contains tightly packaged knowledge, fresh fruits of labor, and a few packs of insights. But my backpack is resting quietly on me and I’m resting quietly on a bench in Central Park because, really, the economy is in the worst shape since the Great Depression and as I ponder on how to inject momentum back into my career, these thoughts start to creep up.

Could I have been more proactive?

Did I major in the right thing? Would I be in a different position if I had studied something else?

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