All I need to know I learned from Bryn Mawr: Maximizing Your Liberal Arts Education
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The lessons I learned from going to women's liberal arts college and advice for students looking to make use of their liberal arts degree.
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All I need to know I learned from Bryn Mawr: Maximizing Your Liberal Arts Education
- 1. All I need to know I learned from Bryn Mawr: Maximizing your liberal arts education Alexis Baird
- 2. My Journey Linguistics Major Product Manager at LinkedIn
- 3. My Journey Southeast Asia and existential crises/soul-searching Graduate school and more existential crises/soul-searching Move to San Francisco and start working for Bing doing computational linguistics
- 4. Lesson 1: Learn how to learn
- 5. Lesson 2: Do sh*t that scares you
- 6. Lesson 3: Don’t be afraid of other women
- 8. Lesson 5: Pursue lots of interests
- 9. Lesson 6: Raise your hand
- 10. Lesson 7: Do your research
- 12. Lesson 9: Believe you’re awesome
Editor's Notes
- How many seniors do we have here? I’ll be talking a bit about the lessons I’ve found in my personal journey but the first thing you should know is that my own personal trajectory did not actual look like this.
- It looked more like this. At Bryn Mawr I took everything from afro-latino literature to evolutionary biology before deciding to major in linguistics. In fact I took pretty much everything EXCEPT computer science and math. So I graduated and went to nominally teach english in Vietnam. Mostly I screwed around for a year. I traveled a bit around SE Asia and decided I really wanted was to go to graduate school. I thought since I had this linguistics thing, I might as well make it useful by getting a computer science degree so I could do computational linguistics. I enrolled in a masters program at Penn designed to be a BS and an MS in just two years. What I decided in that time was that what I really wanted was to NOT be graduate school. But I managed to get through those two years with my masters and some technical skills. I then moved out to San Francisco, having some vague idea that I wanted to be working in tech doing computational linguistics. During my time at Microsoft, I transitioned from more computational linguistics to being a program manager because I thought it would give me more control over After three years with Microsoft, I put together a LinkedIn profile
- The most valuable thing your liberal arts education will give you is the ability to learn new things. This might not be the kind of thing you can put on your resume or LinkedIn profile but it’s one of the most important skills to have. No one can take classes that will perfectly prepare them for the job they’re going to do. You’re going to be in many situations that are unfamiliar and asked to do things you don’t understand. But you’re Bryn Mawr students. By God, you know how to research and study. My own experience in graduate school. Learning doesn’t apply to just once you’re in a job.
- Bryn Mawr is the perfect place to begin practicing taking risks. I can’t emphasize this enough. It’s so important to train yourself to be comfortable being uncomfortable. For me, this was taking an economics class that I didn’t have the prerequisites for. And studying abroad in Cuba rather than Spain (where I had been before). And going streaking with my rugby teammates. I also joined Mujeres when I
- Do they still play “I will not be afraid of women at May Day?”. Internalize this one. The women you work with are your allies—not your competition. If you treat them like that, they’ll act like that. Use your network. I promise you, the good old boy network is still very real. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t leverage your own network. The Bi-Co alum network is a great place to start.
- This goes with taking risks. You’ll fail. You won’t get a job you interview for. You won’t pass the bar. But who cares? Practicing that feeling of failure doesn’t come easily to Bryn Mawr women but it’s so important.
- This balance is not only going to make you a happier, saner person—it’s also going to make you more successful. One of the reasons I was so excited to move to San Francisco was for the biking culture. Once a week, I try to ride the 40 miles to work instead of taking a shuttle. There’s a whole sub-culture of people doing this including several coworkers. It gave me a chance to get to know a bunch of these coworkers and when I go to ask them to do something, it makes working with them a lot easier. Same with the book club I’m in. Or the after-school group I used to volunteer for. All of these are potential conversation starters with your coworkers that make it a lot easier to be effective at your job. Also, I’m a firm believer in the fact that this kind of balance makes you a lot happier and healthier.
- Bryn Mawr women are really good at this.
- Raise your hand if you’ve written some sort of research paper in the past year. Another thing Bryn Mawr women are really good at. This is a huge asset in the job search. Start by applying those research skills to simply finding out what’s out there. Reach out to alums or family friends in jobs that you have never heard of but that maybe had the same major as you, and then ask them if you can interview them about their job. Then, once you get a job interview, do your research. Learn what you can about the person or people interviewing you so you have something to talk to them about. Learn everything you can about the company or organization you’re interviewing with.
- Bryn Mawr women are also really good at this. It doesn’t matter whether that problem is
- Perception is reality