-: My advice to students who might wanna get
into tech, or marketing, or education,
or all of the above as I have,
is first of all to trust that if you follow
your passion it's gonna work out,
and I know you might be at a stage
where you're even trying to identify
what passion is in the first place,
but for me it was very clear.
When I was a student here,
I coached basketball at the YMCA every year,
I did a ton of volunteer stuff with kids, right?
I was in the comm school and interned on Wall Street
as a trader before my fourth year,
and then I came out did Teach For America.
So I think like, it was always clear to me
that I needed to do something that was somewhere
around the education system,
but I wasn't an education major, right?
So I think often times it's easy to worry about, you know,
I need to take this step, and then this step,
and then this step, but Steve Jobs said
in a famous graduation speech, "You can't connect the dots
"of your life and career looking forward,
"but trust that they will connect in reverse."
I'm also a huge believer in the power of LinkedIn,
I used to work there,
I started the college student team there,
but this is a great tool to start networking
and building those connections
that are gonna last you a lifetime,
and really it's about building that network
before you need it.
Comms schools helped me a ton,
the biggest way in which it helped me was probably, frankly,
getting into business school at Berkeley, at Haas,
and then feeling like that whole first year of my MBA was,
I already knew that stuff, right?
It had been four, five years prior,
but I felt like that we had actually done a deeper dive
than to a lot of those basics as the comm school,
and so I kind of felt like
I could really do career exploration,
I could really network,
I could really enjoy the experience of not having to work.
I remember going for long bikes rides
along the San Francisco Bay 'cause I wasn't stressed
about my accounting homework like everyone else was.
So for that I was very appreciative,
but also the comm school itself is a great network,
it's been a value to me time and again,
and it's amazing how many comm schoolers,
not just UVA grads are all around.