Thinking About Working #16

Thinking About Working #16

Written by Noah Leavitt, Director of the Career and Community Engagement Center

Commencement Edition

I’m delighted that Commencement takes place this weekend. Congratulations to all students who have worked so hard to get to this moment and to all staff and faculty who have worked so hard to help our students make it through this year. It’s a grand collective effort!

Given this special season of looking backward and looking forward, today’s Thinking About Working is different from others this year. Readers will recall that I previously invited Whitman community members to reflect on the meaning of work and important work experiences that have influenced them. Today I have accepted my own invitation and am pleased to share the results with you (with thanks to David Letterman for the idea).

Here we go:

10. What early work experience provided excellent transferable skills for later in life?

While I learned a great deal from my early gigs as a paperboy, house sitter, lawnmower, summer nanny to the kids of one of the members of Blue Oyster Cult, and fry cook, by far my most influential early job was as a dishwasher in the Ithaca Country Club kitchen. I learned speed, consistency, precision, cooperation, good humor, a high tolerance for swearing and how to stay out of the muck (or at least keep it off my clothes)—pretty much everything anyone needs to know to succeed in life.

9. Before working in the Student Engagement Center / Career and Community Engagement Center, what was your favorite job in higher ed helping students prepare for their careers?

Being the practice interview coach for the University of Chicago undergraduates who were preparing to go into investment banking and consulting, two professions I had no understanding of (at that time). I had a wonderful tiny office under the sloping roof of Ida Noyes Hall overlooking the Midway and would ask the students tough questions while recording them with my trusty VHS camera so we could watch the recording and figure out how they were doing. (They were usually doing well even though they thought they were doing awful, a reaction I’ve experienced from Whitman students)

8. What job taught you a lot about being a supervisor?

When I was a community organizer in Illinois during the years immediately following the 1996 federal welfare reform, I had a supervisor who, despite being 200 miles away from me, constantly micromanaged me over the phone (thankfully Zoom didn’t exist), constantly interfered in my work and rarely let me make my own decisions. Since then, whenever I’ve had the opportunity to supervise someone I’ve tried my best not to be too directive. (One of the awesome parts of that job was working closely with a first-term state senator named Barack Obama to get some of our proposals through the legislature. I realized then that there are nearly always pluses and minuses to any job.) 

7. As a college Senior, what did you plan to do after graduation as a Philosophy major?

“Postgraduation plans?! What? Nobody ever told me I needed to know this now – HELP!”

(May 17, 1991, Bi-College News. You can find this online if you really need to…)

Little did I know then that my Senior thesis on aesthetics, Forging Ahead: Toward a New Understanding of Paintings, could have been the perfect foundation for a side gig in 2023 advising how to monetize deepfake technology. Grateful to my advisors Prof. Lucius Outlaw and Prof. Ashok Gangadean for their extraordinary mentorship and encouragement on that work.

6. What job do you think about every day?

Since graduating I’ve had 26 meaningful different professional jobs or internships—13 of them in the Walla Walla area since 2005 and eight of them right here on campus! Of all these, the most influential was my role as a VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America – the national service initiative before AmeriCorps) in the tiny coal town of Harlan, Kentucky immediately following college. That experience opened my eyes to poverty and income inequality in Appalachia and in the United States which influences me in myriad ways and informs how I focus my energy, time and finances to this day.

5. What is the most stressful job you’ve had?

I’ve been stressed in all of my jobs but the most existentially-challenging work that I’ve done was when I was lawyering at the Refugee Clinic at the University of Cape Town Law School while I was getting my JD. I was trying to help people who were fleeing civil war, carnage, brutality and unspeakable violence in their home countries reach South Africa, a place that sometimes but not always afforded them some measure of safety. If we weren’t successful we knew that many of their clients and their families faced retribution back home and sometimes even death. 

4. What metaphor for a successful workplace have you used the most to describe the CCEC?

The flywheel from Jim Collins’ classic “Good to Great” (everyone should read this).

3. Do you think ChatGPT and its progeny will change everything about work and working?

Yes

2. What headline would you like to see on the front page of the New York Times on May 15, 2033—ten years from today? 

“Southeast Washington and Northeast Oregon has become a much more just, more sustainable and more inclusive region thanks to the work of Whitman College.”

1. What is your favorite aspect of working at Whitman?

Helping our incredible, ambitious, curious, collaborative students appreciate how valuable their liberal arts education is for engaging in the world, living their values, and pursuing their dreams.

Whitties, as we approach Commencement I want to thank all of the readers of this column. Hopefully, this year’s 16 short reflections on the world of work have been informative and worthwhile. I welcome your comments about this series and also would love to hear ideas to explore next year. As always, please contact me at leavitns@whitman.edu and via my LinkedIn account. Keep thinking about working and I’ll see you Sunday in front of Mem!