Life Design

tl;dr: What made graduate school pleasurable were my kind and gracious classmates. I should make finding gracious people a priority in choosing where to work.

That tweet refers to my troubles in reasoning about what job I should take. I spent the last couple weeks trying to figure out where I should go. To be meta about it, I’ve also been trying to figure out HOW to figure out where I should go.

Today I drew a table in an attempt to model how I should think about choosing a job. Along the top, I list growth, do-gooder-ness, money, network, and flexibility as criteria. Down the left I listed companies I am considering. Then I put in plus and minus signs in the boxes for each company/criteria pair. Chart is not shown to preserve my chances with certain companies.

This was a typical system thinking place to start. All models are wrong, but some models are useful right? This one was particularly useful because immediately the results ran counter to my intuitions. The companies that felt appealing didn’t rank quite as high as I thought. Others that felt unappealing ranked high. It was easy to see why the unappealing companies ranked highly. They ranked highly because they had more pluses in the practical criteria i.e. money and network. The method I used overweighted easy-to-measure criteria like these.

It was less obvious why the intuitively appealing positions didn’t rank highly. My list of criteria must be missing something. So I thought more about why I enjoyed graduate school so much. One session of freewriting on 750words later, it emerged that I enjoy working with kind and gracious people, and that my classmates were an exceptionally gracious bunch. Returning to the choosing-a-job thing, finding the right kind of place with the right kind of people was unrepresented in my criteria, but is clearly important.

The question now becomes, how do I find out whether the people at a potential company are kind and gracious?