Category: Guest Posts

by Kevin

Our next guest article comes from Peter Miller, Network Engineer at 38th Cyber Installation Group at Tinker Air Force Base. 

Peter has recently transitioned from his college life to the working world. One of the challenges of this transition (among many) is dealing with social isolation, especially during a pandemic. How can a young professional attempt to maintain past friendships while building new relationships? Therefore, I asked Peter to describe these challenges in more detail and provide tips on building a fulfilling social life post college.

by Peter

Like every good question, the answer to this blog’s title is not a simple yes or no. You will lose touch with many friends, and even some of your closest friends right now. That is a weird and lonely process, but I think it’s kind of inevitable to the life changes you go through after college. On the other hand, you can also make new, lifelong friends after college, who you share important goals and life experiences with. After 18 months or so out of college, I think it may be helpful to record some of my experiences, surprises and advice.

I hope to achieve two goals in this blog:

1) I want to reassure you that the social dread you feel is completely normal, and there will be some loss of your existing friendships. That’s also normal, and not a personal failure.

2) I want to encourage you about your own possibilities. It’s definitely a new kind of friendship, but post-college social life can be fulfilling in new and exciting ways!

To point 1 (the bad news):

You will lose touch with a lot of people. I don’t think I quite appreciated how different the student daily routine is from the working adult life. This has been exaggerated for me, as my job had a lot of business travel for the first year, and then a pandemic in my second! But the central idea here is still true: you simply will not meet and talk to a hundred people every single day across classes and extracurriculars. The effort of keeping all those social ties by  texting or setting up coffee dates is just not feasible for more than a few months.

Here’s my advice: Start thinking now about which relationships are really, really important to you. Who is it that you share everything with, that gives you good advice, and will always help you out of any mess you put yourself in? For me, that’s about four people, and at first I thought “Oh no, I only have four friends!” But it’s more than enough, in reality. Close friends are special, and take a lot of investment. Put an absolute priority on continuing to share life with those few people. It will still hurt to lose a lot of the casual friendships built on video games, social clubs, or study groups. But it will hurt a lot less if the most important parts of your emotional life don’t lose support.

To point 2 (the good news):

Finding a place to fit in as an adult, not a “kid” or “student”, has been really exciting and meaningful to me. I would never have guessed two years ago that most of my friendly conversations would be about the mayor’s school board appointment or the best mortgage broker. But it’s kind of cool to see yourself have new concerns, ideas, and challenges to overcome. It’s even better to share those milestones with your (previously mentioned) best friends and coworkers. 

My advice here is this: Make friends at work! 

You’re gonna be spending a lot of time there, and these are people you will naturally build a lot of memories with. I have been very blessed to work in an office with some really amazing, inspiring people. My work friend group has a wider range of ages, backgrounds, and life goals than my college friend group. I definitely wish I had been less intimidated by my office job at first. Ultimately, everyone there wants to enjoy their work hours, share some gossip, and unwind with weekend hangouts. This seems obvious, but it definitely took down my anxiety of inviting myself into those existing groups. I have learned a lot from my mentors and peers at work, and it’s so exciting to think that for years still, those connections will get deeper.

In summary, social life after college is very different, but completely worth it. I personally have made some mistakes in this transition. I still am working on trying to maintain some friendships I shouldn’t have let slide. I sometimes feel lonely and isolated at the end of a day, especially working from home this year. But I have made some amazing lifelong friends in just my first two years at work, and I can’t wait to see those relationships blossom for a long time! I have continued to share life with my closest and most caring friends from college. It takes a lot of initiative, just like the transition from high school to college. But the possibilities for deep, lifelong friendships are just around the corner. Go get them!

by Kevin

Welcome to the first of our (hopefully) several guest blog posts from young professionals! These guest bloggers will provide you with a perspective from a professional who is going through similar challenges as you are right now (or perhaps you will in the near future), and more importantly, they’ll share how they overcame them! Challenges will include finishing college, deciding on moving forward with an MBA (or where to attend), finding that first job, or transitioning to the next one, and more….these guest bloggers have just about seen it all--and survived! 

Our first guest blogger is Ornella Gashumba. Ornella has had an exciting journey which has led her to a role as Senior Strategy Consultant at the Chief Analytics Office at IBM. She is now living in New York (although that was a challenge in itself, as she will describe), but that is definitely not where her journey began. From Rwanda to New York (and a couple of midwestern states thrown in): she has made some difficult (yet exciting) decisions (with a little mentoring help) that have positioned her for success. 

Specifically, I have asked Ornella to tell us about the steps it took to begin a career in consulting. I also asked her to walk us through her process to narrow down the firms she considered. If you have any specific questions for Ornella about her journey or want to learn more about a career in consulting, please email me at kevin@mentoringyourmission.com. Ornella would be happy to provide additional information. So, I will let Ornella take it from here… 

by Ornella

I graduated from Oklahoma Christian University (OC) with degrees in Math and Finance. While at OC, I interned at BancFirst and met Kevin through a mutual friend and mentor. Luckily, Kevin also went on to become a mentor of mine. Shortly after graduation in 2016, I took my first job as a financial analyst for a startup in Oklahoma City. Though I thoroughly enjoyed my experience in that role, I knew I wanted exposure to many business models and types of business problems in a relatively short time early on in my career. Business consulting seemed like a good avenue to acquire such experience. I knew that every year, consulting companies recruit about one third of business school graduates in the US. So, in order to get a foot in the door of the consulting firms I was interested in joining, I started researching graduate business degrees. I enrolled in the University of Notre Dame’s Master’s of Entrepreneurship in 2017.

While at Notre Dame, I worked part time as a market researcher and an entrepreneurial- lead helping student and faculty startups flesh out their business value propositions and their go to market strategies. Additionally, I wrote my thesis on the ways through which a mature consulting company can leverage cloud computing to expand their client base from typically large firms to small & medium businesses. Finally, I practiced case interviews and took advantage of the career services offered by the school such as networking sessions, and resume review sessions. I also attended career fairs, and they turned out to be the easiest way to meet recruiters from the consulting firms I was hoping to join.

While going through the interview process with consulting firms, I realized that I prefer going home to my own apartment every day over the typical travel-heavy consulting lifestyle. So, I started focusing mainly on companies with internal consulting arms and got an offer from my current employer and moved to New York. Although I love New York now, apartment hunting was a challenge especially because I was new to the city. Over the summer after graduation, I spent a couple weeks at a family friend’s house in Queens and researched housing online. I scoured through multiple apps to find an apartment within my budget as well as a reasonable commute to my future office. When I had a few options selected, I reached out to my friends and future coworkers who already lived in New York for advice on which neighborhoods were most fun and accessible. After visiting a couple apartments and neighborhoods in person, one apartment in particular suited my needs so I signed a lease and finally had a place to call home. 

As I look back on my experience as a strategy consultant for the past 2 years, I am thankful that many of my expectations for consulting were met. One of my favorite things about consulting is the opportunity to work on interesting projects with a group of very smart people from all nationalities and educational backgrounds. In my team, we use advanced statistics and machine learning methodologies to solve business problems. One of the perks of consulting is the option to easily rotate from project to project. Over the last two years, I have been on projects ranging from forecasting my employer’s quarterly revenue, to recommending optimal project staffing levels for our services business. In my experience with consulting, projects can be challenging because they require learning about a new domain very quickly and delivering results. But that’s what makes it also very rewarding. Finally, consulting projects tend to move from a hypothesis about a problem, to developing a solution collaboratively and presenting it to stakeholders. Through these project iterations, a consultant grows their business acumen, develops skills in data analysis, critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork and communication, all of which are valuable in any role long after one exits consulting. Although I do not plan to leave consulting as of yet, I am glad that my consulting career will have equipped me for the next step on my journey.