Blog Post 3 – Academic Work Inventory

English has been valuable to me personally in terms of individual development and creative development, but it has been extremely viable for me professionally, considering that I am planning to work in a career that is extremely focused on constant reading, drafting, and analysis, down to the most minute word. 

As a lawyer, I will need many of the skills depicted by the texts we’ve read (Anders’ “You Can Do Anything” and Madsbjerg’s “Sense-Making”), but the two most important for me will be Anders’ ideas of the “Rapport Sector,” and “Reading the Room.” As a lawyer, I plan to work in end-of-life law. This means that at the most basic level I will be working with people who are planning for death, people concerned with their legacy and their past. This means that I’ve got to be able to work with all types of people and I need to listen to them to discover exactly what they want. I need to be able to develop a rapport with my clients so that they will be open and honest (especially because the issues are typically sensitive, revolving around family issues or regrets). I also need to be able to read the room – I will be dealing with family members and other influencers, as well as other attorneys. I will need to be able to take all of these influencing factors into consideration while also remaining impartial.

I have learned many of these skills from being an English major undergrad, but there are three projects I’ve produced that showcase these skills:

1. The Oral Histories of the Holocaust Project
2. My Internship
3. My Bachelor’s Essay

1: the Oral Histories Project: 

I enrolled in a small Jewish Studies class where each person was matched with a Holocaust survivor or descendant of a survivor, and we were set to interview them to learn about their personal story of survival, their experiences in immigrating, and their time as a South Carolinian. Although I knew a lot about Holocaust history, something new that I learned was how to listen without a script – especially with an interviewee with a voice as powerful as David Popowski. What I mean by this is that I learned how to listen fully without anticipating what was coming next and without focusing on what I was going to say next. I had been learning this skill for a while, but it culminated during our interview. It wasn’t necessarily new knowledge about the world, as I’d heard people talk about this forever, but it was new to me in the sense that it had been hiding in plain sight, covered by my ego. I had created a four page document with tons of questions and pathways to take, but after we got together, he threw everything off the rails. I didn’t even really get back to “leading” the interview until halfway through, but it was absolutely worth it. 

This practice shaped my own disposition and translated to my career path invaluably. As someone working with end-of-life patients, most of them realize that there is no fix. Most people then want a presence to be there for them and to listen. I don’t have it perfect, though. My ego still gets in the way at times, and sometimes I am simply too nervous about being perfect that it backfires. But this skill will work not only for end-of-life care, but any other career path I go into. It is always a good skill to be able to make people feel seen and heard.

2: My internship with the Virginia Attorney General

For summer 2023, I interned with the Virginia Attorney General, working with victims of violent crime. This wasn’t really something that I wanted to do (why didn’t they put me in the health law sector?), but it ended up being incredibly valuable for my career path. My job was to comfort victims and explain the appeals process to them. I was generally their one link between the person who changed their lives in a horrible way, and to justice. That sounds pretty lofty, but it really was often the case. Most of the people I worked with had zero experience with the legal system. Further, many of the clients were of different ethnicity, faith, and culture than me – which is exactly what Madsbjerg talks about with their idea of “Culture – Not Individuals”. We have to look to bridge the gap between peoples and see why people act the way they do.

3: My bachelor’s essay: “Jewish Views on End-of-Life Care”

My senior year bachelor’s essay is a literature review, survey, and interview collection that I have been working on for the past year and a half. This work is listed under sociology – it’s not a typical bachelor’s essay for an English major. It has been a ton of work, but what I’ve learned is that my skills from English are vitally transferable to other fields such as sociology and data analysis. Further, this project embodies Madsbjerg’s idea of “Thick Data – Not Just Thin Data” – I’m working beyond the statistics, gaining a holistic understanding of Jewish people’s views on end-of-life care engaging a more human experience, rather than an answer to my question on a scale of one to five. 

Many of these English values are the same as what I discussed in my first blog post – the value of an interdisciplinary degree and the value of an empathetic degree that allows one to work with people from many different worlds. What’s so interesting is that these values are distinctly human – the value of connection, of listening, of noticing, of being. That means that values and viability are often quite closely connected, which is something important to think about for us humanities students.