Click Your Fortune #2: Imagined careers - John Werner

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Click Your Fortune is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure style series that literally feeds questions from students to knowledgeable experts around the world. This intro video explains it all: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/click-your-fortune-episode-2

This episode features the professionals listed below answering dozens of questions submitted by students from all over the world. Got a burning question? A hero you'd like to see interviewed? A career you would like to see explored? Suggest and vote up ideas for future click your fortune videos here: https://community.ed.ted.com/teded/topics/suggest_questions_careers_and_people_for_the_next_click_your_fortune_episode

Adital Ela: Sustainability Designer
Sandra Aamodt: Neuroscientist; Author
John Werner: Leadership Team, Citizen Schools; Research Scientist, MIT
Alessandro Centrone: Vice President of Sales & Distribution, Steelcase Inc.

What careers did you imagine for yourself when you were in grad school?

When I was little, my mom said,

"John K!"

(My dad was Big John, I was John K.)

"You'll make a great engineer."

And so, for a long time, I was like,

"Yeah, I'll make a great engineer."

Sometimes I forgot what that word was

and I'd say, "Oh, my mom believes in me,

I'll be something great."

But I really didn't know what an engineer was,

and I never really got the memo

of how to become an engineer.

I didn't know any engineers.

My mom and dad were both lawyers,

everyone they knew were lawyers,

I didn't know what an engineer was.

Turns out my uncle actually was an engineer,

I've learned,

but he lived in Schenectady,

which I didn't know where that was.

I didn't spend much time with him.

So, I went to high school and I graduated.

I went to college and I graduated.

But instead of diving into grad school,

I just started being an entrepreneur.

I went into education

with all these other teachers

and all these other clinicians

and all these other MSWs, social workers.

But I wasn't a clinician,

I wasn't a teacher,

I was an entrepreneur,

and I wanted to change the next generation of schools,

and I realized that by being a little different

than the community,

that was sort of my grad school.

And so, I worked hard,

I started an organization,

I've grown it.

You know, there are 500 people,

$35 million operating budget,

8 U.S. states.

I still didn't go to graduate school.

My graduate school was running an organization.

And then in 2008, when I was an old man,

I went to graduate school.

I got a fellowship.

I became an officer of an elite university,

Harvard University,

and I got to take courses

in every single graduate school.

I took seven classes at Harvard Business School,

six classes at the Graduate School of Design,

a class at the School of Public Health.

I went and lived in Favelas in Mexico.

So, I could have gone and got an MBA

right out of college,

but I would have been a dime a dozen.

Instead, I was one of ten mid-careers

at this great university,

and I was seen as an asset,

not just this, a lost leader,

because the graduate school needed money

to pay for the graduate students.

So, if I were to give some advice on career stuff,

don't just dive into graduate school to get a credential

because you don't know what you want to do.

My brother got a perfect score on the LSATs

but took a year off going to law school

because he didn't know why

he wanted to go to law school.

So, I just dove into education,

built something really special.

In doing so, I built up a network

that was pretty freaking tremendous.

And I think in the next generation,

folks should think about

how they can be a connector of people

from different places.

And graduate school,

you can go there and build a network,

but build your social graph by activities

and by your reputation

and by collaborating.

And graduate school can get in the way of that.

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