Sunday, October 17, 2010

Non-Traditional Employment, Part II

You might recall I wrote a piece about non-traditional employment a little more than a week ago  and posted a link to a Businessweek article that featured ~20 recent graduates and their back-up employment plans.

One of the vignettes that caught my eye was of a University of Washington (my alma mater) MBA student named Eddie Minkoff.  He listed an interest in Product Development but when his plans didn't go as expected, he ended up climbing mountains all over the world--sounds like my kind of work!

This last week I tracked Minkoff down and asked him about his journey and where he ended up.  Here is a snippet of our conversation:

EM: The short answer is I did end up travelling after finishing up my internship at T-Mobile, ultimately spending 5 months in Iceland, East Africa, India, and Nepal. I came back to Seattle in February and the job market was still bad. I took a mountaineering course and got involved with a second non-profit called Intercity Outings, which is a part of the Sierra Club that takes disadvantaged K-12 students on outdoor trips to gain an appreciation for nature.

The last component is that I'm working as a contractor for Microsoft right now in Product Development for the Bing search engine. Still shooting for the product management in a consumer company path, but nothing there yet.






3 comments:

  1. I really liked the article you linked to in part one of this series. I think it's important that MBA realize that, while having a narrow focus is great for achieving a specific goal, their skills and talents put them in a position to do a lot of interesting non-traditional jobs. Chances are we'll all switch careers at least once (probably many more times) and it's worth considering that in our plans.

    Good stuff.

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  2. Hey Brian-- Thank-you for the post. I do think people lose sight of the fact that an MBA, while a graduate degree, is still a generalist degree. In fact, Harvard doesn't even offer specializations because they want to produce all-around quality managers.

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