Serendipity, Chance, What Have You.

So... I may move this blog to Wordpress. We'll see how it goes. Wordpress has a better WYSIWYG interface and some interesting stats, in addition to being able to publicize directly for Twitter. For now, I'm too lazy (read: I have a lot going on and you're lucky to get a blog post) to configure Wordpress to be "pretty", so we'll stay here for the moment (and having historical blog posts is pretty cool).  

On Serendipity 
So one of notable trends from GHC was something to the effect of "Men tend to overestimate their accomplishments and Women tend to underestimate their accomplishments".

This was reflective in undergrad too, where the talk was always how Freshmen hit their first C or D and the men go "Well the professor sucks" and the women go "Gee, I suck" and then drop out of Engineering (coming from High school students that typically got A's".

It's worth noting here that my entire life, I've been "one of the guys" - to the extent that when I was 4 my play group was me and 4 guys. Elementary school I was Captain of the academic team... for 4 boys, and one of their fathers stuck up for me 3 years later when we had a reunion and one of them tried to take the captain seat. (There's something to be said for having sponsors/allies/mentors male or female to stick up for you, and the "female" role of captain to sort out the boys' macho tendencies). It's also worth noting that because I was used to this "boy's world" environment, when I started college - I wasn't terribly inclined to seek out the women's groups. I didn't really see it as a support group I needed. By the time I was a senior, I saw the importance of mentoring younger women. As the ranks thinned out over 4 years of Tech Consulting, it definitely became apparent that having females with differing paths through the ranks was important.

So, there's now. I just took a position as IT Manager (more notes on that, and the transition, to follow). In my own experience, I always considered that I had a path I was following, but I had a willingness to jump through an open door when it presented itself to me, and waver from that path when such an opportunity would show up. That being said, I had to work really hard to get to the point that doors would open... but the actual opening of doors always seemed like "the right place at the right time" or somewhat serendipitous. I think this is the big difference - when it comes down to it, the Resume Titles are somewhat lucky, serendipitous, or somewhat by chance... but the content under the title is my own hard work, and the content under the last job was my own hard work that made it possible for me to be qualified for the next piece of work. So that's the long explanation, but the short answer would be "I was lucky" or "Serendipity" even though the root cause was probably "I worked hard" or "I'm a badass". Most guys would tend towards "I worked hard".

An exploration of my new job, and how I ended up there:
- I made connections from my previous job (successful networking)
- I was passionate about non-profit work
- I happened to reach out to contacts from previous job at a time where they were looking to hire, and a job was presented that would not have shown up in my job search (looking for the ambiguous "science diversity STEM outreach" job, and instead ended in "Totally leveraging your skill set non profit awesomeness"
- Family history of early childhood education involvement that made it especially intriguing
- I was successful at my previous job. Nay, I rocked out at my previous job.

That being said, rocking out at my job alone would not have led me to the place I am now - there's a huge amount of "right place, right time, right phone call, right person, overall serendipity" that went in to this. I feel like that's what tends to be the female experience - while you might be a rockstar and have been a badass at your previous job, it tends to be some amount of Serendipity (I'll say it's more than Chance) that leads to landing that awesome gig. Guys would tend to focus on that "I was a badass/awesome at my job" aspect where as the girls would say "while I worked hard, it wouldn't have happened if not for X random happenstance".