110 • JO-NELL SIEREN

So in your experience, what do you find to be the most necessary ingredients that help generate the best out of people, the best collaboration, their best creativity? How do you manifest that, especially with younger students, younger people that maybe sometimes lack the confidence to?

Oh, that's good.

That's a good question.

Like how would I, in a way, how would I advise students?

Yeah, like what do you find, what have you found in your experience, the things that need to be in place to make sure that everyone feels supported, encouraged, and capable of doing their best work?

think sometimes where people feel where students but in particular feel feel intimidated by what to do next is just lack of context they don't know what they don't know and this kind of goes back to this idea of trying to show them or help them see it so I think a lot of my a lot of my method with this was to try as much enthusiasm as possible to say to a student where do you see yourself or where do you want to be what could this be for you and then follow in like that's Following a design process, right? I think that's pretty similar.

So it's the idea of having the empathy to understand, like, where do you fit? Like, where does this, if it's wanting to be at a particular place or a job, really understanding it and really doing conducting that research into defining a point of view around it.

Because all of the materials you create, all of the things that you're trying to build, that's prototypes, right? That those are things, those are artifacts that you're creating in response to something.

And I apply what you're asking here.

I keep thinking of helping students understand how to get a job and how to get a job doing something they love and how to understand that it is more than just you are hired to do a thing, but you are part of a team and part of a culture and part of a company and what those things mean and how you can get a glimpse of that through research and then a point of view of where you fit in and what your materials might look like and then The other thing is it's through demonstration.

So it's instructing somebody how to read, how to conduct that research and what that can look like.

I will, I don't know if this part answers that question as much, but it just made me think of something I think is incredibly important.

And that is like you, you spend time in school and you're learning skills and you're applying them to your projects and your portfolios.

Even if you have experiential learning and team-based opportunities, project-based things that you're doing.

That's all getting built and you're building up again, that point of view in your portfolio.

And then you'll have a resume and you'll have a cover letter and you'll have a strategy for you're going to apply for different companies.

But the thing that I think is really hard that doesn't get talked about enough is you have to also be building those materials, but then also building your relationships.

So almost every job that I've ever had.

was connected to somebody who even just what was on a resume and a paper, right? It could have been a referral.

It could have been like just a, Oh, highlight a gentle look at this, or it could be somebody I know who came back to me and ended up at Northwestern because Eric Friedman, who oversaw a career center at Columbia while I was working there is working at Northwestern and told me about an opportunity.

I was actually hired as a consultant initially and for some presentation design sort of work.

And really, I became aware of an opportunity and then really thought about how that would fit into what I was doing.

And I think that relationship building, that work on your network is incredibly important.

And I was, even with the students that I'm just getting to know within the engineering design world at Northwestern, I found myself in a similar kind of dialogue with them.

You have to get out there.