Bachelor’s in Anthropology: Awesome! Now what?

Picture this, I am 22 years old graduating from The Ohio State University with a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology, focusing on culture and medicine. “Now what?” A question I am sure was on the tip of both my parent’s tongues. First, I should share that I had aspiration to be a Sports Medicine Doctor since I was in 8th grade and had to do physical therapy on my hips (more on that in a wellness post), but I was discouraged by how many people were also going to school to do something with sports from physical therapy, athletic trainers and doctors. I felt like the field was going to be oversaturated and I wanted to make sure I could find a job after graduation…. So I picked Anthropology, I know but stick with me here. I bounced around a lot of different majors, trying out different classes and decided that I thought I would feel rewarded in my life to teach high school math. I had awesome teachers that always made it look so fun and I love the logic in math. Remember in “Mean Girls:”

I started taking math classes and really enjoyed it , but then I thought: I bet the pay won’t be very good and while money isn’t the most important thing I have student loans and want to be able to pay them back so I should look for something else. I am sharing this whole back story because I thinks its important for anyone in college reading this to remember that these thoughts and feelings of bouncing around are completely normal. There were so many class options and I honestly loved everything I took. I had so many brilliant professors that made all the courses so appealing to me which made it really difficult to land on a major and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Time was going by so fast and each semester seemed to end in the blink of an eye that all of a sudden I was done with my junior year and still had not declared a major… yikes!

I started to run the degree audit tool and plug in what classes I had already taken and run through different majors to see what I could complete in the next academic year. I was trying to follow a timeline to keep my loan amount under control; however, I don’t know that I would ever recommend this to anyone (more on my feelings about timelines later).

Anthropology was the winner! I combined the classes I had already taken and really enjoyed that also aligned with my goal to complete college in 4 years. I loved that I got to take a variety of classes to understand so many parts of the world from language development, cultural values and norms, archaeology and some evolutionary thoughts (since it is Anthropology after all). Perfect! I could continue to learn about all different topics and when I saw my advisor she said this is a lot of major courses that I don’t know you will complete by spring. But I knew I was going to graduate in The Shoe May 2014.

It was a lot of work and a lot of difficult classes but I did it! Now to find a job—I found myself wanting to be outside all the time interacting with people from all different places and have always been a big animal lover so clearly Park Ranger at a National Park was my calling.... this was prior to me watching Parks & Rec so when my friends said I reminded them of Leslie Knope I didn’t know what that meant and then I watched it to find out what a compliment it is to be compared to that character. However, the Grand Canyon was not taking applications at that time so I had no game plan.

Through my senior year I had gotten a job at a local medical group in the medical records department because the money was good and I didn’t have to work past 4:30pm or on the weekends allowing me time to keep my leadership positions in extracurricular clubs at school. It was at this job that I strengthened my love for healthcare and felt like I was making a difference with the patients I interacted with. 

I remember a conversation with one of my best friends Sam. He told me to picture the life I wanted from the house I lived in to the car I drove and the vacations I would take. He said now add up how much that lifestyle would cost to figure out how much money you would have to make to feel fulfilled in life and work backwards from there. This was by far one of the most influential conversations in my life.

I started doing my research and realized my resume needed a direction. What was I passionate about? What did I want to do 40 hours a week every week for decades? I had applied to hundreds (yes, hundreds) of jobs and when I would get called in for interviews I realized the interviewer could tell I didn’t know what I wanted to do because I did not have confident answers. I felt like I was coachable and just looking for any job that would hire me and had decent benefits. All in all I decided I was going to go back to school to get my MBA in Healthcare Administration. I took the fall to study for the GRE and had picked out some schools that had good programs I could afford. I also started volunteering at the Cancer Hospital, which I would continue to do all the way through my graduate program to learn more about the industry and delivery of different health services. This was a great experience that taught me a lot and gave me exposure to lots of different situations that I could talk to when interviewing.

I will write more about graduate school in another post, but will leave you with this: I now work at a large consulting firm and I got the job from a small conversation in an airport.