“Hold on a minute,” my coworker interrupted, putting down her coffee cup, “what do you mean ‘I know how to deliver a baby’?”
I shrugged, “well, if everything goes alright, it’s not terribly complicated. It’s not like I’m going to walk into a hospital and start doing it for fun though, this is only in case of emergency.”
“What kind of emergency could happen where you would need to be the one to deliver a baby?”
“Well, in my last job, I spent a lot of time in the woods without cell service, so…” I shrugged again, “you’ve got to be ready, you know? If an EMT will take two hours to get there, you don’t always have that long before something needs to happen.”
“Chris, there’s a hospital across the street.”
The Elephant in the Room (or Blog)
Every time I start a new job, I find myself having to explain an off-handed comment that I’ve made about another strange, surprising, or seemingly irrelevant experience I’ve had, as you saw above. Some of these have been pretty easy to explain (I took a wilderness emergency medical course that included delivering babies) and some of them have been a bit more complicated (The reason I know Bison have sensitive hearing is because of one time I worked at Bison auction where we had to corral them by shaking a soda can full of rocks. But it had to be the right brand of soda. If you picked the wrong brand, they simply didn’t move because the sound wasn’t quite annoying enough.)

Of course, here at Binghamton I haven’t chased any around any Bison with a can of rocks (yet), but it is still one of those unexpected experiences that helped me make it to where I am today.
In that vein, I’m going to go ahead and assume that since you are reading this, you’re thinking about the future. Maybe you are just doing some light reading as you take a bus to Oakdale Commons, or maybe you’re in the early part of your Senior year thinking oh no, oh no, oh no. In either situation, the proverbial elephant in the room is this:
What’s next?
That question can spur excitement, apprehension, or even digestive distress. And it makes sense, it’s a big decision, with a lot of factors and a lot of considerations to be made. Bearing that in mind, I have some good news, and some bad news.
The good (and bad) news is that your answer to “what’s next” is probably going to change at some point, so don’t worry too much. Instead, you can decide to set yourself up for success by gaining some experience that can be applied a bit more broadly.
According to research by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), resumes that demonstrate skills such as communication, adaptability, and technical knowledge tend to be what employers are looking for. This tells us that these often soft skills, can be essential when it comes to getting even considered for a job.
These exact skills are ones that tend to appear more readily when you are engaged in something like an Internship, Study Abroad, Community Engaged Learning, or Research Opportunity. In fact, these experiences are broadly called High Impact Practices because they are so effective at developing these types of skills, and that isn’t just Binghamton terminology.
Similarly, my experience has been a bit eccentric, so I’ve spent a lot of time convincing employers that an unconventional experience is actually exactly what they are looking for. Think about it this way, while shaking rocks at Bison sounds (and is) funny, you’re also practicing communication skills (with large and occasionally hostile ‘coworkers’ whom do not share a common language), adaptability (finding, evaluating, and usage of the most effective tool), and technical knowledge (I won’t mention names, but the rocks never fell out of my can).
In fact, it’s these types of unconventional experiences that pretty much determined my entire career for me. So while the corralling Bison and delivering hypothetical babies are maybe a bit extreme, it’s important to consider that just because you think an experience is totally irrelevant to your plan doesn’t mean it actually is.
Let’s take a look at what happened to me.
Relevant
In undergrad, I assumed I was going to be a field biologist. I had a plan, I was executing the plan, and all was right with my little corner of the world.
I started off at a community college taking as many science classes as I could possibly fit, and then transferred into a university for the last two years. During my junior year, I was finally getting into all of the really advanced coursework, but doing fieldwork in a city wasn’t quite what I was looking for.
Which is why I was so excited about the summer. I was scheduled to take a three week field course in the mountains and I was ready to get a real taste of what it was like to be a field researcher.
So imagine my surprise when I got to the first day of working on our group research project and… I hated it.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved being outdoors. I loved the plants, the insects, the mud, the wind, the rain, the little bits of dirt that always got stuck in your mouth when eating trail snacks. My teammates were solid, and we generally laughed a lot while doing the work. Even doing the number crunching at the end was fairly enjoyable, which I hadn’t expected.
Unfortunately, with all of these individual pieces I enjoyed, I just didn’t like the process. I loved the plants, but I hated having to count out every individual quarter centimeter leaf in a two meter straight line. I hated how if a salamander walked five centimeters off the line, I couldn’t count it. I hated that for some reason the measuring tape we had would stick at 27 yards so you needed to yank it to unjam it, but if you yanked it too hard, it would pull out to 35 yards and then wind itself into the worst twisty, sharp, aluminum knot you’ve ever seen.

So.
I wasn’t going to be a field biologist.
And I learned a month before my senior year.
That was a bummer.
Irrelevant
To add insult to injury, the moment I got back from this trip I was set to return to an internship I had started earlier that summer. The insulting part was frankly how bad I was at it.
I was interning at a local nature center, working with students during their summer camp programming. It was a camp I had attended as a child, so when I learned that I needed an internship to graduate, it was an easy place to look, even if it wasn’t on my career trajectory.
But in those brief few weeks before my field course, I had learned a lot about myself:
- I was bad at all crafts ever devised by humankind. The papier-mâché snake that I made when I was eleven looked both more anatomically correct, and made less students cry than my attempt at twenty one.
- I was bad at making conversation with the students. For some (later obvious) reason, my eight year old students didn’t understand my college based pop culture references, or have the same interests in video games.
- I couldn’t translate information from my brain into toddler language. Five year olds don’t really know what a taxonomic order is, but they are definitely willing to share their favorite McDonalds order. And then they break into arguments about who’s fast food order is best, someone ends up crying, and it’s not always the toddlers.
As you can imagine, this was an experience I hadn’t wanted to return to. But I agreed to be there for the rest of the summer, so I tried to make the best of it.
And for the next six weeks, I did.
I learned that the reason I was bad at making conversation with the students was that well… I wasn’t really making conversation. I was lecturing. I was just handing out information without any discussion. If you actually ask them questions and listen to their answers, the students immediately perk up.
I learned that I shouldn’t start with translating facts, but with translating feelings. If I found something they were excited about, they would absorb facts and information like big loud sponges. They would beg for more information, more complexity, and tell everyone they met what they just learned.
I learned that you stop making students cry at your crafts if you just elect to clean the bathroom instead of doing craft time, because no one ever wants to clean the bathroom.
I learned that hey, maybe I’m actually getting good at this.

Irrelephant
Almost exactly one year after the end of that internship, I got my first full time job doing essentially the exact same thing I was doing in that internship. I then spent the next seven years doing essentially the exact same thing all across the country. After struggling my way through an experience that I didn’t really believe in, I found myself a career that I loved.
Because of that experience, I got to live in a National Park.
Because of that experience, I got my Master’s Degree.
Because of that experience, I met my wife.
Because of that experience, I know how to deliver babies, I know which cans to shake at Bison, and I know the value in taking a chance on those completely irrelevant experiences.