My ever-changing career path, Pt. I

Over the course of this year since September, I’ve written not one, not two, but THREE blog posts on a change in career. I swear this is the last one, because I am so set on this career path and life plan. This is probably the most important blog post I’ve ever written.

So, the plan is to find relevant work experience in business strategy/consulting, preferably in the UK, and do that for at least 5 years. Hopefully, by then, I’ll have learned everything I need to learn, but if I feel like I need to do more school, I’d do an MBA program in America. And, maybe, by the end of those 5 years in the UK, I’ll be able to kickstart the process of naturalising as a citizen. Yep, you read that right: I fell in love with the country so hard that I want to be a true British citizen.

Now, if you’ve kept up with my journey, you might recall that the original plan was to go into marketing and graphic design. Well, after I started looking into masters programs, I decided that instead of doing a masters in marketing specifically, it would be smarter to do a Masters of Business Administration (MBA). I could specialise in marketing whilst gaining business-savvy skills and learning fundamentals of business management and innovation. Then, when researching the University of Toronto MBA program, I came across a specialisation stream called Business Design and I immediately perked up at it. I didn’t think too much of it again, because shortly after looking into Canadian MBA programs, I decided that if I was to do an MBA, I’d want to do it in America to really round out my international experience – I’d end up with a Canadian music degree, a British law degree, and an American MBA.

A few weeks later, I caught up with an old friend who I hadn’t seen in 6 or 7 years; she works at a marketing agency in downtown Toronto. She was lovely enough to message me after reading one of my blog posts and offer to answer any questions I had about the industry (Thanks, Julie!). So we met up and chatted about how she got into copywriting and she walked me through the other roles that all make up the corporate side of a company. She asked me what my ideal job would be and that’s when we realised that business strategy/consulting was the best fit.

In answering the question of what my ideal job would be, I dug back to when I found the Business Design MBA specialisation and thought about why it interested me so much.

I thought about the Law Review and how much being the third (ever) Editor-in-Chief meant to me. When I took up my position as Editor-in-Chief in second year, the Law Review had only just been founded the year before my first year. I was a little thrown off by the fact that I was just the third Editor-in-Chief ever, but over the year of holding the position and making many important decisions, I finally understood that I was carving a path for the Law Review and future Editors. That realisation felt like I was opening a window in a muggy room, that I didn’t realise was muggy, to let clean air in – and I breathed it all in. In rebranding the Law Review and making changes to the editing process, it felt so liberating to be able to help further develop the Law Review, and I’m so lucky to have had that opportunity and experience.

I’d always shied away from being a guinea pig, in the sense that, whenever something was in its early stages or at a beta stage, I didn’t want to be a part of it because it just seemed to lack credibility and validity and I’d rather have been a part of something that was already well-established. But, turns out, I enjoy holding that capacity to build and shape a project into something huge or better it by coming up with effective solutions for holes in the design of it.

And that’s why I think I’ll be sticking with the new business direction for a long while. Marketing and graphic design felt like great ideas, but they didn’t fully fit into the mould of what I wanted to do, and I would’ve had to build an entirely new skillset. With my law degree, business strategy is relevant and quite similar to what I’ve been learning for the past two years – finding innovative solutions to problems within dynamic systems.

I’m really excited about this new career path in a way that’s different than the excitement I had for becoming a lawyer linguist, or going into marketing. And although I am admittedly excitable about a lot of things, this is something truly special.