Women Athletes and Innovation: How female student-athletes can leverage their unique skills to create exciting career paths
This week, Dartmouth Peak Performance hosted a panel of Dartmouth athletic alumni. NWiS was very excited to participate. The panel included Sally Annis ‘97, TH ’98, Amanda Reed ‘85, Tatyanah Castillo ‘20, and Emily Dryden ‘19. Each alumnae had an amazing career story—each one was incredibly interesting and included many important lessons for us to learn from. There were a few common threads throughout: leveraging your network, life and careers are not always linear, the value of being an athlete later in your career, and staying true to yourself.
Amanda is a venture capitalist and innovator at Global Asset Innovation Advisors. She talked about how when thinking about what career to pursue, you should look at major global trends to figure out what will be disruptive. She also discussed developing a unique skillset to make sure that you are always adding value. In her experience, being a collegiate athlete gives us an advantage because we know from our time as athletes how to deal with struggle and balancing various tasks. In terms of networking, Amanda talked about how creating a strong network for yourself is essential. In addition to more traditional forms of networking, she said that you should always be generous with your time and find mentoring opportunities and moments.
Sally is an engineering project manager at Apple. She has done a wide range of jobs and did a series of internships throughout her career to see what she liked in different opportunities. She told us her 3 goals that she has used to evaluate if she is on track with her career. The goals are to always be learning, work with people smarter than her, and enjoy her job 90% of the time. She emphasized how you should like what you are doing and to not get stuck in a job that does not advance your goals. She also talked about leveraging your network.
Emily is now working at a startup called QNOPY as a customer success engineer. At first when looking for a job, she thought she could do the whole process on her own. However, she soon realized that she needed to build a network of people that could lift her up and support her. She started reaching out to people through the alumni network and sent tens of cold emails. She found that people were very responsive and willing to help out. She was able to use her network to eventually find a position. Emily tried to find a job during the Covid pandemic, so it was difficult but worked out in the end. Many of us can relate to this experience as we are job/internship searching now. She told us to reach out if we need help with cold emailing or building our network. She also emphasized the importance of not comparing ourselves to others.
Taty is working at Microsoft as a customer success manager. She also spoke of the struggles to find a job but that athletes are really resilient. She applied to many jobs and overcame the fear of applying by realizing that the worst that can happen is that the company says no. She kept on putting herself out there and she eventually found a job that suited her. When interviewing, she had to dig deep to prepare answers to why tech, why Microsoft, and why the program. She told a great story about her interview at Microsoft where she found her flow by being herself and being genuine. Taty discussed how if you stay true to your values, the right companies will want you for who you are. We are where we are for a reason, and if we stay true to ourselves we will be successful.
Overall, the night was really great, and we all found ourselves connecting with the panelists and their stories. We appreciate everyone who participated!
