This Wednesday’s Rose Cafe was conducted by Professor Sam Beck, a social and cultural anthropologist from the College of Human Ecology, who discussed about the urban semester program.

To be honest, this Rose House Cafe was quite different from what I had anticipated. I thought that as an anthropologist,Professor Beck would be more focused on the academic aspects of the Urban Semester program and perhaps cover some of his own researches as a scholar. Instead, this talk was more about the conversation between the speaker and the audience; as each of us got a chance to talk about our interests and career goals. On the one hand, I benefited from the career advice Professor Beck gave me. As a city and regional planning major, I always want to travel around the world to pick up planning projects to do. Professor Beck suggested that I should consider taking positions in the United Nations and maybe learn more languages. On the other hand, I also learned a lot from listening to other people’s interests and goals, which exhibited a very diverse range of choices and options, ranging from medicine to arts. I think the biggest takeaway is that no matter what subject(s) one chooses to study, there will always be career options; and it is always possible to combine one’s passions with academic pursuits.

Another topic I found useful was about how to utilize one’s academic advisor. Personally, I have never been to my advisor’s office hour. Partly because my advisor has never replied to my emails for meeting with him. Professor suggested that in order to get advisor’s attention, we should first pay attention to them, such as searching your advisor online and look at their research interests. The idea is that once your advisor feels like you are interested in their stuff, they will take interest in you as well. I think this is an important strategy and I will try to write more effective emails (i.e. contain what I know about my advisor’s academic interests) and see if I could finally get to meet him.