on interestingness
Come on, pick a favorite...
I want to expand on something I mentioned last night. Instead of pondering the full impact of this past weekend's Flinn reunion on yours truly, I just offered up a fairly weak sauce and poorly explained example: that I might not want to talk about work all the time.
Now it's not that my work as a reporter isn't interesting or that I'm looking to avoid all shop talk outside the newsroom. Nor am I suggesting that I'll expect my non-Flinn Califriends to discuss the finer points of biological network models, community agriculture, getting shot during combat medical training or any of the other specific things my fellow Flinns are engaged in.
Rather, what I was getting at is that this past weekend reminded me that the most interesting things about each of us are not always directly tied to the most obvious things about us — namely, our professions and/or our majors.
This is something I learned long ago in preparing for and engaging in youth ministry with SSP: Sometimes, asking a high schooler about his or her classes or activities sparks a lively conversation, but oftentimes you have to ask something they're not expecting — like "What's the last song you had stuck in your head?" or "Who's your favorite Spice Girl?" — to dodge the standard answers that we all (youth and adults alike) have at the ready to address the standard questions.
And it's something that's key to how the Flinn Foundation's selection committees have picked scholars over the years. As Flinnlets (i.e., prospective Flinns) we're often told while preparing for The Big Scary Interview(s) that our questioners aren't looking for a predetermined right answer to their queries but rather for how we engage with the question. And the scholars program has a reputation for not seeking out students who just fit into a certain mold but instead looking at the whole picture. "There is no blueprint for a Flinn Scholar," the foundation will tell you.
Anyway, this past weekend's Flinnsanity reminded me that we are all so much more than our jobs and our majors, as interesting as those things may be. The reunion even included a session on work-life balance in which Kim, one of the Flinn alums leading the session, lamented the fact that people automatically assume, sometimes wrongly, that a person's profession is his or her one true calling.
"Don't make the mistake of thinking that the thing that pays the electric bill defines you — or is the only thing that defines you," she said.
Certainly, the thing we spend most of our time on at work or on campus is often one of the defining factors in our lives. I think that's the case for myself, and it seemed to also be the case for Dawn, a current Flinn who I met on Saturday. When I asked her the Kim-inspired question, "What is your life about, which may or may not include what your major is?" Dawn replied that she's all about food and agriculture and such, which ties in with the degree in global health that she's pursuing through ASU's anthropology school (aka SHESC).
But just because that's the first interesting thing she mentioned doesn't mean it's the only one. Within a few minutes, we had somehow gotten on the topic of my years as a camper and staffer at SSP, which prompted some stories from Dawn about a program she had been involved with as a high schooler, Grand Canyon Youth.
Other times, interesting things about people come up without any ties to what pays the bills — or what we're paying tuition bills for.
Take, for instance, another Flinn whom I met this weekend — Jared, who calls himself The Mediocre Singer-Songwriter and performed a song of the same name at the reunion's talent show:
After hearing this and a couple other side-splitting songs from Jared in the Saturday afternoon Musicale, I chatted him up and asked if music is something he sees as a career path or something that's an aside to some other degree program or life path. He said that The Mediocre Singer-Songwriter's tunes come to him in fits and spurts and that he isn't able to produce a song by just sitting down and willing himself to do so. Plus, he said, the music industry is notoriously capricious. So as it turns out, this music man is a math major.
So I don't want you to think that this past weekend is just going to prompt me to shoot down all shop talk with an "Ugh. Can we talk about something other than work?" although I do reserve the right to occasionally be that whiny. Instead, the Flinn reunion really reminded me that we too often just skim the surface when talking with each other, focusing on the résumé bullet points when there's so much more to be discovered and discussed within each of us. That's what I'll be looking for more often from here on out.