Damian Woetzel splits his days dancing for the Boston Ballet and taking classes towards his master's degree in public administration at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Check out his awe-inspiring schedule in this New York Times article, which also discusses how as a teenager he decided to pursue a career in professional dance against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to go down the conventional college path. (He is one of the few people in his class admitted to the master's program without a college degree.)

I discovered a great podcast interview called "Who Manages Your Career" with Marshall Goldsmith, a leading executive coach. The interview is part of a BusinessWeek podcast series by John Byrne called "Climbing the Ladder" and is available at iTunes.

Key take-aways from the interview:

• No one is going to manage your career except you.
• In the old days, you could show up at a big company at 5 p.m. on a Friday and the place would be deserted. Those days are over. Today, professionals work 60 or 80 hours a week, so if you want to be one (or are one), you better love what you do.
• Don't talk about your career goals in vague generalities ("I want to do something in non-profit"). Go out and get real offers, so you can make real choices.
• Marketing yourself -- managing your own brand -- is a key part of managing your career. You won't learn how to do that in school (even business school). School won't teach you how to sell yourself, how to figure out what you want to do with your life, or how to establish your market identity. You need to figure out what you're good at, what you enjoy, and how that matches up with what the market needs.

That's all great advice, although it can be hard for my audience -- typically in college or recently graduated -- to know what it is they want to do, or even what they're good at. College students are good at school, and that's it. My advice to college students is to treat every summer and part-time job as an opportunity to discover a new industry or professional track and network with all sorts of professionals, because by the time you get out of school, you don't want to stand there scratching your head and run off to law school for lack of any better ideas.

Interesting segment on Boston's Channel 5 today about a 22-year-old economics major at Harvard who also serves as CEO of an $18M bakery -- in France! Granted, she inherited the business, but I'm still impressed. I bet a good number of her professors couldn't manage a PTA meeting let alone an international business, and here she is running it long-distance while finishing up her studies. Hats off.

Interesting blurb in today's New York Times Magazine on empty-stomach intelligence:

Hunger makes the best sauce, goes the maxim. According to researchers at Yale Medical School, it may make quadratic equations and Kant's categorical imperative go down easier too. The stimulation of hunger, the researchers announced in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience, causes mice to take in information more quickly, and to retain it better — basically, it makes them smarter. And that's very likely to be true for humans as well.... [Researcher] Horvath says we can use the hormonal discoveries to our cognitive advantage. Facing the LSAT, a final exam or a half-day job interview? Go in mildly hungry, not carbo-loaded for endurance, and snack to maintain that edgy state.

The Forté Foundation, whose goal is to see more women with MBAs, offers a new podcast series called "The MBA Value Proposition." I have attended one of their forums and generally like their advice and the resources and information they make available.

Not surprisingly, their take is that all women can benefit from an MBA, and as readers of my blog know, I don't view the value proposition of any graduate degree that categorically, for men or for women. MBA degrees do offer benefits, but "value" doesn't really have any meaning if one ignores the cost side of a cost-benefit analysis (and I refer to "cost" broadly -- time, lost income, tuition, opportunity costs/opportunities not taken). So the podcast is a bit misnamed, but a good starting point.

In this first podcast, a lot of the discussion about the benefit of an MBA comes from business school admissions officers, and I would caution listeners that the job of admissions officers is to generate more applications and encourage as many people as possible to apply. As always, consider your sources.

Helpful tips in this article. I would add a little caveat about tip #5, which says the following:

5. Trash your old-fashioned resume. When people start looking for jobs, the first thing they do is update their resumes, usually by adding a few lines to include the latest job, says Yate. Too old school. Today, resumes are kept in databases and searched with certain keywords. So your old-style format won't cut it, says Yate. "Instead, turn your resume on its head: Show them your skills," he says.

To go along with the resume, consider a "leadership addendum," says Ellis. Basically, this is a list of achievements "that focuses on skills and situations," she says.

That's definitely good advice if you're posting your resume on job boards on the web or submitting your resume to a very large company through impersonal means like the company's website.

If you're following the other tips in that list, though, you'll be making a lot of use of your network, arguably a more powerful job searching tool than any online board or any resume submission page on a company website. When you're dealing with real people rather than a piece of software that looks for key words, you're better off with the more conventional reverse-chronological resume format, because people don't read resumes the way software does. Also keep in mind that while big companies maintain those resume databases, smaller businesses aren't as likely to, simply because they don't traffic in large volumes of resumes.

When it comes to your job search, word of mouth trumps all else (even for landing jobs at big companies), so always put real people first, even if that means you create a different resume for the live readers.

The next time some small-minded and undereducated nincompoop asks, "So what on God's green earth are you going to do with your English/Classics/History/fill-in-the-blank degree??" you'll be in good shape if you can defend the merits of a liberal arts education as forcefully as this gal. An excerpt:

Being an English major means you can write grammatically correct and half-coherent sentences without overusing exclamation marks. Being an English major means you are cognizant of the difference between "your" and "you're"; "their," "there," and "they're"; and "discrete" and "discreet." Being an English major means you can use the word "cognizant" without looking it up. Being an English major means you won't be laughed out of a job interview for sending in a résumé and cover letter with any of the above errors.

Being an English major means you can read the works of Austen, Dickens, Achebe, Sophocles, Levi (and that's Primo, not Strauss, for you non-English majors out there), Orwell, Melville, Shakespeare, Rabelais and still have mental power for poetry, analysis, history, context, meaning, and complete comprehension. Being an English major means you can read eight novels per lit class, which amounts to one hundred thirty-six in four years. Do I even have to note that that's more books than some people will ever read in their adult lifetime? Being an English major means you can read one hundred thirty-six books in four years and remember characters, themes, plots, motifs, language, literary criticism, and vocabulary. Being an English major means you can read one hundred thirty-six books in four years and write all the accompanying papers about the characters, themes, plots, motifs, language, literary criticism, and vocabulary.

Being an English major means you can speak well, think critically, and ingest -- as well as comprehend -- large amounts of information. Being an English major means the whole world is open to you because you haven't pigeonholed yourself in a narrow-minded, restricted career path.

What I don't necessarily recommend is pursuing a graduate degree in the humanities -- that's a hard, hard way to go professionally. But undergrad? At an institution that takes liberal arts education seriously? Heck yeah. The distinction does matter, as she points out:

However, and it is almost pedestrian to point this out, your English major does actually depend a great deal on the institution that conferred it upon you. For instance, getting your degree at Podunk College, Any City, Any State, USA, where the only degree requirement is to write "literature" five times in a bluebook is quite a bit different from graduation from say, my alma mater, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I'm sorry to be a snob, élitest, or to actually have to acknowledge that some institutions are better than others, but there you are.