Transcript:
- Hello and welcome to the "What's Career Got To Do With It" podcast, where we hope to provide a space for honest conversation and information that encourages the listener to take the next steps in their career journey. Wherever you're at in this process, we hope this episode will meet you with affirmation, guidance, and maybe some laughs along the way.

- Joining us today is Jamie Byrd, director of Employer Relations at the Duke Career Center as we discuss and answer for many to the question, what are my strengths? And tell me all my weaknesses. No, that's not a question. And what are my weaknesses?

- Uh huh.

- Hey, Jaime.

- Good morning! Thank you for having me.

- My first true boss! You know I love you, Jaime.

- Love you back. So good to be here. Thanks for having me.

- So today we're talking about something that I think students often want to discuss in the interview process or just in general, even in networking of like, this is who I am, I know my strengths or I have no idea of my strengths. And then like I think in particular, having worked at Duke now, I've seen a lot of students who really want to focus on their weaknesses and be like, "How do I overcome this? This seems terrible. It seems like the worst thing. Like how do I even reframe that?" Because I think there's also a general understanding of like, oh you just reframe this weakness to turn it into a strength. That's what you always do. And I think it's a little bit more complicated than that. But Jaime, before we dive into those deep questions surrounding, how you can be a stronger person, what is weakness, what is failure, we'd love to hear from you a little bit about your career journey and how you got to where you are today. Yeah.

- Well, good morning. Thanks again for having me. My career journey has been not a straight line. It's been kind of all over the map, but I have found my spot in student affairs and higher education over the last decade or so. When I was an undergraduate student, I was one of those kids that had multiple different majors. I was a business major for a while. Then I was an English major, then I was a communications major, which I stuck with. And then I added public relations and journalism to kind of round out some of that studying. But honestly, when I was in college, I went to a really small private school and I was involved in a lot of things, and I got to interface with a lot of student affairs staff, and I loved working with them. And so by the time I graduated, I thought, "How can I do what they do?" So I ended up going to get my master's in higher ed student affairs, and the rest is kind of history. I've been in student affairs ever since. So it's been 12 years, 13 years, and a decade of that's been here at Duke. So it's been a fun ride. Hopefully I'm not changing careers anytime soon.

- You never know, you never know.

- We won't let you go. We can't.

- I always like to think like student affairs is like, a microcosm of the world outside as well, because like you have people trying to make it happen and trying to like be professional but then also you throw students in there and it just becomes like this whole background of a mess. But that's like the world. You get out there and you're trying to adult, you're trying to do the professional thing, but then life happens, people happen. There's maniacs on the road out there driving.

- Who try to merge into the lane at the very last minute and won't get over earlier.

- And for me on 147,

- Oh okay, real.

- It's a zipper merge.

- No turning signal, no thank you. No, thank you.* But yeah, so we try to do all these things in our career. And Jaime, I appreciate you going through your trajectory to normalize the concept of finding something and going with it and just meandering and going in your path and just saying, "Hey, this is what I want to do. I'm gonna go give it a try. Oh, it seems to be working. I'm gonna stick with it. I'm gonna go with it." And I'm