Monday, September 20, 2010

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Spoiler alert: This is a personal post. In 2005, I professor I was working with at AUB told me: "Watch out, you are on your way to becoming unemployable." Not unemployed, just unemployable. She told me that my CV was too much all-over-the-place and my profile too vague to be pigeon-holed into something headhunters would be comfortable with. And so little by little, I did go that way.
I stand at a point where my hybrid profile is not always an asset (an agriculture engineer dabbling with advertising, visual anthropology, and online media analysis is not always swollowed well), where my diverse background and experiences are not always amounting to the culmination they ought to have, and where the whole future outlook has fuzziness to it rather than clarity.
By sheer chance, I was looking a few days ago at my archive and I noticed that Campus (the university newspaper that was the must-read in the early till the late 1990s) actually named the graduation issue of 1996 after me "the Tarek Chemaly issue: vini, vidi, vici". I know it dates back to 1996 and that in the mantime many, many things have happened, but I do wonder if I am past my prime after all.

2 comments:

Diane said...

From one touch-it-all to another, yes, it is often easier, professionally, for people who have a specialty. However, "it ain't over till the fat lady sings," and at least jacks of many trades can fall on their feet in many circumstances!

Danielle said...

It's just the beginning dude..just the beginning!