You Need to Be Proactive
One of the things that has been repeatedly drilled into me over the past year or so is the fact that if you want people to do things for you, you’re most likely going to have to harass them. (I don’t mean literal harassment, by the way – please don’t commit a criminal offense and say I encouraged you.) This is true especially when working with highly busy people like managers and professors. If you want something, you can’t just assume they’ll intuit that and give it to you – you have to ask (and assume they’ll forget, then ask them again). If you need them to do something for you, you’ll need to remind them, and inform them of the deadline, likely multiple times. Everyone has their own problems to worry about and the thing you need might not be top of mind. The burden of remembering is on you.
This general idea is applicable in many contexts, and I have, indeed, learned it in many contexts. Especially when interacting with professors, I’ve found that even if I put something on their radar several weeks in advance, I may need to remind them several times. The few times I’ve tried to interview political candidates, I had to be very active and contact them multiple times in order to even get them to talk to me. (Pro-tip – if you can find a phone number, call them. A lot.) I’ve put together several anthologies and worked on a few student publications at this point, and I’ve had to repeatedly remind people to submit, or repeatedly remind other people working on the publication to do various tasks. Some people will remember things on their own, and that’s great. I definitely recommend aspiring to stay on top of things. But even in my personal life, I often need reminders to do things that have fallen off of my radar. No one is going to care about your cause as much as you. Do you want an opportunity? It’s likely that you’re going to have to push for it. No one is going to hand you anything, including help.
I think this goes hand in hand with being assertive, to a certain extent. The part I still struggle with is the line between being proactive and being annoying, and the line between being assertive and being aggressive. My approach is to be polite, but insistent – often a little bit more insistent than I find some other students are comfortable being. There is a balance there, and it can be delicate, for sure. Do not email your professor every day asking for an immediate response, that’s absolutely insane and annoying – but I am perfectly comfortable with poking my head into a profs’ office every two weeks to politely remind them about something non-urgent. If it is urgent, I might do weekly reminders, or remind them in-person as well as over email. Use your judgment, I guess. But I think being afraid to ruffle feathers by coming too close to being mildly annoying is counterproductive. I’m totally okay with being mildly annoying if that’s what it takes to get something done.
Along similar lines, this sort of idea should also be top of mind for any meetings you schedule . Even if it’s not the sort of formal meeting where an agenda is circulated beforehand, you should have an agenda thought through ahead of time to make the most out of the meeting. What do you need? That should be clearly articulated. If you need feedback on something, you should have it ready in a form that will make it easier for the person you’re meeting with to give you feedback. (Don’t just come with half-baked ideas you state orally – make some sort of document, seriously, even if all the document contains is in-progress notes and ideas). The more organized you are ahead of time, the more productive the meeting is going to be and the better feedback you are going to get. If you’ve ever taken a writing workshop, you know what I’m talking about – in a workshop it’s better to submit work that’s as close to complete as you could make it on your own, so that you don’t waste time listening to surface-level comments you already anticipated and know how to address.
Getting handheld can be nice. I’ll admit that sometimes, I would like or prefer to be handheld a little bit – it takes a lot of stress away to have someone else do the thinking for you or have someone else keep track of things for you. But you can’t progress that way. Eventually people start treating you more or less like an adult, and expect you to take responsibility for the things you’re doing, and this also happens as you get more senior in your career. Eventually you have to carve your own path, and that involves the uncomfortable skill of learning how to get other people to help you accomplish your goals. Being proactive is a very underrated skill, no matter what you end up doing with your life.