Destination Unknown 2020 Session
2020 Panel
Destination Unknown panelists represent the evolving and diverging career pathways increasingly typical of the 21st century. Our speakers share with us the challenges they have endured, the successes they have celebrated, and what resources they draw on to navigate complex transitions. In the short video clips collected on this page, they reflect on the impact of General Education on their professional and personal lives, recommendations and regrets included.
2020 Panel Discussion Videos
Seize these days!
Chelsea Burket, Solomon Yaw Darko, Jessica Molina, and Jennie Rothenberg Gritz talk about how to get the most out of a college education and reflect on their own regrets and triumphs.
Risks and Rewards
Jessica Molina and Jennie Rothenberg Gritz talk about making difficult decisions, taking risks, managing consequences, and enjoying rewards in college and after.
Unexpected Dividends
Chelsea Burket and Jennie Rothenberg Gritz discuss the many surprising ways that modern workplaces demand a broad education.
Audio Descriptions Available by Request
2020 Speakers
Chelsea Burket
Chelsea Burket graduated from Penn State Altoona with a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies and a minor in German. She spent her junior year at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, after never having traveled “east of New York, south of the Outer Banks, and west of Cleveland.” Chelsea credits her study abroad experience with identifying her professional passion: cities and how to improve life within them.
After obtaining a master’s degree in urban planning from the University of Michigan, she settled in Pittsburgh and began working for a national consulting firm on projects strengthening local economies and the organizations that support them. In 2021, however, she decided to give back to her own community by reviving a shuttered neighborhood ice cream shop. Chelsea’s ideas for GenEd courses? “How Change Happens” and “Transitions to Clean Energy,” both explored through semester-long group projects.
Generalist Toolbox
Chelsea Burket thinks back to her college days and finds career-defining skillsets in unexpected places.
Becoming Work Partners
Chelsea Burket reflects on how skills learnt in her GenEd courses help her when meeting with a group of new clients for the first time.
Solomon Yaw Darko
Solomon Yaw Darko entered college as an aspiring medical doctor but exited it as an entomologist (insects!), teaching at the University of Ghana, Legon, for several years. He then decided to move to the U.S. and, as if that were not enough, change his profession in the process, retraining for a career as a Licensed Professional Counselor. He now has his own practice in Waterbury, CT.
Solomon’s wide-ranging academic credentials mirror these transitions. He holds a master’s degree in counseling from the University of Bridgeport, an MBA from the University of Connecticut, a master’s degree in entomology from the University of Ghana, Legon, a BSc in biology, and a Diploma in Education from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. Along the way, he has received many accolades, worked for non-profit organizations, and participated in a research project sponsored by the United Nations. His advice to college students? “Be open. Be fluid.”
We All Get Lost
Solomon Yaw Darko offers guidance through a series of questions.
Talking to Parents
No, it’s not always easy, as Solomon Yaw Darko knows, but he offers some important advice.
Jessica Molina
Jessica Molina wanted to be a surgeon, then embraced engineering, but a drama class unveiled her true passion for technical theater. For a moment, combining her divergent interests (“fixing things,” working in the arts) seemed impossible, but a training program in the automation division of Cirque du Soleil provided her with a clear path forward into the field of manufacturing automation.
Since graduation with a bachelor’s degree in integrative arts (primary focus: engineering; secondary specialization: theater), she has been working as a theater technician, making stages lift, scenery move and realizing other feats of “magic.” During the pandemic, she shifted her meshed skill sets to the automation manufacturing sector. Jessica describes the path towards finding the right major as difficult and stressful. For students who find themselves in a similar situation, she has the following piece of advice: realize what you are good at, what traits you have, and then “just try.”
Unexpected Transitions
Jessica Molina talks about falling in love with theater and engineering in college, navigating periods of doubt and uncertainty, and how she found clarity and a professional path.
Jennie Rothenberg Gritz
After Jennie Rothenberg Gritz earned her bachelor’s degree in English, she explored various career possibilities, including freelance writing and teaching at a private school. As she sees it, these first jobs allowed her to “whittle down” her far-flung professional ideas and identify a career field that suited her: editing. After obtaining a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley, she worked as a senior editor at The Atlantic before joining the Smithsonian Magazine, where she currently serves in the same position.
Based on her experience, Jennie advises students to build a professional career right from where they are, using their talents, a laptop, the patience of a step-by-step approach, and the willingness to venture into areas where others fear to tread. She says: “Career is a quest. Life is a quest.” And so, a seemingly “lost year” can be a “found year” as long as energy and insight are drawn from the experience.
How would it even feel to know I’m in the right career?
Jennie Rothenberg Gritz talks about a professional revelation in front of a German castle, and what she did with it.
Download the How would it even feel to know I’m in the right career? transcript
I am unsure if I belong on this career path. Is this failure?
Jennie Rothenberg Gritz offers an interesting set of reflections—by way of a fairy tale.
Download the I am unsure if I belong on this career path. Is this failure? transcript
Sandra Petrulionis, PhD
Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies
Dr. Petrulionis served as a moderator for the inaugural panel discussion in fall of 2020.
Sandra Harbert Petrulionis is the author of To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord, the editor of Thoreau In His Own Time, and Thoreau’s Journal 8: 1854, and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism and More Day to Dawn: Thoreau’s Walden for the 21st Century. She has published on Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, and other American writers and reformers. Her current research includes a cultural biography of 19th-century activist and author Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and, with Noelle A. Baker, The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition, an NEH support project. Sandy is also the Director of the NEH Summer Institute on “Transcendentalism and Reform in the Age of Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller.”