As some of you may already know, I do a lot of things on-campus. I often get the question: “Do you even get personal time - time on your own?” To that, my answer is that I have an interesting approach to maintaining a “healthy” work-life balance.
In all honesty, I enjoy doing things that any other person might, whether it be playing games or hanging out with friends. Unsurprisingly, I may not have the time to do all of these and my distinction between my “personal life” and “work life” is frankly ambiguous at best. Thankfully, the very reason I decided to focus so much on student engagement during my time at Mason Korea is because I enjoy all the work that I do. Yes - this, I understand, may not be the best approach (or be healthy, in fact) when it comes to actual “work.” It could lead to early and severe burnouts during your career, and my solution has always been to add a bit of my own personal sprinkles of interest in the work that I do.
I used my time working with Office of Admissions & Enrollment as a Student Intern, for example, in developing some of my personal and professional skills that I never had the opportunity to apply in the real world. Sure, Excel can be boring, but the number of new functions and challenges I encountered in making life easier for everyone involved was a feat that I absolutely enjoyed and that was incredibly rewarding to see work out. Same goes for more of my technical endeavors, such as using Power Automate, a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tool to automate mundane tasks such as creating structured documents and sending out emails.
This blog in and of itself is an extension of such an approach - sure, it’s a platform for some of my professional and academic documentation, but I also got to host a domain, using (subjectively) unconventional platforms such as GitHub and Notion for my website. I like going the hard way, because that’s simply how I’ve learned.
Maybe that’s why I always tell others to try a little bit of everything out - who knows what the future has for you?