What are the hardest decisions you’ve had to make?ĭeciding that I wasn’t going to try to find a regular job and go back to an office job after Jeopardy that I was going to start my own thing instead of going back to a more predictable office life. And now those kids are adults, so that’s a thing that I have to deal with. I was twelve, and I was the counselor of a group of five year olds. I was an assistant counselor at the day camp at my elementary school. So I really didn’t know what the path was for me. I loved history, but I thought you could only teach and I didn’t think that was what I wanted to do. But by the time I got to junior high, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. And a judge, because I thought that sounded fun. I did want to be a book editor because I would get to read a lot. I’ve been told that when I was very little I wanted to be an actress, which is shocking because I totally freaked out at a ballet recital once because the audience was so big. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? I always want to say tall, but that’s not very informative! If you had to describe yourself in using three adjectives, what would they be? So I thought, “Why don’t I lean into that and figure out how other people have found what they really enjoy?”īecause that’s the dream right – to have a fulfilling role? And so I thought: “Why not find out what makes other people tick and provide some ideas for other people who are trying to figure out what they want to do.” I love women and girls, and I never had a really clear vision of my professional life. In the most unexpected way – it feels like it should have been a movie – I ended up winning all of this money and being successful on the show and having the chance to rethink myself and what I wanted to do. I really enjoyed working with clients and seeing what companies looked like on the inside and what made them tick.īut I got really tired of all of the travel, it wasn’t a great fit, and around that time I ended up going on Jeopardy in the midst of looking like a new job. And that was not for me – I’m a person that needs a lot of quiet a lone time. It’s very much an extrovert job: you travel with your colleagues and spend a lot of time with them. After grad school, I was in management consulting, which was interesting but not a great fit for me. Then I was a buyer at a manufacturer and decided I didn’t know enough about what made everything tick, so I went to grad school for supply chain management to learn everything that went into the mix. It was a great corporate culture and was the standard against which I measured subsequent jobs. I was a person who loved reading and history, but I ended up working in a field that totally didn’t use those things: I worked in supply chain management with a big retailer in Chicago. It’s why we are having this conversation now. Which sounds crazy, because I was 16, but it was such a formative experience that it has shaped who I have become since then. I loved being away I went to boarding school and it was the most important decision I’ve ever made. I went away for the second half of high school, and for college and grad school, but then I came right back to Chicago. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and I now live two miles from the house I grew up in. Tell us a bit about yourself: how would you describe yourself and your life in a quick snapshot? She is second place on the all-time Jeopardy winners list and resides in Chicago, Illinois. Julia Collins is the founder of Girls Like You & Me, an organization dedicated to helping women discover the breadth of opportunities available to them by interviewing women about their diverse careers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |