Navigating
Career Pivots
Saturday, March 5, 2022
As many of us are considering different roles and transitioning to new careers, advice from fellow alums is powerful. MHC-NYC would like to provide guidance by hosting a career panel on the theme of navigating career pivots. Our alum panelists will share their experiences and the lessons learned along the way. Among the topics we'll discuss are starting your own business, pursuing graduate school, leveraging the job market, and more.
Keynote (0:12-37:30)
Entrepreneurship (37:30-1:38:50)
Continued Education (1:53:31-2:54:35)
Mid-Career Pivots (2:54:35-3:56:03)
Transitioning from stay-at-home-parent to work and vice versa (3:56:04-4:49:39)
Final Recap (4:49:40-5:01:35)
Keynote
Emily Lamia ‘06 founded a career coaching and talent development company, Pivot Journeys, that helps individuals navigate their next career move and thrive in work that’s meaningful to them. The keynote presentation will be followed by a Q&A session.
Emily Lamia ‘06
Emily Lamia is the founder of Pivot Journeys, a career coaching and talent development company. She helps individuals navigate their next career move and thrive in work that’s meaningful to them, and also works with organizations and teams to increase employee engagement and build strengths-based cultures.
Emily spent the first part of her career working in electoral politics, serving on electoral and advocacy campaigns, and at the Democratic National Committee. She found her love of coaching and talent development as the Executive Director of Democratic GAIN, a career development association for progressive political operatives.
She has also worked at the Girl Scouts of the USA, where she supported the recruitment, onboarding, and training of their National Board of Directors.
In 2020, Emily was selected as one of Business Insider's most innovative career coaches. She is a Gallup-certified strengths coach, and a Designing your Life certified coach. She received her Master’s in Public Administration from New York University, and her BA from Mount Holyoke College.
Entrepreneurship
Hear alums talk about their experiences starting a business, rewards and challenges, as well as the passion behind what they do. If you are looking to start a business that intersects with making a difference, you will want to hear from our alums doing exactly that.
Jadah Quick ‘17
Jadah Quick is the Founder of Adulting with Moi, a program designed to educate and engage millennials about financial literacy. Knowing first-hand what it’s like to build success on a restricted budget, Jadah’s mission is to ultimately empower millennials to take control of their own destinies through financial literacy and independence. Having worked as a financial analyst at a top multinational financial services company, she has quickly established herself as a trusted financial guru among her clients and peers. Jadah received a BA in Mathematics and Mandarin from Mount Holyoke College.
Tayllor Johnson ‘15
Tayllor Johnson is an artist, performer, educator, and Founder of Sisterhood(verb), Inc. A published poet, she has been writing and performing her poetry and plays for over ten years. She is committed to using art to voice unspoken truths and guides people to discover and speak their truth to define their liberation. At Mount Holyoke College, where Tayllor received her bachelor's degree in Psychology, she began the journey of defining sisterhood and its importance in her life. Pursuing her master's degree at the Center for Experimental Humanities at New York University allowed her to expand on the intersectionality of community and arts integration in education, which led to her officializing her business, Sisterhood(verb), Inc., in 2020. Sisterhood(verb) Inc. is an innovative education consulting business dedicated to curating safe spaces for Black women, women of color, and youth to be themselves, find themselves, and celebrate themselves through arts integration, community, education, creativity, and wellness. Since starting her business, Tayllor has been able to work with various educational communities and fully emerged in the holistic journey that is growing in entrepreneurship.
Continued Education
There are many reasons to consider going back to school. On the Continued Education panel, our alums will share their experience pursuing post-graduate and career advancement education programs and how it has affected their careers.
Lori-Anne Ashwood ‘09
Lori-Anne Ashwood ‘09 is a software engineer at Quizlet, an education technology company. She transitioned from retail to user operations and then into web development via a coding bootcamp in 2016.
Originally from Jamaica, she was based in New York and a part of the MHCNYC board until she was recruited to work in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tanishka Sachidanand ‘19
Tanishka’s passion for the outdoors has significantly impacted her life and has prompted her to develop an interest for environmental sustainability and social justice. At Mount Holyoke, she majored in Environmental Studies and Biological Sciences and graduated in 2019. During her time there, she engaged in research in the intersection of public health and air pollution policy to develop recommendations to combat air pollution in some of the most polluted cities in the world. She has also worked on projects related to renewable energy and energy poverty at the Arava Institute of Environmental Studies. Most recently, she helped develop a sports and wellbeing program for climate-vulnerable fishing communities across India that is now serving 15,000+ individuals in the Subcontinent.
In May 2022, she will complete her MPA in Environmental Science and Policy from Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) In her free time, she likes to write about climate change and gender. Her other hobbies include squash, tennis, and political philosophy.
Ohemaa Poku ‘13
Ohemaa graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 2013 with a Bachelors in History and International Development. She also has an MPH in Global Health from Boston University. She recently completed her PhD in Public Health at Johns Hopkins University where she was an NIMH T32 Global Mental Health Predoctoral Fellow. Currently, Ohemaa is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University. Her research focuses on the cross-cultural interpretations of illness and how stigma impacts access to psychosocial care for individuals living with HIV, particularly for Africans and the African diaspora.
Allison Aviki ‘04
Allison Aviki is a partner in Mayer Brown’s New York office and a member of the Intellectual Property practice. She concentrates on litigating copyright, trademark, trade dress, and trade secret disputes in courts across the country. She is the recipient of the 2019 Law360 Burton Foundation Distinguished Legal Writing Award. Allison received her JD from Harvard Law School, where she served as a research assistant to Laurence H. Tribe and I. Glenn Cohen, and taught Copyright Law on the edX platform under William Fisher. Prior to her career as an attorney, Allison was a book editor whose authors included award-winning jurists, educators, and journalists. She holds an MA in publishing and writing from Emerson College, where she received the President’s Award and the Cecil and Helen Rose Ethics in Communication Award.
Mid-Career Pivots
Many career events focus on entry-level jobs, but what about navigating pivots in your mid-career? Our panel will discuss how they made a major shift in their career path. Learn about different factors to consider if you're not at the beginning of your career or an executive, but somewhere in the middle.
Marguerite Saint-Preux, PT, DPT ‘02
Marguerite is a physical therapist treating patients in New York City. After over 10 years of working in marketing and sales at a global accounting and consultancy firm, she decided to pursue a second career in physical therapy because she wanted to dedicate herself to helping others restore their mobility and confidently return to their daily lives. In January 2015, she started her career transition, and in September 2020, she was conferred her Doctorate in Physical Therapy from Hunter College. Later that year, she was awarded her license to treat in the state of New York.
Although her prior career was unrelated, the project management skills she honed served her well while obtaining her doctorate, and still prove useful in her current profession. Marguerite now enjoys working with patients as they achieve their personal health and wellness goals; she is looking forward to a lifetime of further refining and enriching her skills as a clinician. Marguerite received her BA in Economics and Anthropology from Mount Holyoke College.
Akua Serwah Soadwa ’03
Akua Serwah Soadwa, Founder & CEO of Let’s Pursue You and the Gye Nyame Empowerment Project, graduated from MHC in 2003 with a double major in Economics & Sociology. She later went on to get her Masters in Urban Planning, Design & Development with a focus on Community Development from Cleveland State University.
With over 19 years of combined professional and leadership experience in the aeronautics, banking, non-profit, education, and personal growth & development industries, Akua has been working full-time over the past 2.5 years dissecting her experiences, her highs and lows, and her best practices from each industry to identify her most optimal and holistically sound blueprint for how she lives and works now.
As she prepares to launch and relaunch her existing brands in 2022 and beyond, Akua is excited to share insights on her lessons & blessings; the unreasonableness required to pursue your dreams; the mental, emotional, spiritual and financial work that comes with it; the kinds of practices, behaviors and boundaries needed to stay clear, focused & organized on a daily basis; and her visions for training & developing more young people and women on how to adopt more lovingly responsible practices while studying and working.
Transitioning from stay-at-home-parent to work and vice versa
Learn about the challenging and rewarding experience of transitioning to a full-time parent and then re-entering the workforce. Our panel will share their advice on what and how to prepare for these changes.
Anna Goltz ‘06
Anna Goltz has been raising money since 2006 with deep experience in annual giving, direct response marketing, and database migrations. She oversaw the $3.9 million annual fund for four years at Feeding Southwest Virginia, a regional food bank spanning 26 counties. Anna led data migration projects at James Madison’s Montpelier as well as for the Alumni Association at George Mason University. Early on in her career, she also wrangled fundraising data on political campaigns.
In late 2019, Anna was making plans to step back and seek a little work-life balance. The idea was to freelance as the CRM Wrangler and help charitable organizations meet their funding goals by working smarter, not harder. It turned out February 2020 was not a great moment to start a new business. She found herself sidelined with no school for two children under 5 while her spouse was busier than ever planning government responses to the pandemic. At present, she has found a sweet spot grant-writing part-time for a local homeless shelter.
Born and raised in Minnesota, Anna is a proud alumna of Mount Holyoke College where she majored in Politics and rowed on the crew team. She is active with her local chapter for the Association of Fundraising Professionals and serves as Vice Chair for the Electoral Board in the City of Roanoke, VA.
Ann Croft '95
Ann Croft has always burned the candle at both ends, according to her mother (also a proud graduate of Mount Holyoke College). A psychology/education major, Ann spent almost 10 years as a classroom teacher before her career began burning out. She switched gears to pursue a Masters in social work while jumping into a new job as a bookkeeper to make ends meet. When the alarm bells of middle age began ringing and she realized that she wanted to add a child to the mix, she put the dreams of private practice counseling on hold and slid face-first into stay-at-home parenting.
Now, over 10 years later, Ann finds herself with four part-time jobs, multiple volunteer commitments, and a longing eye on the rear-view mirror as her sweet little girl rounds the corner of pre-teenagerhood. Currently a school counselor at a small private Catholic school in Northern Virginia, Ann is also the president of the MHC DC Club. She is convinced that the relationships she built with other moms and the humor that she sprinkles throughout her day are the main reasons she has found her way so far in the world.