Sue Siegel: Evaluating Career Decisions

First of all, in terms of career planning, here are some questions that I sort of put up there. Okay, what are the critical things you need to be thinking about early in your career? What should you consider when evaluating a new opportunity or job? And again, you've probably done a lot of this already, and some of you probably know what your next step is going to be when you graduate. Some of you will decide, you know what, I'm going to do more studying. But when I think about it, and as I've made transitions between different jobs, all right, this is a tool that I've used. And I show you this because it's not so much the score that you're going to end up with, it's actually the process and standardization of the consideration that you actually make for all of these. Now, this is but an example. You will put your own attributes up on the Y axis. This is actually from an Excel spreadsheet. The inner geek in me, I'll tell you right now. So what I do is I put all the attributes, and these aren't all of them. In fact, I was going to pull one of mine. I thought, yeah, that's a little too personal. But let me just give you a sense of. I put the attributes, I then give them a weighting, and then I score from 1 to 5, either company A or company B or industry A or industry B. And by doing that, I come out with a score. Okay, it's not the score that actually matters. In fact, I will tell you that when I was deciding between staying at Amersham at the time or going into athymetrics, the score came out dead even. And the reason why I decided to actually go to Affymetrix was my husband said to me, are you going to stay a spectator in the genomic revolution or do you actually want to drive? And I said, well, crap, you can't ask me that question and expect me to stay where I am. So of course I went, but the score was dead even. So what I encourage you to think about as you're actually going through any transition and you're going to have your own methodologies, but this process actually helped me standardize the things that I was thinking about that were actually pretty important to me. And the methodology of that purpose made me realize that I at least thought through it. Now, mind you, I've done six or seven changes. So as I've gotten older, I have to admit I've become a little bit more thoughtful about some of the things that matter, and I think those will shift over time, and that's totally okay. But just the fact that you put them down, you actually think through them, you force yourself to actually think about it, is pretty meaningful.