Find Your Calling: Career Transition Principles for Returning Veterans

Instructor

Michael Abrams

Founder, FourBlock; Marine Corps Veteran; Former Executive Director, Center for Veteran Transition and Integration

Columbia University

Michael Abrams joined the Marine Corps shortly following the September 11, 2001 attacks and served on active duty for eight years, which included a deployment to Afghanistan with an infantry company as the artillery forward observer. After leaving active duty, Michael attended New York University’s Stern School of Business graduating with an M.B.A. in Finance and Entrepreneurship & Innovation. While attending business school, he founded FourBlock to help bridge the gap between returning service members and the business community. The program is a university accredited, semester-long course that educates and prepares transitioning veterans for meaningful careers in corporate America. FourBlock is in nearly twenty cities across the country, educating and serving hundreds of transitioning veterans each semester. Michael also served as the first executive director of the Columbia University Center for Veteran Transition and Integration. The center is dedicated to creating and supporting evidence-based programming that enables returning service members with reaching their academic and career potential.

Instructor

William Deresiewicz

Best-Selling Author, Award-Winning Essayist

Columbia University

William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent speaker at colleges and other venues, and the best-selling author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. He taught English at Yale and Columbia before becoming a full-time writer in 2008. Bill has published over 250 essays and reviews. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper's, The Nation, The New Republic, The American Scholar, and many other publications. He has won the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, the Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and a Sydney Award; he is also a three-time National Magazine Award nominee. His work has been translated into 17 languages and anthologized in more than 30 college readers. He has spoken at over 80 colleges, high schools, and educational groups and has held visiting positions at Bard, Scripps, and Claremont McKenna Colleges. Bill’s previous book is A Jane Austen Education. He is working on a book about how artists are making a living in the new economy.

Instructor

Sheena Iyengar

World-Renowned Expert on Choice, S. T. Lee Professor of Business

Columbia University

Professor Iyengar has taught courses in leadership and entrepreneurial creativity. Her research addresses the implications of offering people, whether they be employees or consumers, choices. She has examined choice in a multitude of contexts ranging from employee motivation and performance in a global organization, Citigroup, to chocolate displays at Godiva, to the magazine aisles of supermarkets, and to mutual fund options in retirement benefit plans. Professor Iyengar received the Presidential Early Career Award for her ongoing work in examining cultural, individual, and situational factors that influence people's choice-making preferences and behaviors.

Instructor

Sebastian Junger

NYT Best-Selling Author, Documentary Filmmaker

Columbia University

Sebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times Bestselling author of THE PERFECT STORM, FIRE, A DEATH IN BELMONT, WAR and TRIBE. As an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world, and has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. Junger is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film "Restrepo", a feature-length documentary (co-directed with Tim Hetherington), was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

Instructor

Lindsey Pollak

Career and Workplace Expert, NYT Best-Selling Author

Columbia University

Lindsey Pollak is widely recognized as the leading voice on millennials and the multigenerational workplace. Often called a “translator,” Lindsey advises both young professionals looking to succeed in today’s work environment and the organizations that want to recruit, retain and market to them. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Becoming the Boss: New Rules for the Next Generation of Leaders and Getting from College to Career: Your Essential Guide to Succeeding in the Real World. Her consulting clients and keynote speaking audiences have included over 200 corporations, conferences and universities, including Citi, Estee Lauder, GE, JP Morgan, LinkedIn, PwC, Ralph Lauren, Yale, Harvard, Wharton and MIT. Lindsey also works with select brands as their go-to in-house expert and public spokesperson for all things millennial, including strategic planning, media campaigns and social outreach. As a LinkedIn Ambassador for six years, she created and delivered webinars that trained over 100,000 people to advance their careers using the platform. Currently, Lindsey serves as chair of Cosmopolitan magazine’s Millennial Advisory Board. Her advice and opinions have appeared in such media outlets as The TODAY Show, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN and NPR. She appears on several lists of Best People to Follow on Twitter, including Mashable’s list of top non-fiction authors. Forbes named her blog one of the Top 100 Websites for Your Career. Lindsey’s passion for mentoring young people goes back to her student days as a dorm RA at Yale University. She is now based in New York City.

Instructor

Simon Sinek

Optimist, Motivational Speaker, NYT Best-Selling Author

Columbia University

Described as “a visionary thinker with a rare intellect,” Sinek teaches leaders and organizations how to inspire people. With a bold goal to help build a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single day feeling inspired, feel safe at work, and feel fulfilled at the end of the day, Sinek is leading a movement to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. Sinek is the author of multiple best selling books: - The global best seller (with over a 1 million books sold in the U.S. alone): Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
- The New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
- The New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller, Together is Better: A Little Book of Inspiration
- And his latest book, Find Your Why: A Practical Guide to Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team

Instructor

Robin Stern

Associate Director of Partnerships for the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

Columbia University

Robin Stern, Ph.D., is the Associate Director of Partnerships for the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. She is a licensed psychoanalyst, educator, and author, with over twenty-five years of experience treating individuals, couples, and groups. Robin holds a doctorate in applied psychology from New York University and a postdoctoral certificate in psychoanalytic group psychotherapy from the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health. She is on the faculty of Teacher’s College, Columbia University, where she co-teaches a class on emotional intelligence. Robin is a co-developer of RULER, as well as a co-creator and a lead facilitator for Yale’s Institutes. At the Center, Robin is a principal investigator for the RULER for Parents project, which aims to increase parent involvement in children’s emotional intelligence education. She also works on High School RULER, adapting the curriculum for older students, and on a project to explore the intersection of self-awareness, emotion, and the arts. In collaboration with Facebook, she created a reporting process for cyberbullying incidents and a help center for bullied children. She is currently analyzing the data from that project to gain a deeper understanding of cyberbullying. Robin serves on the advisory board of Crisis Text Line, I”ll Go First, and Project Rebirth, is a member of the Emotionally Intelligence Consortium, and has authored three books. She is a founding member of the Woodhull Institute, where she spent 15 years creating and facilitating development programs for women leaders. She has been a guest on many local and national radio shows and has traveled widely to lecture on emotional intelligence. In 2014-15 Dr. Stern was a fellow in the Public Voices Fellowship, which led to publications in Psychology Today, The Huffington Post, Time.com, etc.