Arcadia Ireland

I spent last Thursday evening updating my LinkedIn profile. It’s not something I often do; in fact, I was horrified to discover that my profile was about two jobs behind on the reality of my life. Last week’s return to the platform after a long absence was inspired by Arcadia Ireland’s student event at the Harcourt Hotel, where Jesse Cook gave a talk on “Creating Your Profile After Study Abroad”. The main thing I took away from Jesse’s talk was the importance of creating a personal “brand”. While that word may to many of us conjure the bland new world of corporate commercialism, the way Jesse used the word “brand” was actually the opposite of bland (or indeed commercial or corporate), and much more fundamentally connected not only to our personal goals but to our very sense of personal separateness and individuality. Your “brand” is made up of the talents and interests that make every person unique.

The significance of writing a concise tag-line that might serve as an accurate header to a LinkedIn profile – one that sums up the very essence of who you are as a professional – ripples out beyond the professional sphere. The challenge of defining, to yourself and to others, exactly who you are and what makes you unique and valuable to the world is one as old as human civilisation. This imperative for self-knowledge, self-definition and self-assertion comes back over and over again in the foundational narratives of our culture – from Sophocles’ dramatization of the Oedipus story about a man whose ignorance about his origins shakes his world to its very core, through Shakespeare’s comedies, many of which are about young people trying to assert control over their own destinies against the wishes of their elders, to many of the great poets, novelists and film-makers of the 19^th, 20^th and 21^st century.

When, in one of the most frequently quoted passages in 20^th-century Irish literature, James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus grandly declared his intention of creating “in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race”, he was boastfully suggesting he would once and for all define the question of Irish national identity. But A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the chapters in Ulysses dedicated to Stephen are as much a record of his struggle to define his own personal identity, inextricably tied up with that of his parents and muddled by an excess of university coursework. If Joyce had lived a century later, Stephen Dedalus would almost certainly have had great trouble capturing the complexities of his individual consciousness in a single line for his LinkedIn profile.

Trying to come up with an apt headline for your LinkedIn profile can make you feel like Alice in Wonderland being asked by the stern Caterpillar to explain herself. “‘I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see’ […] I hardly know, sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’”

The purpose of all this is not to give you an existential crisis, but rather to set you thinking – as I have been thinking – about the importance of self-definition, to both your personal and professional lives. A study-abroad semester or year of the type you are engaged on now can be a perfect opportunity to find out and to articulate some fundamental things about yourself, your skills and interests and talents. A year away from home in a foreign country forces you to be self-reliant and so discover how well equipped you really are to take care of yourself and others; it may also give you the distance from your homes and families required for gaining valuable perspective, or even just the space and leisure to think. Not everyone’s response to a year abroad is the same, but we can be certain that everyone will find themselves affected or changed by the experience in some way.

So whatever this year abroad in Ireland may bring you, try and take it as an opportunity for personal growth and self-definition. See if, unlike Alice, you can come a little bit closer to explaining yourself by the time you get off the plane on US soil again at the end of the term … Or failing that grand existential aim, perhaps you can at least get a decent tag line for your LinkedIn profile out of it!