Ji Hyun Joo is the Advisor & Program Coordinator at Beyond Barnard. She joined the Beyond Barnard team in 2022, shortly after graduating with an MFA from Columbia University, where she taught undergraduate international students writing in data and society for two years. Prior to going to graduate school, she worked in communications in the tech and non-profit sectors.
What is your favorite part of your job?
Working at Beyond Barnard has allowed me to meet colleagues with diverse backgrounds and interests, all coming together with the collective goal of supporting Barnard students in their career and post-grad journey. It’s been a unique experience to feel a strong sense of community in a workplace.
If you could speak to your college self, what advice would you give her?
If I could speak to my college self, I would tell her to calm down, as everything is bound to fall in place. The undergraduate years are a time of mass uncertainty, both in exploring your career aspirations and figuring out who you are, two threads that are inevitably intertwined. Normalizing the confusion and the anxiety that comes with mixing and matching different pathways and discovering what works and feels best, is important. Everyone’s path is different and so is yours, but the process of trial and error is a collective experience.