Alumna Shares Career Insights, Offers Advice

Jocelyn Wyatt ’99 understands the power of good advice. Fourteen years ago, the anthropology major wanted to travel internationally and change the world. She took a professor’s advice and now leads an international nonprofit organization.

These days when she speaks with students, she’s the one giving the advice.

Her advice for Grinnellians

“It’s not about the quantity of the people in your network or the connections that you have on LinkedIn or the number of the people that you’ve emailed once,” she says. “It’s really about maintaining or developing real relationships — in-depth relationships with people who can help you and mentor you in your career search while you’re at Grinnell and beyond.”

Wyatt is the co-lead and executive director of IDEO.org, a nonprofit that fights global poverty through design.

“The combination of anthropology and a liberal arts education — combined with an MBA — is really what has allowed me to both have broad-based perspectives and an orientation toward learning that Grinnell provided, with some of the more specific skill sets around management and running an organization that I was able to get through business school.”

Doug Caulkins, professor emeritus of anthropology, has taught “alumni enriched” courses for more than 10 years. On average, 30 alumni participate in these courses annually. Wyatt spoke in two of Caulkins’ classes.

He teaches:

• Solutions: Managing Entrepreneurship & Innovation, in which alumni innovators, like Wyatt, talk about their social and business enterprises.
• Creative Careers: Learning from the Alumni, in which Grinnellians return to participate in the Friday afternoon class to advise the 50 to 80 students who take this class each spring semester.

“Alumni are, in an important sense, pioneers who have gone out into the world of work and career and are coming back to Grinnell to report to current students on the world that they are about to enter,” Caulkins says.

Tackling inequality and injustice

IDEO.org is headquartered in San Francisco, Calif. and manages 15-20 design projects worldwide each year. The organization has grown from two co-founders in 2011 to 32 employees. It is the nonprofit arm of the design and innovation firm, IDEO.

• In Africa, IDEO.org works with Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor on a project to provide in-home toilets for residents of Kumasi, Ghana.  
• In Zambia, the organization works with Marie Stopes International on programs to improve Zambian adolescents’ access to reproductive health, family planning, and contraceptives.

Wyatt, who also serves on the Grinnell Prize selection committee, is committed to sharing her expertise with Grinnellians.

“There’s so much positive change that’s happening in the world that it’s hard not to be optimistic that it’s going to continue,” she says.