Why you don’t have your geek dream job

Careers

When I attended Animation on Display in Japantown, I finally got a chance to attend one of Steven Savage’s geek career panels. I went to Fans Without Their Dream Jobs. Believe me, it was more uplifting than it sounds, offering attendees the tools to make steps toward those jobs. Based on my impressions, here are the top five reasons geeks don’t have their dream careers:

You talked yourself out of it

“Geeks are smart,” Steven told us. “Smart enough to delude ourselves into thinking we can’t do what we want.”

If you know you’re smart, and have built up a mental argument for yourself about why you can’t have your dream job, you’re going to believe your own bullshit. If your reasoning is, “fandom is silly and useless” or “jobs aren’t supposed to fun” or “the world just doesn’t work that way,” think again. Is there any factual evidence to back up these long-held beliefs? Probably not.

Instead, Steven thinks these beliefs are established early by an authority figure like a parent or a guidance counselor, or our culture in general, and you just don’t question them. What’s so smart about that?

You think liking X means doing Y

This isn’t your fault, Steven said, since it probably started through the people around you. Perhaps you like to play video games, and would like a career in the industry.

“Oh, so you want to be a video game developer?” people might ask you.

Of course, that’s not the only job in the industry. You could be a game tester, designer, localization specialist, writer, marketer, or a whole slew of other things. Steven suggests brainstorming every job related to your fandom and matching them with skills you already have.

You suck at the job search

Even if you’re the best animator in your class, you still won’t be able to get a job if you don’t have an equally formidable set of cover letter-writing, resume-building, and interviewing skills.

“Your ability to job search is separate from your skills to do the job,” said Steven. “Your talent means nothing if you don’t have the skills to get the interview.”

It’s never made sense to me that the job search process utilizes completely different skills than the ones companies actually want to hire you for. But since that’s the way the world works, Steven said the only way to beat the game is to hone your search skills as sharply as you do your craft. Perfect your resume, develop a portfolio, and learn to network.

You don’t want to sell out

This is really a straw man argument with no basis in reality—“If I make money doing something I love, I’ll become a sell out.”

First of all, Steven asks, what does selling out even mean? If you’re truly honest with yourself, it’s hard to name a successful person in your industry of choice who is a genuine sellout. Usually, that’s just envy talking.

“Selling out is a near meaningless term, and in some cases it’s just people being jealous,” he said.

Steven suggests defining what “selling out” means to you, and making a list of the characteristics of a sellout, like for example, compromising your integrity for money. You can then remind yourself that not only is it unlikely that you’d be put in a position like this, but that you would never allow yourself to accept it.

You think you won’t get rich or famous

And maybe you won’t. Getting a job in fandom is tough, and you’ll likely have to begin at the bottom. This is where you have to prioritize and think about why you want money and fame in the first place.

Steven said that even though we’re taught to think fame and fortune are life’s ultimate goals, neither is a reliable measure of success. (Would you call the Jersey Shore group successful?) He also pointed out that fame can cause misery—imagine an equal number of fans and haters scrutinizing your every tweet—and while money is nice, it’s a tool, not an end result.

And finally, is your current situation going to make you rich or famous anytime soon? If not, why not opt for a field that you at least know is going to make you happy?

Steven mentioned seven other myths that fans buy into that keep them from having their dream jobs. I’ll preserve some of the mystery so you’ll check out his blog and his panel, but I’ll reveal one more thing. The common denominator in all twelve of these reasons is you. Somewhere along the way, you’ve mentally decided that your dream job is an impossible thing, and you tell yourself these excuses to keep from even trying. As Steven would say, you’re smarter than that.

“Geeks created everything that’s cool about the world,” he told the panel. “There’s no reason we shouldn’t be running it, too.”

Can you pass the geek test?

Fandom

When I was in Japantown, I spent a lot of time checking out the mall’s enormous selection of Gundam models. I didn’t have any room in my stuffed carry-on suitcase, but that didn’t keep me from window shopping. Lately I’ve been lusting after unusual models, like the Acguy and Z’gok.

At the store with the biggest selection, a group of four guys were standing in front of the wall of Gundams, blocking my view. They didn’t seem to notice me, so I said “excuse me,” in order to get through. That seemed to surprise the tallest of the guys.

“Wait,” he said. “You build Gundams?”

I nodded. As I’ve written before, I built my first Gundam a few years ago and have dabbled in tougher models since. I even wrote a Gundam modeling tutorial for beginners.

“Really. What’s the last model you built?” he asked. It may have just been in my head, but I felt like he didn’t believe me.

Perhaps it was the pressure, but I couldn’t remember the full name of the last model I’d built, an MS-06S Char’s Zaku Real Grade.

“A… Zaku,” I said.

That seemed to make him upset.

“There are a lot of Zaku models,” he pointed out.

“It was the new one, the real grade,” I said. (Real grade is one of the building difficulty levels defined in my tutorial.)

“Those aren’t even hard to build,” he replied.

I was feeling increasingly flustered, so I called over to Steven, who was in another part of the store, and we left together.

I had just been an unwitting recipient of the “geek test,” a pop quiz some fans give to verify the geek cred of people they don’t think belong in their fandom. I was frustrated with myself for playing along.

As I explained on ANNCast, this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. As a woman, I know I’m not alone. It’s the reason I wrote about why I can’t be a hot girl and a nerd at the same time. Even if I feel like I’m blending in at a Magic: The Gathering event, somebody will ask me where my boyfriend is and break the spell. Even though I was there with my fiance, nobody asked him where his girlfriend was.

I hate to admit it, but the whole experience left me wondering, perhaps I should be trying to build more difficult Gundam models. That guy is going to assume that women aren’t good at model building, just because the woman he did meet was an amateur. Like it or not, whenever I choose to indulge in male dominated hobbies, I am an ambassador for my gender.

Have you ever been given the “geek test” by a fellow fan? Did you pass?

Photo by Fiends Ain’t Family on Flickr.

Otaku Journalist in Japantown

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 Exactly one week before today, I was standing in San Francisco’s Japantown, a six block weeaboo wonderland. It’s taken me this long to write about it because nothing I can say will ever live up to how I felt when I was there. There’s no way to do it justice, so I’m just going to give you the facts.

I was in San Francisco for business, more specifically, to attend the LiveJournal community leader summit. I Even though it meant missing out on Katsucon, I decided to extend my trip for one extra day so I could finally explore Japantown, a part of the city I’d been dying to visit since I saw it on America’s Greatest Otaku. As it turned out, I’d picked the perfect date to do it; Saturday also marked the first day of a local geek convention, Animation on Display.

In the morning, I met up at the convention hotel, Hotel Kabuki, with my host, Steven Savage. As I’ve written before, Steven is a geek career expert and the author of Fan to Pro, a book that changed the course of my career. We’ve been in touch online for more than a year, but this was our first time meeting in person. Here’s us standing in the courtyard pretending like we know each other.

Steven was busy; he presented three different panels that day. (I attended the two on geek careers, and will be recapping at least one.) But he still made sure that I experienced all the essentials of a trip to Japantown, namely, shopping and eating too much.

Here’s a diptych of photos I took inside the immense mall that connects to Hotel Kabuki and takes up half of Japantown from there. The bridge is usually packed with people, but Steven and I showed up just as the mall was opening up. To the right is a literal wall of figures. You should have seen their Gundam selection!

I’ve never seen shops as anime fan-targeted as those at the mall. For example, several stores were dedicated simply to manga, and there was a shop that sold cosplay off the rack. Animation on Display was a small convention with about 1,000 attendees, but it was almost as if it was attached to a three-block dealer’s room year-round. If we had a place like this on the east coast, I’m sure we’d hold all our conventions there.

There was no shortage of food options, either. Above is an okonomiyaki, a sweet potato pancake with savory chicken and shrimp, that Steven ordered. I had the less photogenic salmon-ikura donburi and beef curry. I couldn’t get over the availability of Japanese snacks either—you could buy onigiri and dango right from a food stand. For somebody who makes her own onigiri at home since she can’t buy it anywhere, it was unbelievable.

Probably the best part was being able to mingle with a completely new group of fans. Now that I’ve been attending east coast conventions for years, I always see familiar faces. At AOD, I was introduced to new people, new panels, and new projects I’d never heard of. I also got to meet some of the bronies interviewed in this Wall Street Journal article.

Anyone who’s tired of the same old stuff on the east coast should definitely check out what they’re doing out west. For example, I loved their idea of holding mixers, super-casual panels for meeting other bronies, for example, or other people with careers in geekdom. (And it goes without saying that west coasters should see what we’re doing over here.)

My visit caused me to realize the Internet hasn’t yet bridged the different forms fandom takes in different parts of the country and, no doubt, the world. It’s worth taking a trip to see the other coast, even if it’s not for a bigger con like Anime Expo or Otakon. (In fact, based on my experience, I’d encourage seeing a smaller con.) My physical visit helped me realize that the fans in my area make up just a small part of the global marketplace of ideas.

In conclusion, I certainly hope that wasn’t my last visit to Japantown. Until then, check out my photo gallery. I took hundreds of photos, but hardly any of them came out because my hands were literally shaking with excitement. It was an experience I won’t soon forget.

The Inside Story: A shout out to my bronies

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The title of this post is, first of all, a quote from Stephen Colbert, back when he acknowledged his brony brethren on his show back in August. Second, it’s a title suggestion from my boss, who encouraged me to blog about my latest high-traffic story. And third, it’s a thank you to everyone who read my story and proved there’s still a (big) audience for fact-driven reporting.

Fandom is a tricky topic. It’s full of detailed minutia, inside jokes and memes, fanart and fanfiction that delves so far away from canon that even the original creators might not understand it. Frankly, it’s a lot for an outsider to handle, and a reporter’s job is to inform even somebody who is hearing about the group for the first time.

As a result, a lot of fandom stories follow simplified themes, dumbing down or even misconstruing what the culture is actually about. It’s usually well intentioned, but still kind of difficult to read for somebody who’s embedded deeply in the fandom.

When I wrote Researchers strive to understand brony culture for the Daily Dot, my goal was to write a story that informed outsiders without dumbing the culture down. Something both my mom and Mister Spectre could read, in which they would each find something of value.

After my editor ran it over, I knew it was outsider-perfect, but I wasn’t sure what bronies would think. Everything in this story is either a quote from one of the researchers or a sourced fact. There’s no flattery or pandering to the fandom. If they did find it, I knew it’d have to be based on its informational merit.

For two days, they didn’t find it. And then I sent it to Sethisto, the webmaster of Equestria Daily. For the uninformed, that’s the brony community’s most highly trafficked news hub. Seth’s verbatim response to my email: “SCIENCE! Totally postin!” It spread from there.

The blog post with my story in it has 140 comments and counting, and I’m going to try to read them all (brony comments are much, MUCH more pleasant than comments in virtually any other community). It’s not just because I’m happy to have a hit. It’s that it’s more proof of my belief that fandom reporting doesn’t have to be opinionated to get clicks. It’s already interesting enough on its own.

Screenshots via Equestria Daily. 

Otaku Journalist on ANNCast: Hold the hate mail!

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On Wednesday night, I was a guest on ANNCast to talk about sexism in anime and fandom. It’s the most popular podcast I’ve ever been on, and certainly the most structured.

We talked until midnight for me (since I’m on the East Coast, they’re three hours behind), and I’m usually in bed by eleven. I prepared some notes before we started talking, but I don’t think I had enough of a filter. Simply put, as soon as I signed off of Skype, my fiancé said to me, “You’re gonna get hate mail for that.”

He’s probably right. I’m definitely going to get shit for accusing lolicon fans of being childish, for saying that geek culture rewards women who act like sluts, and other equally unfiltered remarks. The former high school debater in me cringes, but these raw musings probably made the podcast more interesting than if I had been my most thoughtful, polished self. At least that’s what I’m telling myself!

Give it a listen here.